History: Recent Episodes
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I joined Crisis editor Eric Sammon to discuss secession and my new book Breaking Away: The Case of Secession, Radical Decentralization, and Smaller Polities.
From the discussion: "Secession should really just be thought of as one form of political decentralization. In America, we’re pretty familiar with the idea of decentralization overall. Most people call it federalism. ... Americans get the idea of decentralization overall, but what of course they forget is that America’s past is founded on the idea of a more radical version of decentralization, which is known as secession. And so secession took place during the American Revolution, which was a attempt for these 13 sovereign states to secede from the larger empire."
Do people have a right to go wherever they want and for whatever reason they like? Certainly not. I have no right to use or occupy your rightful property without your permission. And the same applies for you and everyone with my property.
Do people have a right to migrate to whatever part of the world they please? They certainly do. If they don’t violate the life and property of another person, nobody has a right to limit theirs.
It should be easy to combine these two statements into one: my liberty ends where your liberty begins. Or: it is everyone’s right to not be coerced or aggressed upon. Or even: everyone has a right to be left alone on their property if they so wish.
But, unfortunately, even such simple, unambiguous statements tend to be both confused and confusing when the issue is migration. Part of the reason for is that we have emotional attachments to things that aren’t ours, such as the structure, ethics, culture, and perception of the society that we are embedded in. Part of it is that much of what relates to migration, including both its causes and implications, is a matter of policy. And, of course, part of it is also the existence of the State, including its impact on property both in the past and present, which always muddles the waters with respect to people’s rights and liberties.
Migration and Rights From the perspective of individual rights, migration is not even an issue. People move about practically daily and all over the world: we travel to work and back; we go on road trips and vacation in foreign countries; we move to the other side of town or another state for a job or opportunity; we expatriate in pursuit of opportunities for ourselves and our families.
None of this is problematic and we largely take these things for granted. But it is also not free: without sufficient purchasing power, we are not able to afford to travel wherever and whenever we want. Or quit our jobs and live the rest of our lives on a paradise island somewhere.
On the other hand, opportunities arise in all kinds of places so it could very well be that we cannot afford not to move far away to pursue them.
In the end, what it comes down to is a personal valuation of the alternatives. For most, a great opportunity far away is not worth pursuing because it requires leaving people, customs, and familiar ways of life behind. That’s not for everyone. For others, sometimes many, the promise of the faraway opportunity is simply too good to let go.
But there are also arbitrary limitations imposed on us and our ability to move around. Passports and visa requirements, for example. Those are rights violations imposed by the State. The passport is your domestic State’s permission slip to leave and travel abroad and the visa is the permission slip to enter a territory controlled by another State.
Migration and Collectivism Rights are always individual rights. There are no collective rights for the simple reason that those collectives comprise of individuals and individuals coming together don’t automagically gain more rights just because they are together. Not to mention that any right that the group supposedly has, but that the individuals do not have, is necessarily a violation of the individual’s rights.
Individuals can of course choose to associate or disassociate with others. They can also organize in formal groups that, through for example voluntary contracting or tacit understanding, choose to distance themselves from or exclude others – or limit who may join and who may not. But there is a difference between forming and upholding groups of individuals, even if they choose to share property or make it communally administrated, and superimposing groupness onto individuals.
I do not mean groupness as merely a matter of using descriptions. I am, for example, of Swedish origin and live in Tulsa, OK. You could say that I am part of the “Swedish community in Tulsa,” but it is only true in the descriptive sense (as a native Swede living in Tulsa). But I am not part or member of any type of community in Tulsa, Swedish or otherwise. It would likewise be true to say that I’m part of the 6’3”-and-taller community or the immigrant community, both which again are accurate – but as descriptions only. (I am indeed a tall Swedish immigrant in Tulsa.)
An actual community or group requires more than a mere description. You do not form a community by saying it – and you certainly do not form a community by a third party saying it (such as someone in New England making statements about “Oklahomans”) – regardless of how formal the pronouncement may appear (such as the State pronouncing who is a “citizen” and who is not, who has paid enough taxes and who has not, etc.).
There must be voluntary individual and mutual commitment by the individuals to make a community. And there must also be some form of discriminating rule by which to distinguish members from non-members. The latter largely requires the former: unless the individuals who choose to form a group dedicate property toward the group’s ends, the group isn’t much at all.
Needless to say, the commitment of property, effort, time, etc. toward the group’s ends needs to be voluntary and of justly owned property. Which leads us to the issue of the State.
Migration and the State The State creates a group in the same sense that an attacker or thief does: it imposes its will on them by harming them and violating their individual rights. While the victims have their victimhood in common, this is a only description of what happened to them and insufficient to make them a community. But they can of course, building on their shared experiences and suffering, choose to form a group or community to support their own healing, prosecute or take revenge on the perpetrator, inform the world about the heinous crime committed, etc. The difference between the former and the latter should be clear.
The same applies to all violators of rights, including the greatest perpetrator of crime of all time: the State. Victims of the State can certainly form groups (such as taxpayer unions, political parties, secession movements, etc.) and they are free to do so (but the State might disagree). Merely being a victim of the State does not make you a member of a group, however – it only makes you a victim.
It is also a mistake to assume that a State’s violations of rights are limited to those who it permits to reside within the boundaries of its controlled territory. Certainly, the State focuses its aggression “at home” and directed toward its subjects. But few States are tyrants at home while letting the subjects of other States off the hook. Visa requirements and trade restrictions (tariffs, quotas, taxes, licensing requirements, etc.) are examples of violations of rights that go well beyond the State’s own subjects. Victimhood is not limited to the territorial claims of the State.
We already mentioned above that passports and visa requirements limit how, when, and where people can travel. These restrictions apply to crossing that invisible line that the State recognizes as the boundary of its territory. It matters not which in direction you intend (or try) to travel. Without the documentation required by the State, you are not allowed to cross. (Enforcement certainly varies, but try to enter “your” country without a passport and you’ll see how much your citizenship and/or residency matter…)
Migration vs. Rights? Does this mean that anyone and everyone should, from the perspective of rights, be allowed to enter a country at will? Yes, it certainly does. Merely moving from one point to the other is not a violation of rights. It makes no difference if you move across the street, to the other side of town, or across an arbitrary line upheld by a criminal.
Being different from the majority or the norm is also not a rights violation.
But trampling on another’s property without permission certainly is. As is forcing one’s way into a community that wishes to exclude you. But for that to be the case an actual group must be formed. It is not enough to appeal to some generic descriptor, without buy-in from those who fit that very description. That’s just stating your opinion. Worse: it’s stating your opinion and suggesting that it implies a group of you and (many) others – whether or not they know it or agree with it. It’s a strange group that consists of “members” with no buy-in or voluntary commitment and where they neither need to know about nor agree with their assigned membership. In fact, that sounds close to a rights violation in itself.
The Great Depression, Great Inflation I, the Financial Crisis, and the unfolding Great Inflation II have all been caused and perpetuated by hyperactive Progressive government. In the past crises, holding gold would have conserved savings and provided added returns.
The Great Depression came about when the Progressives’ newly-spawned Fed, having first greatly increased the quantity of money throughout World War I, again increased the quantity of money throughout the 1920s, by 62 percent (for details on figures, see table below). There was considerable innovation-driven growth already, but this new money created out of thin air created an unsustainable boom.
Progressive regulation of utilities, which at the time were high-tech and high-growth, sparked a stock market crash. Projects failed, businesses failed, and banks failed, ruining borrowers. Both parties‘ politicians then blocked product prices and wages from being decreased in sync, which had been done throughout the remarkably-similar 1839-1843 crisis deflation and had allowed workers to keep working and investors to keep earning returns. Investors saw that the Progressive, newly-hyperactive government could eliminate their returns or confiscate their returns, so investors rationally held back on new projects. Tragically for individuals, the Progressive government controlled the price of gold and started treating it as illegal for unlicensed individuals to hold gold.
Great Inflation I came about when the Fed increased the quantity of money in the 1960s and 1970s by 176 percent. Starting in the 1970s, both parties’ politicians significantly blocked corresponding increases in prices and wages. Investors again saw that the Progressive government could eliminate their returns, so investors rationally flocked to savings-conserving assets, including gold from 1975 on, once conservatives in government again started honoring it as legal for unlicensed individuals to hold gold. Sadly, Progressives in government meanwhile started treating the inflation-driven increases in the dollar prices of gold not as holdings of constitutional money or as conserved savings but instead as taxable capital gains.
The Financial Crisis came about when the Fed increased the quantity of money from 1995 to 2007 by 128 percent. The Progressive government also leaned on its financial cronies to lend mortgages to crony voters who were at serious risk of defaulting, and then bailed out almost all of its financial cronies. The initial increase in consumer prices was echoed and outpaced by the increase in the price of gold.
Great Inflation II has been started by unprecedented increases in the quantity of money by 303 percent, of which the portion that has come only recently, in the time of covid, has been 120 percent. Stock prices first were inflated and now have begun to decrease. Consumer prices have started to increase. (Consumer prices change quickly for quickly-processed products but as a whole don’t become stable for 8 to 16 years or more; so if the average is 12 years and the fastest changes come in the middle, then after the money-quantity changes, the most-substantial consumer-price changes would turn up in 6 years.) The price of gold has so far only decreased.
These crises’ superficial differences mask these crises’ deeper commonality. Each crisis is caused by a boom during which the quantity of government money is greatly increased, followed by a bust during which governments further disrupt workers, customers, and investors from healing themselves. Throughout the boom and the bust, governments treat taxpayers and money-holders as a commons resource—like land owned in common by everyone, which gets overgrazed and depleted. Various groups in government each grab as many resources as they can until the taxpayers and money-holders are depleted in resources and need significant time to rebuild. Although the Fed enables these depletions and has a fiduciary duty to not be the enabler, the root cause is always the politicians’ choices to borrow on the backs of taxpayers and to spend and regulate to favor business cronies and activist cronies.
The table below summarizes these crises’ booms in the quantity of money, the resulting busts in the prices of consumer products and stocks, and the resulting changes in the price of gold.
Table. Four Crises Summarized.
Booms in money quantity,resulting busts in urban-consumer and stock prices,and resulting changes in gold price.
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1 The money quantity TMS2, often referred to as TMS, for the USA.
2 Murray Rothbard’s calculation.
3 Author’s calculation by Griggs and Murphy method.
4 Consumer-price index for urban consumers in the USA, as listed on InflationData.com.
5 Widely-used index of 500 leading large-cap USA equities, covering approximately 80 percent of available market capitalization, as listed on macrotrends.net.
6 Gold bullion price in USA dollars, as listed on macrotrends.net, deselecting “inflation-adjusted.”
7 Holding of gold by unlicensed individuals was treated as illegal from 5/33 through 12/74.
The boom money-quantity increases of the Great Depression, Great Inflation I, and the Financial Crisis were fractions of the boom money-quantity increase in Great Inflation II so far: only 0.20x, 0.58x, and 0.42x as much.
The consumer-price decreases of the Great Depression would be drowned out by today’s modern-monetary-theory Fed. The consumer-price increases of the Great Inflation I and the Financial Crisis were sizable fractions of the money-price increases: 1.11x and 0.23x. The consumer-price increase of Great Inflation II so far has been a much-smaller fraction of the money-price increase: only 0.08x.
The gold-price increases of the Great Depression, Great Inflation I, and the Financial Crisis were multiples of the money-quantity increases: 1.1x. 4.8x, and 1.2x. The gold-price increase of the Great Inflation II so far has been a negative fraction of the money-quantity increase: -0.1x. All in all, gold’s downside potential is small and gold’s upside potential is very large.
USA governments have a long history of largely respecting the glaringly-obvious right to own property. Political pressures have prevented gold from ever having been confiscated outright. The same political pressures remain in play now. In fact, the holding and voluntary pricing of gold may well be as protected now as they have been at any time under majority-Progressive rule.
Stocks are ownership of the world’s productive assets, which makes them the source of the values of all other assets. Over sufficiently-long time periods, even periods that include crises, stocks are unmatched as investments. Gold is a store of existing value. Over sufficiently-short time periods of crisis, gold protects existing value from being rapidly destroyed by government assaults on productive actions. Gold is for crises.
From now until the Fed makes a lasting slowdown of its enabling of government spending, or puts an end to its enabling, gold looks like an obvious buy, and worth holding as Great Inflation II unfolds.
Like the 2018 midterms, the 2022 midterms have too-few competitive races to change the swing votes substantially and shift the congressional houses from Progressive big spenders to constitutionalist government-limiters. The most-rapid change in government response to this crisis would be to elect a more-constitutionalist executive. Expect to re-evaluate gold holdings depending on how administrations change in 2024, 2028, and 2032.
In the latest demonstration of the absurdity of defamation laws, radio show host Alex Jones has been ordered to pay $965 million to people who didn’t like things Jones said about the 2012 Sandy Hook massacre in Newtown, Connecticut.
In the years following the massacre, Jones repeatedly stated that he thinks the shootings were staged and that the purported parents were so-called crisis actors. (He has since said he thinks the shootings were real.) Some of Jones’s listeners chose to agree with Jones’s claims that the shootings did not occur, and this allegedly informed the decisions by some listeners to engage in the harassment of some of the parents of murdered children.
Essentially, Jones was found guilty of saying things that supposedly inspired other people to say cruel and disrespectful things to the parents of the Sandy Hook victims. The harassment allegedly also includes the desecration of the graves of victims.
Jones is being ordered to pay hundreds of millions of dollars because some other people—who were not acting under any orders from Jones—allegedly committed some crimes on their own. It’s difficult to see, then, how Jones actually inflicted any actual damages on his supposed “victims” in this case. If people have harassed the parents, of course, that’s a crime for which the actual harassers are responsible. The real guilty parties here are the people who have committed acts of harassment. But it appears that Jones has been convicted here of simply saying things that the jury and the plaintiffs found objectionable.
[Read More: “The Dangers of Defamation Laws” by Ryan McMaken]
In a free society, a private citizen saying things that other people are free to ignore is not punishable by law. In a society which does not respect free speech, however, merely saying words is apparently grounds of levying fines of hundreds of millions of dollars. (Actual threats of violence directed at specific persons are dangerous, but are not what we are talking about here, and that’s not what Jones has been accused of.)
The idea that Jones is somehow guilty for the acts of third parties he doesn’t even know follows from the basic twisted logic of defamation laws. The idea of defamation as a punishable legal matter is based on the notion that people do not have free will and are not responsible for their own actions.
For example, if a stranger tells me that my neighbor is a pedophile, I have no reason to automatically believe the accuser. Yet, this is what the logic of defamation assumes. If Person A says nasty things about Person B, we are supposed to assume that people do not have the freedom to reject the accusations and ignore them. Rather, we are to assume that people are robots who believe everything they are told. Similarly, there is no reason why anyone must believe the latest theories spun by Alex Jones.
Moreover, given that people are free to ignore the accusations of Person A, it is especially absurd to assume that Person A is somehow responsible if Person C then uses the opinion of Person A as a reason to inflict some kind of harm on Person B.
The reality is that people do have a choice and don’t have to believe every nasty thing some other person says. Nor are people being somehow forced to act in any particular way because someone said some cruel things about someone else.
The idea that people are responsible for their own actions apparently had no place in the court proceedings against Alex Jones, and the judgment against him is a standing threat to ordinary people who say unpopular things.
In an age when everyone who disagrees with official regime narratives is labeled a racist, a domestic terrorist, or worse, this is a dangerous development indeed. Governments have used defamation laws to silence critics, and the wealthy have long used threats of defamation suits to do the same. Naturally, Murray Rothbard opposed defamation laws and recognized they are a way for the powerful to silence the powerless:
The current system [which allows for defamation suits] discriminates against poorer people in another way; for their own speech is restricted, since they are less likely to disseminate true but derogatory knowledge about the wealthy for fear of having costly libel suits filed against them.
The Jones case is known and notable partly because he has the means to mount a sizable legal defense. Unpopular people of lesser means will fare even more poorly, and will much more easily and quickly be threatened into silence.
The answer to all this is total free speech in which people are explicitly expected to come to their own conclusions and be responsible for their own actions. As Rothbard noted: in a system of unrestricted free speech, “everyone would know that false stories are legal, there would be far more skepticism on the part of the reading or listening public, who would insist on far more proof and believe fewer derogatory stories than they do now.”
Georg Oesterdiekhoff has taught sociology at the universities of Aachen, Erlangen-Nuremberg and at the Universidad Nacional de Colombia in Bogotá. He has written or edited 30 books and has published about 100 journal articles. His work has been covered in leading journals, such as the American Journal of Psychology, Journal of Social Sciences, Anthropos: International Review of Anthropology and Linguistics, Physics International, Human Evolution and other reputable publications. He has developed the so-called “structural-genetic theory programme” that aims to use developmental psychology to explain history generally, and accordingly, the history of culture, society, law, morals, politics, arts, and religion.
Jean Piaget is frequently discussed in your articles, so why is he so important? Jean Piaget has shown that human development from childhood to adulthood goes through four major psychological stages, transforming basic mental processes, personality structures, experiences of people, and the understanding of logic, nature, social affairs, law, politics, morals, and religion. He has already shown that pre-modern peoples usually do not develop the fourth stage of human development and often neither the third stage. The second stage of human development – the preoperational stage – is the stage that describes the mental world of ancient or pre-modern peoples best. However, Piaget did not work out a systematic and coherent theory to describe all the phenomena involved. Others such as C. Hallpike, L. Ibarra, Rolando Garcia, C. Radding, and S. Gablik have devoted complete monographs to describe the similarities between ancient adults and modern children more comprehensively, using Piaget´s research. My task is to develop a theory that explains and tackles all the problems originating in that comparison between ontogeny and history. Moreover, I have shown that the parallels between children and ancient adults concern every single aspect. There is not one phenomenon that characterizes the psyche of a child that does not also describe the main characteristics of ancient adult humans. They may differ in experience and knowledge but not in those structures coming from the psychological stage.
Can you explain the differences between ancient adults and children in more detail? Children and ancient humans, from whichever world culture, region, and time period, share the same patterns in logic, the same animistic understanding of movements and physics, the same belief in magic and ghosts, the same categories concerning causality, chance, and probability, the same view on myths and dreams, and the same understanding of law and religion. You will not find one detail to describe the psychology of a child that is not being described as a main feature of the psyche of ancient humans, described in ethnological or historical books. For example, both groups of humans do not understand syllogisms and both groups also believe that desire and ritual can turn rocks to humans or birds to horses (belief in metamorphosis). Similarly, like children pre-modern adults attribute humanlike abilities to animals, plants, and objects.
Why could ancient humans not develop beyond these stages? Piagetian Cross-Cultural Psychology found that exposure to modern schooling is decisive to attain the adolescent stage of formal operations. Pre-modern societies, with their lack of quality education could not stimulate further development. This shows that a dialectical interrelationship between material culture on the one side and psychological advancements on the other side is the motor behind the progress of civilization. Without socialization in modern culture people do not develop beyond childhood´s stages.
A signature theme of your work is the difference between pre-modern societies and contemporary societies, but how did the former differ from the latter?
Societies are made by people and not by social structures as sociologists do believe. People staying on the preoperational stage make societies that are different from modern societies created by people staying on higher psychological stages. Pre-modern societies are characterized by simple technologies, lack of sciences, huge role of religion and magic, superstitions and rituals, punitive laws, and brutal social affairs such as maltreatment of women, slavery, or even cannibalism. Modern societies could only emerge as result of that interplay between culture and human development that I have mentioned above. Modern society is characterized by science, industrial growth, enlightenment, humanism, and liberty. The adolescent stage of formal operations, that emerged in Europe during the 17th and 18th century, created science and the age of enlightenment, and gave birth to the rise of the modern, industrial society.
Why were ancient societies like Rome unable to transition to modernity? The Romans could not preserve the achievements of the Hellenistic culture and sciences – they really destroyed that culture in consequence of their conquest of the Eastern Mediterranean B. C. The Romans were not good at sciences as the Greeks had been. They obviously could not establish a culture able to promote the evolution of formal operations, as the ancient Chinese, Japanese, and Indians couldn´t, too. I have no complete answer why the Europeans of the 17th and 18th century were successful, and why the other civilizations weren´t. Gutenberg´s invention may be part of the answer or may contribute to the explanation needed. The general theoretical model (interrelationship between socialization and psychological development) is apparent, the single factors crucial in history are still opaque.
Can the cognitive developmental approach explain the rise of the Physical Sciences? Piaget and Garcia published in 1983 a book dedicated to that subject. The preoperational stage is incapable to develop scientific thinking. The intellectual prerequisites of scientific thinking are given when the adolescent stage of formal operations arises. This stage emerges in modern adolescents between their 12th and their 18th year, with the 15th year as a decisive year. Then adolescents can understand theories and think systematically, coherently, experimentally and empirically. They replace the magical-animistic worldview of the child with the rational and scientific worldview. The same transformation took place in Europe during the 17th century, whereas Asia endured in preserving the worldview of the child, being therefore incapable to develop the physical sciences. As currently the whole world advances, at least more or less, with backbenchers and forerunners, sciences have disseminated on a worldwide scale.
You submit that the cognitive developmental approach explains the rise of modern society, but what’s its relation to the European miracle? The rise of modern, industrial society is the European miracle. Historians and sociologists have tried to explain the rise of modern society by reference to colonial exploitation of the South (Wallerstein), by exploitation of the working class (Marx), by struggle of classes (Moore), by Protestant ethics (Weber), by liberal markets (Hayek) or by Property Rights (North, Thomas). These theories are either superficial or even wrong. The emergence of the modern world originates in education and human development, that is, in the adolescent stage of formal operations. This stage explains the rise of the science and technology, the establishment of civilized political systems, the evolution of music and arts, and the emergence of humanism in human relations and pedagogics.
Did pre-modern people have a different approach to law? Children and ancient people did not distinguish physical and moral (legal) laws. For pre-modern humans and children, the behavior of physical objects originates in their obedience to the moral laws, rather than the laws of mechanical causality, unknown in premodern nations till Europe’s 17th century, and initially unknown among modern children, because of the same cognitive immaturity both groups share. Physical laws were considered norms imposed by God that physical entities followed by will and obedience, whereas moral norms, also imposed by God, were regarded as holy and unchangeable. This confusion of physical and legal laws is typical for the child´s understanding of law and nature, as Piaget has already found out in 1932. Piagetian Cross-Cultural Psychology evidenced that ancient people have the same understanding. Therefore, they deny democracy and the change of laws and customs (misoneism). Secondly, children and ancient humans embrace the phenomenon called objective responsibility (Erfolgshaftung in history).
The implication of this is that people bear consequences of actions they are not responsible for. Collective punishments, bloodshed, and judicial prosecution of animals belong to this subject. Thirdly, both groups of humans resort to combats, oaths or ordeals to solve conflicts. The ordeal of hot iron, fire or boiling water to decide judicial questions originated in the mentality of the child. Fourthly, young children support severe punishments even when socialized in modern households. Likewise ancient humankind demanded severe punishments. That explains the brutal-sadistic punishment systems of the ancient word.
Is the cognitive developmental a tool to understand the precipitous decline in violence observed by people like Steven Pinker? Ancient humans staying on the child´s stages tend to be more emotional and passionate, aggressive, and violent. This observation stood in the centre of Elias´ theory of civilization which Steven Pinker follows in his relevant book on the history of violence. Of course, the decline of violence during history is also explainable in terms of existence/lack of institutional forces (police; justice). However, it is obvious that more rational and civilized people deny violence while people staying on the child´s stages resort to violence more easily. You only have to read a report on the culture of duels and bloodshed in former times to gain the data you need to understand that point.
Intelligence is indeed influenced by genetics; however, your work argues that the success of industrial societies is primarily a result of modernization pressure, please discuss your findings? Psychologists and biologists say that hereditary factors affect the individual intelligence, some maintain that this observation should be extended to the acknowledgment of racial differences. I have no idea how to combine these contentions with those won by Piagetian Cross-Cultural Psychology. What we see is that every race can stay either on the preoperational stage or on the formal operational stage in mere dependence of culture and socialization. White people stood on the preoperational stage some centuries ago, and they were the first to advance. However, nowadays people from all over the world follow this path due to modernization and globalization. Therefore, I see not much room for hereditary factors to play a crucial part. By the way, “intelligence” refers to mental abilities only, “psychological stage” describes phenomena more profound. When people can develop from preoperational to formal operational stage within two following generations then it is to assume that culture affects psyche much more than genes do.
What is the status you ascribe to your theory? I regard the discovery that pre-modern humans stood on preoperational or concrete-operational stages but not on the adolescent stage of formal operations as the greatest discovery ever made in the whole history of social sciences and humanities. Provided that there is and will be progress in sciences then I estimate that in 200 years this discovery will be appreciated as the greatest discovery on a worldwide scale. It matches the discovery of evolution in biology fully. You must appreciate stage theory in order to be able to explain the world history of law, politics, morals, economy, religion, and arts. Moreover, there are no foundations that lie deeper than the stage structures because the development from suckling over child to adult is the deepest layer of psychological phenomena to discover. Even the reduction to neurological phenomena would bring nothing because it is necessary to describe the phenomena in psychological terms. That means that now social sciences and humanities have found true foundations of historical trajectories for the first time.
The current ignorance in relation to this discovery is part of the advancement and progress from Middle Ages to Modernity: It is one thing to develop, and it is another thing to understand that this development has really taken place. Therefore, modern social scientists, in consequence of the stage they have elaborated, cannot understand animism, worship of ancestors, magical rituals, judicial procedures against animals, etc. as manifestations of different psychological stages but try to interpret them by insufficient means. In the future when scientists have reached higher stages then they will easily see the huge gap between the ancient and the modern world.
For our interested audience, which of your publications would you recommend as a first step of studying your research? For example, the article “Different developmental stages and developmental ages of humans in history. Culture and socialization, open and closed developmental windows, and promoted and arrested developments.”, published in the American Journal of Psychology in 2021.
The war in Ukraine has brought back the debate on international security among European countries, especially in the countries of the former Soviet bloc in Central and Eastern Europe. Most of these countries, such as Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia, broke free from the communist regime with the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union at the end of the 1980s. These countries began to build democratic structures with a relatively free market economy.
The shift from central planning economy to capitalist enrichment mechanisms and privatization has become a reality. In some countries that transformation unfortunately was done not in peace but in accordance with Jefferson's famous sentence that „the tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.”
A few years ago, before the war was started, Polish organization „Stowarzyszenie Libertariańskie” (Libertarian Association) wrote an optimistic statement about Ukraine:
We are witnessing a repeat from Lithuania, but on a larger scale. In the elections, Volodymyr Zelensky was elected president, whose political staff openly admits to libertarian ideas. (..) it is worth keeping your fingers crossed for the initiative and potential implementation of several libertarian postulates in the beautiful Ukrainian lands.
After February 24, 2022, the discussion on security flared up again, also on the websites of European libertarians and supporters of the Austrian school of economics. In an interview with Dr. Michał Stępień from the Department of International and European Law at the University of Wrocław, published on the website of the Polish Mises Institute we read that:
The scale of armed aggression by Russia with the participation of Belarus against Ukraine since February 24, 2022 and the related scale of crimes against humanity, which is being committed by the Russian army, has meant that the previously used arguments of Russia, assuming that it is a defense of the Russian minority living in Ukraine and Georgia, is completely inconsistent with the actual situation witnessed by the international community. In the event of the occupation of Crimea, the Russian armed forces pretended not to be the armed forces of Russia. What the armed forces were, today is absolutely beyond dispute, so this trick is legally insignificant. In the case of the military operations undertaken on February 24, 2022, the armed forces conducting the military operations against Ukraine have been officially announced by the Russian authorities.
Support for Ukraine and words of encouragement come from libertarians for obvious reasons. However, the fundamental question that arises is whether, in such a situation, the libertarian can compromise using ideological pragmatism. Can we accept the fact, for the needs of the moment, that the domination of the United States within Pax Americana as a hegemon and gendarme of the world was and is necessary in this part of Europe to maintain civil liberties, free market, and to expand these aspects within the self-determination of newly liberated countries?
The European freedom perspective is closely correlated with the analysis of the imperial activity and policy of the United States, to which the former Soviet bloc states owe their freedom. So, does a European libertarian, e.g., a Polish libertarian, can and has to adopt the view that the involvement of the United States can serve to extend freedom? Paradoxically, this thesis is not as obvious as it might seem. After all, as a political movement, libertarianism believing in small government, is opposed to imperialism, unfounded aggression, and the destructive role of violence in human relations. Maybe some societes can take advantage of US hegemony, according to geopolitical rules, to expand their sphere of freedom, democracy and free market? The conflict in Ukraine, despite the obvious reasons on the side of the attacked Ukraine, seems to divide many libertarians. Libertarians, as we read in the principles of Libertarian Party:
...believe that war is justified only in defense. We are opposed to a draft. If a war is just and necessary, Americans of all backgrounds will volunteer to fight it. We believe that a draft enforced by law is no different from slavery.
Much has been written about international relations from a libertarian perspective (including classics of thought like Murray N. Rothbard and H.-H. Hoppe). But the European perspective of the libertarian movement seems to be a little different. This is probably because many European libertarians know historical aspects and realize that without the involvement of the United States, especially in their culminating moment, i.e., the presidency of Ronald Reagan, the countries of Central and Eastern Europe might still be in captivity and Russian dependence, like in Belarus or Chechnya for other example.
Fear of the Russian Federation seems to be a natural determinant of the European libertarians' view of the collective involvement of Western forces in helping Ukraine. By the way of example; Polish libertarians expressed their indignation at the words of the famous psychologist Jordan B. Peterson speaking on the war in Ukraine. Peterson declared that he saw the conflict (war) as a clash of values. As we said libertarians' support for Ukraine seems obvious.
Various supporters of freedom seem to recognize this problem and support Ukraine by sending money and basic necessities. But is it enough? Does the role of commitment end there? Many freedom activists says that the case of Hong Kong should be a warning to the free world. The prospect of a libertarian Ukrainian state that breaks out of the gloomy Kremlin despot seems very tempting and possible. For example, Rainer Zitelmann sees opportunities for Ukraine, which may become an economically liberal state in which political currents of freedom thought can and develop.
Conclusion This short and provocative reflection maybe open the great debate. The problem outlined here requires a broader attention to this issue throughout the Austro-libertarian community. If we have two or more agressive imperialist Leviathans, should we choose the lesser evil among them? What strategies of freedom should be adopted in the face of that kind of crisis? Are there any alternatives to imperial military alliances? What criteria for collective self-defense of states should be adopted from a libertarian perspective? The answers still remain open and we should not avoid them.
Here's an interesting bit of new legislation coming from Congressional Democrats. Georgia Democrat Rep. Hank Johnson has introduced the "Supreme Court TERM Act." This legislation would:
Establish terms of 18 years in regular active service for Supreme Court justices, after which justices who retain the office will assume senior status;Establish regular appointments of Supreme Court justices in the first and third years following a presidential election as the sole means of Supreme Court appointments;Require current justices to assume senior status in order of length of service on the Court as regularly appointed justices receive their commissions;Preserve life tenure by ensuring that senior justices retired from regular active service continue to hold the office of Supreme Court justice, including official duties and compensation; andRequire the Supreme Court justice who most recently assumed senior status to fill in on the Court if the number of justices in regular active service falls below nine. It's a both a court-packing bill and a term limits bill. It's unclear that the bill would pass constitutional muster under federal judges' current interpretations of Article III of the US Constitution. But, that probably doesn't matter since such legislation is unlikely to get through the Senate, given that Sen. Manchin of West Virginia has already said he would not support any court-packing legislation.
The idea of Congress erecting term limits for the Supreme Court while doing nothing to create term limits for Congress is an impressive display of chutzpah for current members of Congress. After all, term limits for Congress have long been very popular, with the idea often commanding around 75 percent support from those polled. That's even more than the support for limiting the tenures of SCOTUS justices, which is apparently around two-thirds in support.
Legislation limiting Congressional terms is also of unclear constitutionality, at least as far as current interpretations offered by federal judges go. But there's no reason why Congress couldn't put the wheels in motion for enacting Congressional term limits. The reason this hasn't happened, of course, is obvious. Those in Congressional leadership positions—the ones who determine what gets voted on—would be the most impacted were such measures adopted.
But how much would term limits affect the average member of Congress? 62 members of the Congress over the years have served more than 40 years in Congress overall. 10 members of the Senate have served more than 40 years in the Senate alone. 32 members of the House of Representatives have served 40 years in the House alone.
It's a fairly safe bet that most members of the public would support term limits set at well below 40 years. But how much lower? Not all members are in there for these long multi-decade periods. What is the average tenure for a member of Congress?
Well, according to a July 2022 report by the Congressional Research Service,
The average length of service for Representatives at the beginning of the 117th Congress was 8.9 years (4.5 House terms); for Senators, 11.0 years (1.8 Senate terms).
So, setting the term limit for members of the House at, say, 12 years of the House of Representatives and 18 years for the Senate, would not impact the "average member." But it would definitely eliminate those members of congress who serve decades in Congress. People like Mitch McConnell or Chuck Schumer or Nancy Pelosi would be long gone. Even if these 3 people had served 10 full years in the House and then moved to serve 18 years in the Senate, they still would have used up their full terms years ago.
Do Members Stay in Congress Longer in the 21st Century? Of course, we haven't approached the question of whether or not term limits are a good thing. It's not at all obvious that term limits would make Congress more laissez-faire, less corrupt, or less warmongerish. It could be that term limits would just bring in a larger number of people who are pretty much like the current sorts of people who inhabit Congress. Moreover, maybe in the good ol' days people actually served longer in Congress than they do now. Maybe longer Congressional tenures would actually improve things?
Well, it turns out that the average length of tenure of members of Congress has gone up considerably over the past 150 years. As noted above, the average tenure for the current crop is 8.9 years in the House and 11 years in the Senate, but those averages were much lower in the nineteenth century. As we can see, the average for Senators never exceeded 6 years until the late nineteenth century. It never exceeded 4 years in the House until around 1900. The overall trend has been steadily upward since then:
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Source: Congressional Research Service. In other words, for the first 100 years of the Republic, the average length of so-called "service" in the Senate was one term, while it was less than two terms in the House.
[Read More: "Repealing the 17th Amendment Won't Fix the Senate" by Ryan McMaken.]
Those could be due to many different factors. It could be due to the structure of political parties which was much different in the nineteenth century. Senators, of course, were generally chosen by state legislatures, and many senators came and went based on deals struck with state politicians. In any case, we do know that greatly reducing the average tenure of members of Congress would simply return average tenure lengths to what was common in the past.
That's unlikely to "fix" Washington, DC. But holding Senators to a single term or a House member to 2 terms would not necessarily be a radical departure from the Congresses of the past either.
Proto-Progressives didn’t stand back and let a porous border emancipate slaves into rising prosperity. Instead, proto-Progressives used the new industrialization, railroads, and telegraphs to power industrial-scale conscription, killing, maiming, and destruction.
Progressives didn’t stand back and let European governments wage a first total war against Europe’s people. Instead, Progressives used their new income tax and new chemical technology to also send our own men into trenches to their deaths, and to also kill other men using poison gas.
Progressives didn’t stand back and let customers and businesses work together in the 1920s and 1930s. Instead, Progressives used their new Fed to print money, creating an artificial bubble and crash, and then kept prices high for both labor and products, stopping customers and businesses from adjusting prices themselves and working out the optimum path to recovery on their own. This greatly weakened the nation, incentivizing the Axis governments to attack and drag the nation’s people into WWII.
Progressives introduced inadequate studies and a media storm to ban the pesticide DDT. The resulting resurge of malaria killed millions.
Progressives introduced new procedures for abortion and used these to kill millions.
Progressives engineered a virus to be more transmissible by humans and deadly to humans. They locked down workplaces. They blocked and greatly-delayed fast home tests, punished doctors who used generic antivirals, and threatened businesspeople who sold the clot-reducing supplement NAC.
They mandated vaccines that cause new variants to evolve, lessen natural immunity, and produce clots potentially across the lifespan. If nonlethal strokes increase, dramatically decreasing the quality of life for many people, Progressives will be there to bury this problem they created by assisting their victims in committing suicide.
Once you know what you’re looking for, the extent of the misery that has been blamed on businesspeople or on acts of God but that has actually been caused by Progressives will take your breath away.
Progressives have limited awareness of their roles in all these harms, thanks to certain tricks that people’s minds play on them.
One particularly-powerful trick gets played by a Progressives’ mind on itself: denial.
Denial is greatly facilitated by focusing away from horrific consequences and focusing instead on other people’s supposed evil motives, on being the first in history to prevent a depression, on alleged weakening of eggshells, on temporary liberty for women, on being first in history to save people from a deadly scourge, and on and on.
Another powerful trick works almost the same way: urgency.
To a Progressive, a crisis screams deafeningly for his most-powerful savior to take action, immediately.
The more stressful the perceived urgency, the harder it is for anyone to think clearly. Stress produces “cognitive rigidity.”
The result is that only a very-few limited possibilities even surface in Progressives’ awareness. To not take some centralized action, any centralized action, is completely out of the question. Lives would most definitely be lost. (And the people to blame would be the people who knew better—the Progressives, of course.)
Tragic, isn’t it? A mere belief that government people are moral and capable, while customers and businesspeople are naïve or immoral (so their capabilities don’t matter), is enough, in a crisis, to seemingly compel action that’s disastrous.
So then, interestingly, Progressives don’t even have to think that they must not let a crisis go to waste.
And yet, conveniently, the actions they would take without thinking just happen to be exactly the same actions they would take if they consciously determined to not let a crisis go to waste. Which in fact is what Progressives determine to do.
Progressives act, and people die. Doesn’t rhyme, but is actually true.
As Ronald Reagan said, “The nine most-terrifying words in the English language are ‘I’m from the government and I’m here to help.’” True that.
Remember that in every crisis.
Voltaire once famously urged people to “Judge a man by his questions rather than by his answers.” Someone’s questions tell us what they already presume to be true and whether they are seeking wisdom or something very different. For example, a politician asking “who should I blame for something I am actually at fault for?” or “how can I best make a proposal that will violate people’s rights and liberties come across as reasonable?” is not seeking wisdom.
But asking appropriate questions is often a useful means toward wisdom. Unfortunately for most of us, knowing what wisdom is to be developed and how best to get others to see that wisdom for themselves is a high bar to clear.
That is why Leonard Read turned to Socrates for inspiration toward wisdom and how to more effectively transmit such wisdom as we have to others, which he pursued for a major part of his adult life, in his “How to be like Socrates,” Chapter 20 in his 1973 book, Who’s Listening.
Each of us is unique. But the method employed by Socrates to advance understanding is one that all of us might well try to emulate.
The Socratic method of teaching or discussion is to ask a series of easily answered questions that inevitably lead the answerer to a logical conclusion foreseen by the questioner. This is to teach a student the way of philosophizing, as distinguished from urging him to memorize the conclusions of philosophers.
This is quite the opposite of the popular “compulsory mis-education” which tends to turn students into carbon copies of so-called teachers. Instead of putting masks on students--blanketing their minds with someone else’s “wisdom”--real teaching is an unmasking process, helping [individuals] to find their own hidden aptitudes, potentialities, uniqueness…Enlightenment is the mutual goal.
If enlightenment is sought, and the Socratic method can help us get there, one would think it would be used more than it is. Read asked why.
Why, we must ask, is this superior method so little used?...because we do not know the right questions to ask.
How can we reach the level of wisdom to utilize that method to lead others to “own” such wisdom for themselves?
If one would be like Socrates, where does he start?...training for enlightenment above and beyond where he now stands…To ascend, one [first] reaches for the bottom rung…practiced and mastered, to that extent may one rise step by step toward the top.
Consciously developed, it assures individual growth in awareness, perception, consciousness; and this leads in turn toward the good society…we seek for truth and share it with those who also seek…We enrich or enlighten each other.
As one succeeds in probing for truth, he becomes more and more conscious of an ever-expanding unknown…If one can reach the level of humility, of wanting to know, then the next higher rung of the ladder is within reach: an intelligent interpretation of self-interest. In reality, this amounts to an understanding of the Golden Rule: one’s interest is never served by doing injury to another.
Leonard Read then turned to exemplars of the kind of wisdom he sought.
Immanuel Kant was at this level: no one has a moral right to do anything that cannot be rationally conceded as a right to everyone else-the principle of universality. The interest of self and of society are in harmony, not at odds.
William Graham Sumner…stated the principle in brilliant terms: “Every man and woman in society has one big duty. That is to take care of his or her own self… the duty of making the best of one’s self individually is not a separate thing from the duty of filling one’s place in society, but the two are one, and the latter is accomplished when the former is done.”
With such exemplars in mind, Read also acts as an exemplar of someone seeking wisdom, by first turning serious questions inward.
I…am aware of knowing nothing, and understand the Golden Rule. However, I do not know enough answers to ask many of the right questions. Why am I not more like Socrates? Simply because I am not wise enough. Nonetheless, each of us can strive for more wisdom.
Finally, Read provided an example of a step along the Socratic path toward liberty:
Q-Joe Doakes was lynched. Who did it?
A-A mob.
Q- Mob is but a label. Of what is it composed?
A - Individuals.
Q- Then did not each individual in the mob lynch Joe Doakes?
A- That would seem to be the case.
Q-Very well. Can any individual gain absolution by committing murder in the name of a label, the mob, a collective?
A- I guess not.
Q- Now that we have established that point, let me pose another question. Do you believe in thievery?
A- Of course not.
Q- Logically, then, you do not believe that you should use force to take my income to feather your own nest. True or false?
A-True.
Q-Is the principle changed if two of you gang up on me?
A-Not at all.
Q- One million? Even a majority?
A-Well, perhaps O.K. if a majority does it.
Q-Do you mean that might makes right?
A-Oh, no.
Q- That is what you have just said. Would you care to retract that?
A- To be logical, I must.
Q-You have now agreed that not even 200 million people or any agency thereof-government, labor unions, educational institutions, business firms, or whatever—have a moral right to feather their nests at the expense of others, that is, to advance their own special interests at taxpayers' expense. You have also admitted that no one gains absolution by acting in the name of a collective. Therefore, is not every member who supports or even condones a wrong collective action just as guilty as if he personally committed the act?
A- I have never thought of it that way before but I now believe you are right.
Thus, by asking the right questions, one may thread his way through the maze of moral, economic, and political philosophy toward truth. This is the method of helping others to find right answers for themselves, the way to truth through their own minds. Your problem and mine is to become wiser that we may increase the number of the right questions to ask. This, in my view, is the way to become more and more like Socrates.
After the leaking of a draft opinion from the Supreme Court on “Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization,” it seems clear that the precedent set in Roe v. Wade and upheld by Planned Parenthood v. Casey is being overturned. In the document, confirmed by Chief Justice Roberts, Justice Alito plainly says that the majority opinion is “that Roe and Casey must be overruled,” and that “It is time to heed the Constitution and return the issue of abortion to the people’s elected representatives.”.
So, what does this mean for Abortion “rights”? Despite what liberal pundits' hysteria makes it look like, this does not mean that abortion is now banned in the entire United States. What it does mean is that the decision on whether it is banned is determined by each state’s government.
Essentially, the power to legislate abortion has been handed from the federal government down to the states in a rare victory for states’ rights. Particularly on an issue that divides Americans more than nearly any other issue.
Forty-nine percent of Americans identify as Pro-Choice and forty-seven percent as Pro-Life. Overall as well, thirty-two percent support abortion being legal in all cases and nineteen percent support abortion being illegal in all cases. Support or lack of it seems correlated to the region the state is in, as Pro-Life states tend to be in the South or Midwest, while pro-choice heavy states are in the Northeast and West coast.
Twenty-three states already have laws that would trigger if the decision is made final that either impose restrictions on abortion they could not previously impose or an outright ban of abortion, all in either the South or Midwest. Conversely, sixteen states have laws that protect the “abortion rights” which are all on the Northeast and West coasts.
The pre-existing divide between more rural, Southern, and Midwestern states and more urban, Northeastern, and West coast states is going to be furthered. The difference in policy, even among states that are generally pro-life or pro-choice, will create a new incentive for people in choosing where they live. One based around a moral issue.
While what set of morals one wants to live under somewhat exists between the states in the varied cultures between them, abortion being a state issue gives an easy signaling device for them. It is a safe assumption that “what is their abortion policy” is a question people will ask when considering where to move.
This is a continuation of the trend of people moving from state to state concentrating certain states on one ideology and culture that is becoming increasingly opposed to other ones. The obvious question that comes from observing this trend is, “Are we going to see secession from this?”
The answer to that question cannot be definitively answered till something happens, but we can draw parallels to the last time the U.S. saw States secede in the Civil War. Historian Alan Taylor describes the U.S. up to 1850 as “built on an unstable foundation of rival regions and an ambiguous Constitution”.
There were many conflicts between the states before the Civil War and even full-on rebellions such as the Whiskey or Shay’s Rebellion. The States only continued the trend of division among themselves leading up to the Civil War culturally, economically, and politically.
Slavery would become the issue that is credited with causing the Civil War, but, while playing a part, was not the only reason, nor does it explain all of the divides between the states. In some states like North Carolina, it was never clear whether the general population even cared about the issue as it was a relatively small slave population state.
Additionally, several Union states kept slavery throughout the war, even after the emancipation proclamation, till it was outlawed by the 13th amendment. Although slavery was not the sole cause of the Civil War, it did become the issue that served as the face of the divide.
Similar conditions do exist today as leading up to the Civil War if you replace the issue of Slavery with the issue of abortion. States before this decision had already been engaged in legal fights with the federal government over abortion. Not only this, several states have made laws to re-enforce “abortion rights” and provide greater access to it.
It is clear that before and now after the leak states are dividing along this line and it is coming to the forefront of the differences between them. Though we can see that many other divides exist between the states that are only being exacerbated, such as COVID 19-policies and approach to the economy.
This provides quite substantial evidence for some kind of situation similar to the Civil War secession or a softer secession such as the USSR. One can only wait, but regardless if such a scenario happens Abortion will be at the forefront of the divide between states for the foreseeable future.
Loveland, Colorado police officer Austin Hopp was sentenced this week to prison time for attacking an elderly woman with dementia in June 2020. After pleading guilty to second-degree assault and other crimes, Hopp reached a plea agreement with the county and was sentenced to five years in prison plus three years probation.
Hopp was “enforcing the law” when he threw victim Karen Garner to the ground, broke her arm, and dislocated her shoulder. The 80-pound, 73-year-old woman had allegedly attempted to walk out of a local Walmart with $13.88 worth of merchandise. When confronted, Garner left the merchandise in the store and walked home.
Hopp and his partner, Officer Daria Jalali, quickly caught up with Garner, who was picking wildflowers along the road. Hopp proceeded to assault Garner with the help of Jalali. [See video.] Hopp’s manhandling of the tiny woman was so aggressive that a local bystander even stopped—thinking Hopp was abusing a small child—and asked “do you have to use that much aggression?”
The sergeant on site, Philip Metzler, was quick to dismiss the bystanders’ concerns and shouted down the citizen, declaring Hopp “didn’t do anything wrong.” Metzler also invented a false narrative about how Garner “ran from the store” and “resisted arrest.”
Soon thereafter, Garner was taken to the local lockup where she was refused medical attention, even though she had a broken arm. While Garner while crying in pain in her holding cell, Hopp, Jalali, and Community Service Officer Tyler Blackett viewed the body cam footage from the incident. Video from the police station shows the three officers laughing and joking about Garner’s arrest and her broken arm. Hopp announced that he was “proud” and “super excited” that he had the opportunity to use hobble restraints on the elderly woman. Jalali and Hopp shared a fist bump over the arrest with Hopp declaring that the arrest “went great” and “we crushed it.”
But then nothing happened. As is so often the case with police assaults on members of the public, the leadership in the police department took no exception to Hopp’s assault or the fact that Garner was denied medical attention. The laugh-fest following Garner’s arrest was not seen as anything to worry about. Loveland's assistant chief of police Ray Butler, after viewing Hopp's video, concluded Hopp's felony assault was "necessary, reasonable, and within policy."
It was only in April of the following year that Garner’s daughter was finally able to get information on her mother’s violent arrest. Thanks to their skilled attorney, bodycam videos of the incident were made public, as was the video from the police station. Only after a public outcry over the contents of the video did the police department’s leadership take any significant action. Hopp, Jalali, and Metzler were given paid vacations—also known as “administrative leave”—pending investigation.
Hopp, Jalali, and Blackett finally resigned—i.e., were not fired—in late April. It was not until more than a year after the incident, in September 2021, that Metzler resigned. Metzler, of course, had signed off on Hopp’s report, and—according to Garner’s attorney—deliberately mislabeled his own bodycam files so as to hide evidence. The other sergeant that approved Hopp’s report, Sergeant Antolina Hill, remains employed by the department.
Now, nearly two years later—and certainly no thanks to the police department that employed and protected him—Austin Hopp is in prison. His partner Jalali is awaiting trial in June.
Do Police Understand the Concept of Proportionality? But this leaves us with an important question: what sort of thinking convinces a police officer to conclude it is laudable, or even acceptable, to rough up an old lady in this manner?
We can already guess the narrative that the police were telling themselves, given the words of Metzler: in their minds, Garner was apparently a “criminal” who resisted arrest and ran from the scene of a crime. Perhaps in their minds, this exaggerated version of events justified breaking an old woman’s arm and throwing her in a jail cell.
Most reasonable people, however, understand there is a problem of proportionality here. Garner didn’t actually steal anything, but even if she had stolen something, was the proper response to beat her up? Moreover, in Garner’s case, the value of the goods she had in hand amounted to under 14 dollars. This must all be viewed in light of the basic premise of proportionality which is that “[T]here should be a proportion between the severity of the crime and the severity of the punishment.”
So, here we have a woman who had not actually stolen anything, but police were acting as if she were a hardened criminal, deserving of harsh treatment. Moreover, as Murray Rothbard was always careful to note, when a suspect is in the process of being apprehended, guilt has not even been determined yet. In other words, all force taken against a suspect may ultimately prove to be against a party who is completely innocent.
Thus, in the Garner case, we witness police breaking an old woman’s arm in a case where:
Guilt has not been established.The suspect has not actually stolen anything.The suspect is a small elderly person and presents no threat to the community. The public, on some level, understood all of this, which is likely why the public’s reaction to the police in Garner’s case was one of near-universal revulsion. Had Hopp arrested the local 200-pound ne’er-do-well in a similar fashion for stealing a pack of cigarettes, Hopp would almost certainly not be in prison today.
Reasonable people understand that not all cases of theft (or attempted theft) are created equal and do not call for the same response. Indeed, in many cases, proportionality and basic decency suggest no arrest at all is the most prudent course of action. Garner’s case is just such a case.
The "Arrest and Jail" Model for Minor Infractions Is a Modern, State-Centered Invention “Law and order” types, however, often have problems understanding proportionality and the fact that arresting people is not necessarily the solution to every legal infraction. For many olaw-and-order advocates, even very minor infractions require forceful intervention, jailing, and arrest. Those suspects who don’t immediately and docilely submit to arrest? Those people—regardless of their alleged infraction—are “resisting arrest” and therefore must be made to comply by any means necessary.
As the Garner case has demonstrated, however, this is a ghoulish position and out of touch with the real world.
For example, in the case of Garner, how might the situation have been handled differently? It was apparent to any decent person—i.e., not the personnel of the Loveland Police Department—that it is would not have been appropriate to use violence against someone in Garner’s situation. For one, the supermarket could protect itself from Garner in the future by simply banning her from the premises. This is common in the case of shoplifters. If the police were hell bent on establishing Garner’s identity—and if she refused to provide a name—they could simply have followed her the additional half mile home. Then they could have issued a summons to appear in court.
This almost certainly would have been less time-consuming and costly than arresting the woman and putting her in jail. The summons approach definitely would have been less costly than the $3 million settlement paid out to the victim’s family in the Garner case.
Yet, we continue to hear from the “always comply” crowd that any minor infraction requires a response of overwhelming force followed by violent escalation. But what if Garner had somehow managed to get free of the police officer and was able to run away? If we believe that compliance is of paramount importance, then we must conclude that it would be justifiable to use all types of force, up and including deadly force, on people in Garner's situation. In other words, we end up supporting the idea that death is somehow a proportional "punishment" for petty (attempted) theft. Cleary, there is something very wrong with this position.
Moreover, from a public-policy view, police resources are wasted on cases such as these. If Loveland is like most communities of its size and demographics, there are many unsolved, never-prosecuted car thefts, assaults, and burglaries. Anyone who has been a victim of a burglary, for example, knows that the police do next to nothing in terms of finding stolen property. Police often lie that they "must enforce every law" but this is obviously not the case. Police choose each and every day how to distribute police resources and what crimes to investigate and address. This is reflected in the fact that police devote very few resources to homicides, but large amounts of resources to more lucrative and easy investigations of illegal drugs.
So why did two police officers and their sergeant decide to double down on arresting Karen Garner? Because it was the easy thing to do. Also, Garner presented no threat whatsoever to the personal safety of police officers. This made her an even easier target. Tracking down dangerous criminals, on the other hand, requires actual work and risk.
In the end, it would have been best to do nothing from the standpoint of police. If Walmart wanted to insist on punishing Garner somehow for her petty non-theft, Walmart could sue her in court. This, of course, would be the course of action recommended by Rothbard in his chapter on proportionality in The Ethics of Liberty. But even then, the penalty inflicted on Garner would still have to be proportional, since, as Rothbard notes
The victim [i.e., Walmart], then, has the right to exact punishment up to the proportional amount as determined by the extent of the crime, but he is also free either to allow the aggressor to buy his way out of punishment, or to forgive the aggressor partially or altogether. The proportionate level of punishment sets the right of the victim, the permissible upper bound of punishment; but how much or whether the victim decides to exercise that right is up to him.
In Garner's case, Walmart could pursue maybe 20 bucks for restitution for the time spent by store employees on reclaiming property from Garner. Or Walmart could simply decide it's not worth the trouble. Anything more than a few bucks restitution in this case is disproportional to the severity of the crime. A broken arm is beyond the pale of reasonable responses. On the other hand, a doctrinaire commitment to police-enforced “law and order” simply depends on an imaginary version of reality in which every minor infraction can be addressed through government intervention.
Such thinking is purely modern. Historically, prosecution for such offenses has generally been a matter of private civil law. The idea that police ought to be sent out to round up every low-grade thief is a product of big-government twentieth-century thinking, and it leads to a “cure worse than the disease.”
That was clearly the case in the Garner situation. Fortunately, the court recognized this, and Hopp will have a few years in a prison cell to help him understand. Let's hope his partner Jalali will soon have the same opportunity.
Starring Alexander Skarsgård, the recently released film “The Northman” portrays Viking life in stunning and vivid detail. The historical accuracy is said to be unprecedented; Robert Eggers, director of The Northman and other historical tales (The Witch, The Lighthouse), emphasizes his employment of Viking experts to achieve such an accuracy. The film indubitably meets contemporary historians’ expectations; but for economists of the Austrian persuasion, the film provides an excellent example of the fallacious and often contradicting interpretations historians provide for historical phenomena.
At its core, the film balances two commonly-propagated tropes about Vikings: their brutal and animal-like nature, and their trust-based society of egalitarianism. How can one reconcile these views? On one hand, Vikings are rapacious misanthropes that plunder and torture with abnormal barbarity; on another, they live by oaths and reputation. Egger’s “The Northman” excellently displays this dichotomy; in the beginning of the film, we witness the Vikings “going berserker” before raiding a Slavic village, murdering and violating all they can.
In contrast, much of the film is about fulfilling oaths and attaining/maintaining “honor”; in a later scene, the protagonist hands a gold piece to an unknown Viking sailor, who are to bring the protagonist’s dazzling bride-to-be on a months-long sea journey to Orkney in recompense. How are the Vikings that violate any woman they find also entrusted with ensuring safe passage for a beautiful woman, of whom they have no consequences of disturbing once past the bay line? This is not an oversight of the scriptwriter (though one may imagine his or her own puzzled look), but one of contemporary interpretations of Vikings.
Pete Leeson has extensive literature on the economics of pirates. Using rational choice theory (and much supplementary data), he accurately deduces that pirates did not plunder and murder solely to quench their own depravity, but because doing so was wealth-maximizing for securing early surrenders. When merchant ships would spot the jolly roger, they predicted facing rapacious blood-fiends, and moreover that their lack of immediate surrender would result in excruciating torture and execution.
As Leeson notes, it behooved pirates to emphasize a favor for torture and a high discount rate (high time preference) to secure plunder with as little cost as possible. Contemporary historians failed to reconcile pirates’ brutality with their crafting of, and adherence to contracts of private governance; rational choice theory, however, gives us a clearer picture.
Vikings likely have a similar explanation. “Going berserker” and torturing victims brutally both imply a high discount rate, and further reinforces that retaliation would be met with severe consequences. Both serve the purpose of securing plunder and victory with little cost. Berserker roughly translates to “bare-shirted” or “bear-shirted;” note that although going berserker is a “state of mind,” they are denoted by physical appearance, almost as if they are signaling ferocity to enemies and not actually manifesting the spirit of a wild beast.
If Vikings truly entered an altered state of mind granting them superhuman abilities that clouded their judgement (thus giving them a high discount rate), why would they take so much care to signal this to enemies? Deliberate signaling is contradictory to the frenzied disposition they exhibited, akin to pirates’ perceived temperament.
As the historians and archeologists advising Eggers’ film indicate, there is also surprisingly little historical text or archeological finds that give us any glimpse of the religious rituals which shaped Norsemen’s barbaric mindset. In an interview regarding his film, Eggers discusses how they crafted the set regarding the “scene where Berserkers need to transform human beings into beasts through shamanic ritual”:
“The academic consensus was that Vikings didn’t have special clothing for rituals. But the academic consensus is also that rituals involved splattering blood over everybody. I said to the archeologist Neil Price, ‘So, like, everyone was just walking around covered in blood all the time?’ And he was like, ‘Wow, I never considered that.’ So, based around a lot of other ideas we saw in sagas and archeology, we did invent the ceremonial clothing for rituals. That was total invention.”
Interestingly, we don’t know how Vikings became berserker; the “ritual” is completely unknown, save for the fact that blood was supposedly splattered on everybody. Therefore, it could be equally true that no ritual ever existed. It seems modern historians have interpreted this part of Viking lore with the same scrutiny as recently-raided 9th century Slavic villagers: completely accepting what the Vikings wanted their prey to believe. Remember that Leeson confronted a similar issue: contemporary historians interpreting pirates to be exactly what the marauders wanted their prey to believe of them.
Dissimilar from Leeson’s work, we do not have any early data on Vikings; record-keeping at the time was understandably scant. For comparison, the golden age of Vikings took place from 793–1066 AD; the “Domesday Book”, widely considered to be one of the first attempts at actual record-keeping, was written in 1086 AD. Without supplementary data and trustworthy sources, we may only deduce what we can with rational choice theory.
However, contemporary historians also lack sources. They use accounts written centuries after-the-fact (by the posterity of Vikings’ victims, nonetheless), and completely accept their retellings as truth. But, it is unlikely that Vikings could organize raiding expeditions alone if they were truly the carnal beasts one reads about in the sagas. Had they been so, merely transacting would be unfathomably difficult as commitment issues would stall parties’ enthusiasm. Without transaction, it is hard to imagine any society existing.
“The Northman”, a splendid (but gory) tale, was expertly informed by contemporary historians and archeologists; as such, the film excellently displays the flaw in common academic interpretations of Vikings. Logically, I would not go anywhere near an individual that violates and murders for sport, and I would certainly not transact with them; individuals in history would have likely thought the same, because they are equally rational beings.
To assume otherwise when interpreting historical phenomena is fallacious methodology, but it is common practice in contemporary academia. Economists are often accused of “economic imperialism” when applying methodology to non-market behavior; we must continue to do so until other social sciences begin to adequately interpret human behavior.
Sam acknowledges Janna Lu for her wonderful editing help and encouragement.
As Sasha Levine reveals in his ground-breaking book, Surveillance Valley, at the height of the Cold War, US military commanders were pursuing a decentralised computer communications system without a base of operations or headquarters, that could withstand a Soviet strike, without blacking-out or destroying the entire network.
The project was coordinated by the Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), created by President Eisenhower in 1958, for the development of technologies that would expand the frontiers of science and technology and help the US close the missile gap with the Soviets.
DARPA has since been at the vanguard of every major advancement in the development of personal computers ever since the cold war, culminating in 1969 with the first computers being in universities across the US.
A few years later DARPA would develop the protocols to enable connected computers to communicate transparently across multiple networks. Known as The Internetting Project, DARPA’s prototypical communications network, the ARPANET, was born in 1973.
Fast forward to 1990 and the ARPANET was officially decommissioned, and the Internet privatised to a consortium of corporations including IBM and MCI. Eventually the federal government created a dozen or so network providers and spun them off to the private sector, building companies that would become the backbone of today's internet, including Verizon Time-Warner, AT&T and Comcast. That’s the same six corporations who not only own 90% of US media outlets, they control the flow of global communications, through a process of absolute vertical-horizontal alignment of legacy media with digital media, and the infrastructures and technologies that enable their mass communication.
J.C.R. Licklider A central player in the development of the ARPANET, who many consider the founding father of computing, was American psychologist, J. C. R. Licklider.
Lick, as he was known, was the first Director of the agency tasked with executing DARPA's information technology programs, The Information Processing Techniques Office (IPTO), that has been responsible for just about major advancement in computer communications since the sixties.
As Stephen J. Lukasik, a contributor to the ARPANET project reflected in his paper ' ‘Why the Arpanet Was Built’ ‘Lick saw information technology and behavioural and cognitive science issues as connected.’
Lick was essentially predicting how the internet would go on to evoke real world social processes that have radically transformed how we communicate, organise and process information. It is no coincidence that a psychologist of ‘Licks calibre was at the vanguard of a new technology designed to exploit basic vulnerabilities in the human psyche.
In the 1960’s Lick oversaw DARPA’s strategic interest in a new frontier of information technology, called Brain Computer Interfaces (BCI’s). In his famous paper, considered one of the most important in the history of computing, Lick put forward the then radical idea that the human mind would one day merge seamlessly with computers. He was anticipating the evolution of AI and the role that DARPA would go on to play in funding just about every major advancement in BCI technology over eight decades, including Elon Musk’s brain-machine interface company, Neuralink.
The Vietnam War The ARPANET brought together the Pentagon’s war machine with university research departments and the Bay area’s counterculture scene. Inspiring much of the anecdotal idealism that would define the early years of cyberspace as a liberating new frontier for humanity.
But war hawks and intelligence analysts had other ideas. If the lessons of the Vietnam war were anything to go by, the future of US warfare would not be with nation states, it would be with ideologies, or more specifically, grassroots movements, such as the Viet Cong, who had the power to stoke the flames of civil unrest, that could lead to uprisings, or worse, revolution. Alternative approaches were, therefore, needed to infiltrate and disrupt this new threat to the free world.
As the war raged in Southeast Asia, another psychology PHD, Robert Taylor, joined DARPA as the agency's third director. Taylor transferred to Vietnam in 1967, to establish the first computer centre at the Military Assistance Command base in Saigon, a central pillar in the DoD’s psychological warfare operations.
The move was endemic of the changing rules of military engagement that saw DARPA, and indeed, this new technology, playing a major role in the war effort, both in Southeast Asia, and at home on US soil, against the growing anti-war movement.
In 1968, Taylor and ‘Lick published their seminal paper "The Computer as a Communication Device." Laying out the future of what the Internet would eventually become. The paper began with the visionary statement: "In a few years, men will be able to communicate more effectively through a machine than face to face.” Anticipating the meteoric rise of social media, particularly Facebook, in the decades to come.
Bringing the PSYOP Back Home The origins of Facebook coincide with a controversial military program that was mysteriously shut down the same year Facebook launched.
The military program in question, LifeLog, was developed by DARPA’s Information Processing Techniques Office, with the stated aim of creating a permanent and searchable electronic diary of a person’s entire life. A dataset of their most personal information.
But would people willingly give up a record of their private lives to a military intelligence social media platform?
Probably not. Enter Facebook.
LifeLog, meanwhile, was ostensibly shut down. But this was not the first nor the last time that a project of this magnitude would be proposed.
In a 1945 article for The Atlantic, Vannevar Bush who directed the US Army's psychological operations during World War II, discussed his hypothetical project, The Memex, as a device “in which an individual stores all his books, records and communications, and which is mechanised so that it may be consulted with exceeding speed and flexibility."
In immortalising people's lives, it was hoped that LifeLog would eventually contribute to the emerging field of artificial intelligence (AI), that could one day think just like a human, intersecting with another DARPA backed project - the Personal Assistant That Learns (PAL) - a cognitive computing system designed to make military decision-making more efficient, which was eventually spun-off as Siri, the virtual assistant on Apple's operating system.
But LifeLog is just one part of the story. There was another DARPA program that also ‘disappeared’ one year before Facebook made its debut. Often cited as the precursor to Facebook. The Information Awareness Office (IAO) brought together several DARPA surveillance and information technology projects.
The stated aim of the IAO was to gather and store the personal information of every US citizen, including their personal emails, social networks, lifestyles, credit card records, phone calls, medical records, without, of course, the need for a search warrant. This information would funnel back to intelligence agencies, under the guise of predicting and preventing terrorist incidents before they happened. Reminiscent of Project Camelot’s early warning radar system for left wing revolutionaries.
Despite the government, apparently, abandoning their gambit for total information awareness over ordinary Americans, the core of the project survived.
I draw your attention to Palantir, the spooky data analytics firm founded by Facebook’s board member, Peter Thiel.
Despite being portrayed as science fiction in the firm Minority Report, Palantir’s predictive policing analytics have been deployed extensively against insurgents in Iraq and by police departments in the US.
This is, of course, nothing new for the Chinese. The convergence of big tech data analytics with social credits has been deployed for many years by the CCP to weed out and punish dissidents, who can find themselves held indefinitely in political re-education camps for holding the wrong set of political beliefs.
But it must also be accepted, these Orwellian methods of repression did not originate in China. The encroachment of the CIA onto the public sphere has been happening since the 1960’s, when the US imported decades of counterinsurgency from the soviet satellites to tackle the anti-war and civil rights movements. This was ramped up in the wake of 9/11. Now through the backdoor of COVID-19 total information awareness is coming home to roost, as China’s social credits system has been implemented on the back of the Green Pass.
Before anti-vaxxers and conspiracy theorists, you had civil rights and anti-war activists. The ideology guiding dissent may have changed, but the military tactics used to counter it remain the same.
Counterinsurgency If insurgency is defined as an organised political struggle by a hostile minority, attempting to seize power through revolutionary means, then counterinsurgency is the military doctrine historically used against non-state actors, that sets out to infiltrate and eradicate those movements.
As David Galula, a French commander who was an expert in counterinsurgency warfare during the Algerian War, emphasised:
“In any situation, whatever the cause, there will be an active minority for the cause, a neutral majority, and an active minority against the cause. The technique of power consists in relying on the favourable minority in order to rally the neutral majority and to neutralise or eliminate the hostile minority.”
Overtime, however, the intelligence state lost touch with reality, as the focus of its counterinsurgency programs shifted from foreign to domestic populations, from national security risks to ordinary citizens. Particularly in the wake of 9/11, when the NSA and its British counterpart, GCHQ, began mapping out the Internet.
Thanks to Edward Snowden’s revelations in 2013, we now know that the NSA were collecting 200 billion pieces of data every month, including the cell phone records, emails, web searches and live chats of more than 200 million ordinary Americans. This was extracted from the world's largest internet companies via a lesser-known, data mining program called Prism.
There’s another name for this, and its Total Information Awareness. What ceases to be worth the candle is that people’s right to privacy is enshrined under the US Constitution's fourth amendment.
Few understand how lockdowns are ripples on these troubled waters. Decades of counterinsurgency waged against one subset of society, branded insurgents for their Marxist ideals have, overtime, shifted to anyone holding anti-establishment views. The predictive policing of track and trace and the theory of asymptomatic transmission are the unwelcome repercussions of the intelligence state seeking total information awareness over its citizens.
Throughout COVID-19 anyone audacious enough to want to think for themselves or do their own research has had a target painted on their back. But according to the EU, one third of Europe is unvaccinated. This correlates precisely with David Galula’s theory of counterinsurgency, that suggests one third of society is the active minority ‘against the cause,’ who must be neutralised or eliminated.
When Domestic Populations Become the Battlefield The use of counterinsurgency in the UK goes back to colonial India in the 1800s. According to historians, this is the first time the British government used methods of repression and social control against indigenous communities, audacious enough to want to liberate their homeland from Imperialist rule.
These tactics was deployed extensively during The Troubles in Northern Ireland against another anti-imperialist faction, also looking to liberate their homeland from The Crown.
Much of the lessons learned in Northern Ireland were later transferred into the everyday policing and criminal justice policies across mainland Britain. And it wasn't just dissenters who were targeted by these operations, it was anyone with left wing ideals, particularly trade unionists who, it could be argued, were conspiring with the Kremlin to overthrow parliamentary democracy.
I draw your attention to the spying and dirty tricks operations against the 1980s miners' strike. This continued right up until 2012, when the police and intelligence communities were implicated in a plot to blacklist construction industry workers deemed troublesome for their union views. The existence of a secret blacklist was first exposed in 2009, when investigators from the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) raided an unassuming office in Droitwich, Worcestershire, and discovered an extensive database used by construction firms to vet and ultimately blacklist workers belonging to trade unions.
If you want to know what happened to the left, look no further than Project Camelot’s early warning radar system for left wing revolutionaries. Decades of infiltration has recalibrated the left into genuflections of establishment interests. It was the unions who scuppered the easing of lockdowns in the UK and consistently called on the Department of Education to postpone the reopening of schools.
From the infiltration of unions to the co-option of activism, a judge-led public enquiry in 2016 revealed 144 undercover police operations had infiltrated and spied on more than 1,000 political groups in long term deployments since 1968. With covert spymasters rising in the ranks to hold influential leadership positions, guiding policy and strategy, and in some cases, radicalising those movements from within to damage their reputation and weaken public support.
By now it should become obvious to observers that the decision to cancel historical figures in the West is driven by anti-white animus. The legacies of historical figures like Christopher Columbus and Thomas Jefferson can’t be discussed without activists arguing that they were problematic characters. Such figures are not judged as products of their time but rather as villains who are unworthy of forgiveness. Neither are we allowed to appreciate the achievements of personalities tainted as villains by woke activists.
However, whenever we are talking about non-white personalities nuance becomes important. Books authored by Marie Favereau and Jack Weatherford offering a balanced appraisal of the Mongol Empire have received glowing reviews from respected outlets. History reveals that Genghis Khan was a tyrant who often killed subordinates for flippant reasons, but notwithstanding his psychopathic tendencies, he demonstrated impressive leadership abilities, and celebrating his capabilities must never be seen as endorsing atrocities committed by his regime.
Distinguished Professor Jeffrey Garten can outline Khan’s contribution to globalization without people thinking that he is an apologist for tyranny: “The international networks of free trade pioneered by Khan and his successors, changed the world in underappreciated ways: The printing press, gunpowder, and the compass were all brought to Europe on Mongol trade networks.”
In another insightful review, Nathaniel Scharping comments on his complex legacy: “From early in his military career, the Khan promoted a meritocracy, upending the traditional aristocracy of the Mongolian steppes. It was a policy that would continue throughout his rule and after his death. Genghis Khan also promoted religious freedom and banned the use of torture throughout his kingdom. After his death, the Mongol Empire would nurture trade routes and diplomatic relations that helped sustain its strength and brought news and knowledge from the outside world to Asia.”
The reputation of Genghis Khan has become so refined that Carl Hartmann thinks that if we should call anyone in central Asia over 800 years ago a feminist, Genghis Khan would be the prime candidate for not relegating women to an inferior status. Presenting a dispassionate assessment of Khan’s legacy is indeed noteworthy, so why can’t white people defend the legacies of men like Columbus and Jefferson without inviting venom?
Like the British and the French, the Mongols presided over a vast empire entailing the subjugation of conquered peoples and the evidence suggests that the Mongol invasion had an adverse impact on Iran, but for some strange reason contemporary historians are uninterested in shaming the Mongols for past ills. Although writers like Abbas Edalat and Ira Lapidus are rather specific in explaining how the Mongol invasions retarded conquered regions and economists are obsessed with studying the effects of European imperialism they are unwilling to explore the implications of the Mongol invasions with equal fervor.
But the mindset of activists and disingenuous academics is quite simple once we appreciate the uniqueness of Western civilization. The Western world was the first region to modernize and it is also the progenitor of many innovations. As a result, Westerners unlike racial minorities in the West do not occupy the position of the underdog. For the past 500 years, the West has been the most tremendous force in the world some think that it is only appropriate for white people to atone for the sins of their ancestors by continuously genuflecting to demands that their culture be erased.
Quite disappointing is that few on the right are challenging this swindle. When conservatives refuse to push back against calls to remove statues of Robert E Lee and other figures associated with the confederacy, they are doing the bidding of illiberal and misinformed activists. Because the culture of the pre-civil war South is deeper than reverence for slavery and racial hierarchy understanding the rationale for embracing confederate symbols shouldn’t be difficult for mainstream conservatives and libertarians.
If people have a right to self-expression and whites are people, then we should afford them the right to celebrate their heritage without harassment. Some supporters of confederate symbols could be racist, but even so, many are decent people and must never be deprived of their right to self-expression. Libertarians and conservatives only cede the moral high ground to unreasonable activists when they compromise history for social prestige.
The ideas of “natural selection” or “Darwinism” are familiar to almost everyone who has an elementary understanding of the natural sciences. It invokes the notion of constant struggle for survival and competition. Only those who are strong will stay alive. Might makes right, in the most literal sense of the term. Even though it is the “Law of the Jungle”, it is commonly believed today that mankind lives outside this jungle, and has escaped the clutches of natural selection.
While the animals instinctively tear each other apart for survival’s sake, humans supposedly are far too advanced for such barbarity. Mankind has long since moved beyond this base instinct of the “survival of the fittest”. We do not try to kill one another, and indeed, even cooperate with each other in order to better ensure our survival. Even though we are not perfect, as the existence of murder, theft, and war indicate, the existence of the human race today is removed totally from any ideas of “natural selection,” and as convincing as this narrative may appear, this entire paradigm of thinking is wholly incorrect.
To be sure, it is true that interpersonal cooperation makes individuals much more productive than they would be in autarkic production. Economists have shown for centuries that the division of labor makes people much more productive than would otherwise be. Additionally, it is true that people today generally do not view each other as potential enemies or threats to their own existence, as they would be forced to do in a setting of brutish nature. However, it is not the case that the civility that people enjoy today was originally an outcome of his own moral stature or belief in non-violence. Man was not driven into cooperation because of his desire to reject natural selection, but because of it.
Some clarification of terms is useful here. The common conception of “natural selection” views it exclusively in terms of creature-vs-creature. In reality, the mechanism of natural selection is much broader than this. Organisms must not only survive against others, but in must survive in their environment. Ludwig von Mises understood and emphasized this crucial point:
Both schools [referring to Social Darwinism and its critics] misunderstood the Darwinian concept of the struggle for survival. It does not refer merely to combat and blows. It means metaphorically the tenacious impulse of beings to keep alive in spite of all factors detrimental to them. As the means of sustenance are scarce, biological competition prevails among all individuals-whether of the same or different species-which feed on the same stuff. It is immaterial whether or not tigers fight one another. What makes every specimen of an animal species a deadly foe of every other specimen is the mere fact of their life-and-death rivalry in their endeavors to snatch a sufficient amount of food. (Theory and History, pg. 39)
As Mises points out, it is a creature’s environment that he must survive within. Other organisms are certainly elements within that environment, but do not wholly comprise it.
Organisms, through the idiosyncrasies and random movements of nature, will gradually evolve and exhibit different characteristics. These differences between organisms will naturally affect their ability to survive in their environment, with those who are more will-adapted surviving at the expense of those who are less well-adapted. Animals and plants we find living in areas with little rainfall have evolved mechanisms by which they can survive without much precipitation (such as many species of cacti, for instance). The differences that these organisms manifested made them more likely to survive within their environment, and as a result, they survived on while others that were less adapted did not.
For millennia, this was all there was to the world’s biological story. Organisms continued to evolve to changing climates and some lived and some died and so it goes. Natural selection just keeps chugging on. Several thousand years ago, mankind came onto the scene. We as a species started out as hunter-gather nomads, but eventually started to form larger communities and grow. Fast-forward to present day, and the world has been largely conquered and tamed by mankind. The modern world is filled with technological marvels and wonders of engineering. Diseases that once killed millions are all but eradicated. What started off as humble bipedal hunter-gatherers have become a planet-conquering race.
However, this success did not come through a rejection of the mechanism of natural selection, but through working within it. Man is, unlike all other animals, species, and organisms, uniquely gifted with the construct of reason. He is granted a conceptual grasp upon himself and the world greater than any other found in all of nature. It was with this reason that man made a monumental discovery. Instead of competing with others, cooperation with others allows for everyone to achieve a greater ability to survive. Instead of the differentiation within all individuals serving as the basis for competition within our environment, those differences can be the basis of trade and cooperation.
If I have a particularly adept ability to bake bread, and my neighbor has a particularly adept ability to craft shoes, one can see an obvious opportunity for trade here. I am better off baking bread and trading my excess bread for the excess shoes of my neighbor. We both get what we want and are wealthier because of the trade. Undoubtably, the option of violence is always available as well. I could simply kill or threaten to kill my neighbor and receive shoes from him in that way. However, violence is always risky. Perhaps he is actually stronger than me and instead I am the one forced to pay tribute to him. Additionally, violence is disadvantageous in the long-term. If I kill him, then I can no longer receive any furniture from him, and continually threatening him can lead to retribution. Regardless, peaceful transaction is more productive and efficient, so it benefits both me and my neighbor for us to trade cooperatively with each other.
Notice that the motivation for peaceful trade has nothing to do with altruism. It is not through a desire to create a more moral society that I engage in peaceful trade, but through my own desire to survive. This change of attitudes has the secondary effect of promoting and encouraging peace and harmony between individuals, but this is not the primary motivator for their trade. The emergence of the division of labor in society was a result of the mechanism of natural selection, not a desire to escape from it. Mises, again, clearly saw and understood this dynamic in the evolution of human civilization:
Man alone by dint of his reason substituted social cooperation for biological competition. What made social cooperation possible is, of course, a natural phenomenon, the higher productivity of labor accomplished under the principle of the division of labor and specialization of tasks. But it was necessary to discover this principle, to comprehend its bearing upon human affairs, and to employ it consciously as a means in the struggle for existence. (Theory and History, pg. 38-39)
Human civilization, as far as we are aware, is the greatest accomplishment of life and reason. Mankind has a grasp and hold on his world in a way heretofore unseen. This accomplishment represents not the rejection of natural selection and its grip upon the future of the human race, but as the greatest level of success within that system. In a world of “survival of the fittest”, human beings in peaceful cooperation have proved to be the fittest, and thus, have survived and thrived.
As Mises stated above, the Social Darwinists and those of similar schools misunderstood the concept of natural selection. They also erred in its application to the human condition. It makes little sense to ask if the ideas of natural selection “should” be applied in modern society. Nobody asks if the idea of 2+2=4 “should” be accepted in society. Math is composed of positive facts, and is not subject to ethical considerations. Similarly, the mechanism of natural selection is a fact of life. It is the basis on which existence within this universe resides. There is no question of whether or not it “should” apply to society. It applies to society whether we like it to or not, just as 2+2=4 applies regardless of how our personal feelings on the matter.
The emergence of civilized society has the effect of making men less aggressive and more kind to each other. In a nomadic existence, those outside the tribe are always potential threats to your own survival. The domesticated and modern man has no such concerns about strangers whom he encounters. This effect is undeniable, but as we stated above, it is a corollary effect. But even in a morally elevated society, man has not escaped the iron grip of natural selection. He must always work to survive in his environment, and his fellow men are only one part of that environment. Having ethically harmonious relationships with those around him certainly improves this aspect of his environment, but is not enough to remove him from the need to survive altogether. He still must eat, drink, sleep, and have clothing and shelter if he is to live, regardless of the comradery he has with those around him.
The peace of modern society is not an incoherent perversion of nature. This peace has emerged in response to the challenges of the natural order. Because man was forced to survive in his environment, he employed his reason to aid him in his quest for survival. His reason led him to production and exchange with others as the best method to aid in his survival. As the marvels of human civilization can show, man’s reason has been amply vindicated. For millennia, the story of human beings was constant violence and distrust towards one another. It was only when this was exchanged for productive peace that the story of human civilization and triumph could begin.
Today would have been Murray Rothbard’s ninety-sixth birthday. He was an unforgettable friend whose immense knowledge of many different fields was unsurpassed, in my experience. In a lecture on the Austrian theory of the business cycle, he mentioned the common objection that the expansion of bank credit might have no effect if investors anticipated trouble. After the lecture, I asked whether Mises had answered this point. He said, “See his response to Lachmann in Economica, 1943.” I often went to used bookstores with him, in both Palo Alto and Manhattan, and listened to him as he commented on nearly every book on the shelves. When he was a student at Columbia, he admired the philosopher Ernest Nagel, who he said would always encourage students to do new work. Murray was like this himself. He constantly encouraged students to work on Austrian and libertarian topics. His support for me was never failing, and I owe him everything. If only he were still here now, to guide and instruct us!
Today would have been the ninety-third birthday of Burt Blumert, one of the greatest personalities of the modern libertarian movement. Burt was the indispensable man behind the scenes and was a key figure in the Mises Institute, the Center for Libertarian Studies, the Rothbard Rockwell Report, and LewRockwell.com. He was one of Murray Rothbard’s closest friends; and when you met him, it was easy to see why Murray liked him. He was a genial and kind person and a source of wise counsel to all those fortunate to know him. Burt was the founder of Camino Coins and a principal figure in the hard money community. If you want to get a sense of what Burt was like, you have only to read his collection of humorous essays, Bagels, Barry Bonds, and Rotten Politicians (2008). It was a source of great pride and comfort to Burt in his final illness that he was able to see this book in print. Burt helped me with good advice when I most needed it, and I will always be grateful to him for his counsel and friendship
Without carefully analyzing data media outlets continue to endorse the narrative that Britain’s policies drained India of resources and culminated in deindustrialization. Colonialism is a contentious subject and perceptions are shaped by visceral emotions, and hence dispassionate analyses are required to arrive at a logical conclusion. For conclusions to be fruitful, we must desist from entertaining romantic notions about colonialism by admitting that colonialism is an extractive system and it is rarely the goal of colonial powers to develop local economies.
Even if colonialism produces favorable social outcomes, this is merely an indirect effect and not a testament to the benevolence of colonialists. Secondly, it’s always a plus to survey economic data on precolonial India before presenting the conclusion that British colonialism retarded growth. Unappreciated in the debate on colonialism is that the state is naturally extractive and prior to the ascendance of Western colonialism, conquered regions were already under the aegis of autocratic states.
Before the establishment of British rule in India, the Mughal Empire was the predominant player on the subcontinent, and to fund military exploits taxes were levied on the working population—although the spoils of war were appropriated by elites. It’s quite obvious that the Mughal Empire suppressed the potential for growth by extracting resources from working people to finance military expenditures. Failure to apply similar standards to judge the Mughal Empire prevents the debate from evolving beyond gimmickry.
Critics of the British Empire can’t possibly expect to be taken seriously, when they argue that the British drained India of resources by using local taxes to compensate English bureaucrats but suddenly forget that Mughals also excelled at raiding the working population to advance political projects. Concerning the policy of extraction during the Mughal era, Irfan Habib suggests that peasants were under immense pressure:
The imposition of the land tax (usually called mal in Mughal times) remoulded the relations of the peasant with his superiors…. True, says a fourteenth century document, the peasants are “free born” (hurr-asl), but their obligation to pay tax requires that they be bound to the villages where they have been cultivating the soil. The right of the authorities to force the peasants to cultivate the land, restrain them from leaving it, and bring them back if they did so, is also asserted on various occasions during the Mughal period. Finally, if the peasants failed to pay the tax, they would become subject to raids and enslavement by the king’s troops.
Yet noting that both the Mughal and British Empires were exploitative fails to invalidate the assumption that Britain drained resources from India’s economy. Defenders of the British Empire are mistaken in thinking that exposing the hypocrisy of critics refutes their arguments, when it has only made these positions less tenable. To debunk their theories, we would have to grapple with rigorous data claiming to confirm the drain theory.
According to a widely circulated study by Utsa Patnaik, from 1765–1938, Britain drained India of approximately $45 trillion. The key point of Patnaik’s paper is that after 1765, instead of using precious metals from Britain to acquire Indian goods, the East India Company instead taxed the Indians and then used that revenue to purchase goods from the Indians for British consumption. Of course, the British employed this tactic to increase savings at home—but this finding offers no credibility to the drain theory. However, it has received validation in academic quarters, with Jason Hickel even stating that the British benefited from free goods, since taxes imposed on Indians were used to purchase these goods: “Instead of paying for Indian goods out of their own pocket, British traders acquired them for free, ‘buying’ from peasants and weavers using money that had just been taken from them.”
Now, we get Hickel’s point that Britain would have accrued substantial savings by using tax revenues to pay for the goods instead of silver. Yet missing from Hickel’s observation is a broader appreciation of how governments operate. Being a parasitic entity, the state derives income via extractive tools—such as taxes and tariffs. Hence, Hickel’s analogy is applicable to public spending—we only benefit from public projects because of coercion to pay taxes. It’s immaterial that Indian imports were bought with local taxes because this is how governments normally behave.
Hickel is on firmer footing when he upbraids the British for shortchanging Indian traders by centralizing payments:
After the British Raj took over in 1858, colonisers added a special new twist to the tax-and-buy system…. Basically, anyone who wanted to buy goods from India would do so using special Council Bills—a unique paper currency issued only by the British Crown. And the only way to get those bills was to buy them from London with gold or silver. So, traders would pay London in gold to get the bills, and then use the bills to pay Indian producers. When Indians cashed the bills in at the local colonial office, they were “paid” in rupees out of tax revenues—money that had just been collected from them.
Surely, this unsavory act would have depreciated the value of local savings. Gold and silver are valuable commodities and hence are better suited to hedge against risks. Despite the negative impact on Indian traders, the degree to which this policy had a considerable impact on the living standards of Indians remains debatable. Moreover, the British built the Indian civil service, railways, and introduced modern technologies, so even though locals were taxed to provide these luxuries, if the benefits outweigh the cost of taxation, can we still argue that the British drained India?
Furthermore, in assessing the economic policies of the British Empire Niall Ferguson rebuffs the drain theory, citing Tirthankar Roy: “Roy … casts doubt on the idea that taxation under the British was excessive, showing that the land tax burden fell from around 10 per cent of net output in 1850s to 5 per cent by 1930s. The supposed ‘drain’ of capital from India to Britain turns out to have been comparatively modest: only ‘about 0.9 to 1.3 per cent of Indian national income from 1868 to the 1930s’, according to one estimate of the export surplus.”
On the other hand, that India encountered deindustrialization during colonialism is uncontroversial. Therefore, scholars are more interested in uncovering the causes of deindustrialization. To contextualize the issue, David Clingingsmith and Jeffrey G. Williamson in a 2005 paper showed that India experienced deindustrialization in two periods—1760–1810 and 1810–60. For the former, deindustrialization was an outcome of the dissolution of the Mughal Empire. The collapse of the Mughal Empire and deteriorating climatic conditions, created aggregate supply-side problems which eventually led to the erosion of India’s advantage in manufacturing. Clingingsmith and Williamson wrote:
As central authority waned, revenue farming expanded, the rent burden increased, warfare raised the price of agricultural inputs, and regional trade within the subcontinent declined, all serving to drive down the productivity of foodgrain agriculture. Grain prices rose, and given that ordinary workers lived near subsistence, the nominal wage rose as well. As a consequence, the own-wage in Indian textile manufactures increased, hurting India’s competitiveness in the export market.
During the second wave, deindustrialization occurred because the global incorporation of the factory system lowered the relative price of textiles, rendering production in India uneconomical. Nevertheless, the forces of globalization resulted in some positive outcomes. Globalization entails the decline of old industries and the creation of new ones, and this process unfolded in India, according to Bishnupriya Gupta. New industries emerged as a result of British investment in sectors like tea and jute and also due to the responsiveness of Indian entrepreneurs, who retooled their businesses and adopted European technology. And contrary to the deindustrialization theory, studies indicate that though employment in the manufacturing industry among men dropped from 9.1 percent to 8.4 percent in the epoch 1911–31, manufacturing increased as a share of the total output and on a per capita basis.
British rule in colonial India was indeed imperfect; however, the current debate is highly political, and as such ideas emanating from all sides must be scrutinized before writers decide to advertise them as incontrovertible facts.
François-Marie Arouet (1694-1778), who took on the name Voltaire after one of his imprisonments for running afoul of French authorities, was a poet, writer, philosopher and historian of the French enlightenment. In fact, libertarianism.org called him “almost certainly the most important figure of the French Enlightenment,” to the extent that “The Enlightenment is sometimes referred to as ‘The Age of Voltaire.’” He was notorious for his satirical wit, famous for his style, and celebrated for his criticisms of the abuses of authority. He was also an outspoken supporter of civil liberties, including the freedoms of religion, speech, and trade, whose views influenced both the American and French revolutions.
Voltaire was one of the most productive writers in history, who, in an era of strict censorship, backed by harsh penalties, is credited with not only poetry, plays, essays, and novels, but also historical and scientific works, more than 2,000 pamphlets and books, and over 20,000 letters.
For example, As Wendy McElroy put it, “his Philosophical Letters resounded deeply within the consciousness of Europe for many decades to come. One of its themes was that freedom—especially freedom of commerce—was the true wellspring of religious toleration and of a peaceful civil society.”
Although most of Voltaire’s his words were directed to other topics, his work offered useful insight into liberty, and government which is so often its nemesis. As the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy put it “Central to [his philosophy] is Voltaire’s conception of liberty.” In an era when the juxtaposition between liberty and government is still commonplace, his thoughts regarding liberty are still well worth remembering today.Man is free at the instant he wants to be.Liberty of thought is the life of the soul.Think for yourselves and let others enjoy the privilege to do so, too.Virtue supposes liberty…Under coercion there is no virtue.My thought is no more subject to authority than is sickness or health.Liberty…about which so many volumes have been written is, when accurately defined, only the power of acting.Liberty is not and cannot be anything but the power of doing what we will.All men are by nature free.The true character of liberty is independence, maintained by force.All men are equal; it is not their birth, but virtue itself that makes the difference.All the citizens of a state cannot be equally powerful, but they may be equally free.All men have equal rights to liberty, to their property, and to the protection of the laws.If this world were what it seems it should be, it is clear that it would be impossible for one man to enslave another.To learn who rules over you, simply find out who you are not allowed to criticize.No opinion is worth burning your neighbor for.It is through our mutual needs that we are useful to the human race. That is the foundation of all commerce, the eternal link between men. Without it not a single art would have been invented, no society of ten people formed.A multitude of laws in a country is like a great number of physicians, a sign of weakness and malady.It is the poverty connected with our species which subordinates one man to another. It is not inequality which is the real misfortune, it is dependence.So long as the people do not care to exercise their freedom, those who wish to tyrannize will do so; for tyrants are active and ardent, and will devote themselves …to put shackles upon sleeping men.History contains little beyond a list of people who have accommodated themselves with other people’s property.In general, the art of government consists in taking as much money as possible from one party of the citizens to give to the other.The tyranny of the many [is] when one body takes over the rights of others, and then exercises its power to change the laws in its favor. Included in his vast body of writing, Voltaire offered readers insights into liberty, and especially freedom of expression, which his use of put him both in prison and in exile for criticizing those with power. And his influence reached to America’s founding. Even a famous saying falsely attributed to him says something important about his approach: “I do not agree with what you have to say, but I’ll defend to the death your right to say it.” In an age where government providers of dis- and mis-information, and others who want more government control, are so intent on policing everyone else’s words, we could benefit greatly from Voltaire’s jealous love of liberty, particularly liberty of expression.
"If any State in the Union will declare that it prefers ‘separation’ over ‘union,’ "I have no hesitation in saying, 'let us separate.'" Earl Starbuck, “Was Secession Treason?” , Abbeville Institute Blog, September 18, 2020, at: https://www.abbevilleinstitute.org/was-secession-treason/.
~ Thomas Jefferson
In 1998, Russian Professor Igor Panarin, former KGB analyst, lecturer, and writer tied to Russia’s Foreign Ministry, predicted the economic and moral collapse of these United States, leading to eventual civil war and breakup by 2010. His predictions appeared in The Wall Street Journal and other publications. Of course, to this date, no such separation has come to pass. However, with the lingering 2020 election controversies (thousands of votes mysteriously appearing early on November 4th, hundreds signing sworn affidavits attesting to election fraud and the near impossibility that any of these accusations will ever be examined, questionable voting machines, etc.), various assaults on individual rights, increased centralization of government power, Marxist indoctrination within the education system, and other factors, some in Texas and other States have openly talked about secession.
After considerable bloodshed, the Thirteen Original Colonies seceded from the British Empire. Post-Revolutionary War, Britain and these “United States” signed the 1783 Treaty of Paris, which stated: “His Britannic Majesty acknowledges the said United States, viz., New Hampshire, Massachusetts Bay, Rhode Island and Providence Plantations, Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia, to be free, sovereign, and independent States.”John S. Tilley, Facts the Historians Leave Out, Twenty-Second Printing (Nashville, Tennessee: Bill Coats, Ltd., 1991), 25-26. Furthermore, “In 1781, the original thirteen States entered into a ‘Confederation’, and drew up ‘Articles’, one of which said: ‘Each State retains its sovereignty, freedom and independence, and every power, jurisdiction, and right which is not by this Confederation expressly delegated to the United States.’”Ibid., 25.The States have never relinquished their sovereignty.
Events of the 1800s included:
In 1803 the New England States threatened secession; the Louisiana Purchase was seen as a dilution of their power. Massachusetts Senator Thomas Pickering stated: “I rather anticipate a new Confederacy exempt from the corrupt influence of the aristocratic Democrats of the South…There will be a separation…”Ibid., 34.Largely due to dissatisfaction with the War of 1812, the New England States considered secession in 1814 during the Hartford Convention. Secession sentiments ebbed after American victory was assured.The New England States mulled secession in 1845. “John Quincy Adams and fellow New Englanders so opposed the admission of Texas that they openly urged the withdrawal from the Union.”Ibid. Again, they saw it as a dilution of power.Seven Southern States seceded in 1860-1861. (The remainder seceded after Lincoln’s call for 75,000 troops to invade sovereign States.) They protested the North’s perversion of the U.S. Constitution, e.g., usurpation of Southern rights, slavery disagreements, and the punitive protectionist tariffs that supported Northern industry. The late Charles Adams explained: “When Southerners realized what they were up against with respect to a high tariff and a new Congress and Republican administration, only two courses of action seemed open to them–secession from the Union and a low tariff for the Confederate states.”Charles Adams, When in the Course of Human Events--Arguing the Case for Southern Secession, (Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2000), 81.[1] John Remington Graham, A Constitutional History of Secession, (Gretna, Louisiana: Pelican Publishing Company, 2002), 106. The American Colonies and Southern States both had valid reasons to secede. As members of a voluntary compact, the Southern States had the best case; whereas, the American Colonies were one part of a vast Empire. Virginia, New York, and Rhode Island entered the Union under the proviso they could withdraw if it was in their best interests. From the 1788 Virginia Convention, we have the following: “We the delegates of the people of Virginia, duly elected in pursuance of a recommendation of the General Assembly and now met in Convention, having fully and freely investigated and discussed the proceedings of the Federal convention and being prepared as well as the most mature deliberation hath enabled us to decide thereon, do in the name and in behalf of the People of Virginia declare and make known that the powers granted under the Constitution, being derived from the People of the United States, may be resumed by them whensoever the same shall be perverted to their injury and oppression, and that every power not granted thereby remains with them and at their will.”John Remington Graham, A Constitutional History of Secession, (Gretna, Louisiana: Pelican Publishing Company, 2002), 106. New York and Rhode Island mirrored Virginia’s language: ”their conventions ordained the root principles on which the right was founded: ‘That all power is naturally vested in, and consequently derived from the people’: and ‘That the powers of government may be reassumed by the people whensoever it shall become necessary to their happiness.’”Ibid.
Even Lincoln, the extreme nationalist, commented on January 12, 1848: “Any people, anywhere, being inclined and having the power, have the right to rise up and shake off the existing government, and form a new one that suits them better. This is a most valuable, a most sacred right, a right which we hope and believe is to liberate the world.”Tilley, 32.
If Panarin’s predictions eventually come to fruition, we must all hope that it is accomplished peacefully. After all, there is nothing more American than secession.
People who know anything at all about the demographic history of the US know that the life expectancy at birth in the United States was significantly lower in the 1940s than it is today. In fact, this is somewhat common knowledge because most people know—or at least suspect—that if you got cancer or had a heart attack or stroke in the 1940s, you would probably die a short time later. Many also know that child mortality was also higher in the mid-twentieth century.
In fact, the life expectancy, according to the CDC, was 65.9 years in 1945, the year World War II ended. In 2020, life expectancy was 77 years.
But you don't exactly have to read textbooks on this sort of thing to have a sense of it. Just talk to your grannie or abuelita who might mention her siblings who died as young children. Yet this sort of common sense is apparently beyond the abilities or skill set of the journalists at The Daily Caller who recently ran a headline stating: "US Life Expectancy Drops To Lowest Level Since Second World War." And lest we think it was just the editor who hurriedly wrote a bad headline, the same mistake is repeated in the first paragraph which reads:
The U.S. life expectancy dropped to its lowest level since World War II in 2020, multiple sources reported.
This "fact" is so obviously wrong it's a wonder that an editor let it go out the door. With a life expectancy of 77 years in 2020, that means US life expectancy did not come within even ten years of modern life expectancy until 1948. In 1948, the life expectancy at birth was 67.2 years. Moreover, this metric didn't crack 70 years until 1961.
Here's what the actual life expectancy at birth has been historically in the United States:
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And here's how much life expectancy at birth has changed over the last 20 years. It's not much at all thanks to continued thanks continued issues of obesity, drug addiction, diabetes, and suicide:[[{"fid":"129803","view_mode":"image_no_caption","fields":{"format":"image_no_caption","alignment":"","field_file_image_alt_text[und][0][value]":"le","field_file_image_title_text[und][0][value]":false,"field_caption_text[und][0][value]":"","field_image_file_link[und][0][value]":""},"type":"media","field_deltas":{"1":{"format":"image_no_caption","alignment":"","field_file_image_alt_text[und][0][value]":"le","field_file_image_title_text[und][0][value]":false,"field_caption_text[und][0][value]":"","field_image_file_link[und][0][value]":""}},"attributes":{"alt":"le","class":"media-element file-image-no-caption","data-delta":"1"}}]]
But perhaps in the age of covid, reporters are willing to believe pretty much anything so long as it makes covid look like the bubonic plague of the 1340s. Indeed, had life expectancy actually fallen to WWII levels in 2020, that would have meant a decline of nearly ten years which would have been the worst since the flu of 1918, when life expectancy fell by 11 years. From 2019 to 2020, the decline was 1.8 years.
As Americans transition into 2022, many people will consider making New Year’s resolutions. If history is any guide, however, little of their focus will be on addressing the cognitive dissonance between personal resolutions to be good and do good for others and the many political resolutions to harm others to feather one’s own nest that always attract substantial support. Such reflection might benefit us by improving both our personal and political behavior. So perhaps what we could use are new years’ resolutions to recommit ourselves to wisdom we seem to have forgotten.
A good example comes from Leonard Read’s “To Each His Own,” written over a half century ago in his Accent on the Right. Its focus was that the biggest problems that arise with government, as well as some of the biggest problems we face as individuals, trace back to violating the commandments not to covet and not to steal, because coveting provides the impetus for seeking to benefit ourselves at others’ expense and stealing is the action triggered by that covetousness.
The prevention of such violations is a central task of government, which can advance the general welfare by more effectively protecting all of our property from invasions by others, which better enables all the voluntary relationships property rights make possible. This is illustrated by the few enumerated functions of our federal government (e.g., national defense is protection of you and your property from foreigners), as well as the traditional functions of state and local governments (e.g., police, courts and prisons provide similar protection from your neighbors’ violations). But unfortunately, government has become a supposedly “respectable” way to violate what its job is to defend.
Consider Leonard Read’s insights into the importance of those two commandments for the existence of, or advances in, real civilization.
THOU shalt not steal! To know that stealing is wrong…implies knowledge of an alternative that is right…to each his own, usually referred to as private ownership. The ancient taboo against stealing presupposes that an individual has a right to the fruits of his own labor.
Recognizing as evil the taking of that which belongs to another certainly antedated The Decalogue by many centuries.
There is every reason to believe that the observance of this taboo, this respect for the principle of private ownership, marked the dawn of civilization. Whether this thou-shalt-not is honored or breached primarily determines the rise or fall of civilization.
True, “thou shalt not covet” is even more basic than “thou shalt not steal”; if no one coveted the possessions of another, there would be no thievery.
To refrain from stealing is the genesis of civilizations!...First, civilizations rise and fall with the rise and fall of individual freedom. Second, individual freedom rises and falls to the degree that private ownership--the absence of stealing--is respected and adhered to. Individual freedom is out of the question wherever and whenever private ownership does not prevail!
Creative outbursts--the mark of civilization--bear a direct correlation with increase in individual freedom.
This private ownership thesis rests, fundamentally, on [the] assumption…that one person has as much right to his life as any other. If an individual has a right to his life, it logically follows that he has an equal right to sustain his life, the sustenance of life being the fruit of one’s own labor or what can be obtained for it in peaceful exchange.
Not to steal is to respect life; it is to endorse and to hold sacrosanct the institution of private ownership.
No civilization could be born without the observance of this taboo. The institution of private ownership--to each his own--has spawned all civilizations!
Were [thievery] the general practice, we would quickly descend into another dark age. A resort to law would be useless; the gendarmerie also would be thieves!
While the institution of private ownership has been given lip service over the centuries, by the people and governments alike, actual observance has been more of form than of substance.
Few among us understand that private ownership can be universally endorsed in principle and completely obliterated in practice. Nor is it widely understood that the forcible taking of income, beyond that required for the principled functions of government, has the same eroding effects on private ownership as stealing. Legalizing the compulsory transfer of control still amounts to the destruction of private ownership.
Realize that individual freedom and, thus, the flowering of civilization are possible only where private ownership prevails. Merely imagine owning absolutely nothing required for your own livelihood. Your life would be in the hands of others.
Leonard Read saw the twin sins of coveting and theft as the greatest threats to real civilization. The latter, motivated by the former, undermines the fundamental basis of the voluntary arrangements that create civilization--private property. As a result, he recognized that the essential function of government was to maintain the principle of “to each his own,” and that any time government fails to defend that principle from others’ invasions, or itself commits such infringements, it impedes rather than advances civilization. That is “a fundamental maxim for civilized men,” reflected in the unalienable rights of our Declaration of Independence, a “new world” resolution that was to define American government. Supporting that far older resolution, increasingly violated rather than followed, would make an excellent resolution for the new year.
Just before the verdict was reached in the Kyle Rittenhouse trial, Gregory McKelvey, vice chair of the Oregon Democratic Black Caucus, tweeted this to his followers: "Employers, consider giving your Black employees a day or two off after the Rittenhouse verdict. Regardless of the outcome, it’s going to be hard for Black people to work and it isn’t fair to expect them to.”
But why should black Americans be particularly upset about the Rittenhouse trial? It is true that the destructive protests which brought the seventeen-year-old to Kenosha with an AR-15 in tow were over the police shooting of African American Jacob Blake, but the three men Rittenhouse shot were white.
Nevertheless, it seemed very clear in the eyes of many on the left, including those in the media, that somehow this trial was about race. After the not-guilty verdict was read, NAACP president Derrick Johnson made an appearance on MSNBC’s The Last Word and claimed that Rittenhouse’s acquittal “was worse than [the] Emmett Till trial”—a reference to the fourteen-year-old African American boy who was lynched by adult white men in 1955 for allegedly flirting with a white woman and their later acquittal by an all-white jury who agreed that the men had murdered Till but didn’t think they deserved imprisonment for it.
So how did Rittenhouse’s acquittal rise to the level of the justice system turning a blind eye to a racially motivated lynching? You’d be forgiven for thinking that the seventeen-year-old boy must have killed people of color based on how the story was treated as a racial one. In fact, this very assumption was actually made not only by many average Joes on the street but by mainstream journalists who should have known better. For instance, Brazil’s most popular newspaper Folha de S.Paulo had to pull a tweet which stated that Rittenhouse had killed two black men. The British news site The Independent provided a caption for an online story about Rittenhouse’s acquittal which initially read that he had “shot three black men.” The caption was later altered but with no acknowledgement of the error in the story itself.
Many who know full well that the men Rittenhouse shot were white nevertheless see an important racial component to his trial, namely that Rittenhouse’s freedom to walk through the streets of Kenosha with a semiautomatic weapon unbothered by police, along with his later acquittal, were the result of his white privilege and that “Rittenhouse wouldn’t have been acquitted if he was a black man.”
This analysis suffers at two points. First of all, bias within the American legal system is not an input/output mechanism wherein white defendants are handled with kid gloves and people of color have no chance at a fair trial. For instance, on the same day that Rittenhouse was acquitted Andrew Coffee IV, a black man, was found not guilty of murder after a jury believed his testimony that during a deadly SWAT raid police opened fire first. On the other hand, Daniel Shaver, a white man, was fatally shot by a police officer after a witness saw him holding a pellet gun through a hotel window. The officer who killed Shaver was found not guilty by a jury and retired by his department on the medical grounds that he had suffered PTSD as the result of the shooting and trial.
Of course the justice system isn’t just prosecutors, judges, and juries. It also includes police officers. Was Rittenhouse treated differently by police in Kenosha than an armed person of color walking the streets during the riots would have been? This seems like a hypothetical question for which we couldn’t know the answer, but there were in fact at least two armed civilians of color patrolling the streets of Kenosha on the same night that the white seventeen-year-old shot three protestors—Erick Jordan and his sixteen year old daughter Jade. The Wisconsin father brought his daughter back to protect demonstrators protesting Rittenhouse’s acquittal, so police harassment doesn’t seem to have been a significant fear of his. Examples like these can be multiplied and demonstrate that this simple input/output narrative of “If he had been black …” doesn’t hold up to scrutiny.
While something like this input/output mechanism may have existed when racial discrimination was explicitly written into our laws, the most persuasive and fact-based arguments for systemic racism and racial bias today, when legal discrimination is technically outlawed, are ones which are more nuanced and complex. Instead of comparing Rittenhouse’s case to that of a hypothetical black man who is never given a fair trial, one has to step back and look at the real data in aggregate to see the disparate outcomes which may be (and likely are) at least partly explained by racism.
The other point where this “If Rittenhouse were a black man” analysis fails us is that it tends to lead to a mindset where an individual’s right to a fair trial and to be treated as innocent until proven guilty is undermined by racialized scorekeeping. When one reads between the lines of these kinds of arguments, the implication is that Rittenhouse should have been found guilty because he is white and because a black person in his shoes might have been treated worse by our justice system. In other words, it is not Rittenhouse who should have been on trial but white privilege. This is nothing less than scapegoating—punishing someone innocent (or at least innocent until proven guilty) for the injustices perpetrated by others.
This brings to mind another famous murder trial nearly thirty years ago that was also tinted with racial overtones—the O.J. Simpson murder case. A now famous photo of a room full of mixed race spectators hearing the verdict on television told the story of a racialized America—white viewers were shocked that the black Simpson could have been acquitted of the murder of his white ex-wife and her white lover. In contrast, black viewers seemed to treat it as a victory for black Americans that he was. Comedian Chris Rock also highlighted the feeling of black camaraderie over Simpson’s acquittal that he witnessed at the time, summarizing the mood as “Yes, we won, we won! Yes! We won!” To which he retorted, “What the [expletive] did we win? Every day I look at the mailbox for my O.J. prize: nothing! Nothing!” In a Chappelle’s Show sketch years later which imagined the comic as a potential juror in the Simpson trial, a prosecutor asks him, “Would you at least admit that O.J. more than likely killed his wife?” Dave pauses to reflect before responding, “Sir, my blackness will not permit me to make a statement.”
After decades of trying to apply King’s formula of judging individuals by the content of their character and not the color of their skin, Americans are again seeing identity being increasingly collectivized along racial lines. In fact, King’s dream of a colorblind society is now seen by many progressives as propping up white supremacy. But we have to see the injustice of this collectivist approach to justice. If Simpson had actually been guilty of murdering two people, how would his acquittal have made up for the wrongful imprisonment of other innocent black men? If Rittenhouse had a legitimate argument for self-defense, how would his being found guilty have atoned in any way for racial injustice?
While we must address racial injustice wherever we find it, we can’t do it by drafting strangers into an internecine racial struggle whose lines were drawn (read: fabricated) long ago by enemies of human peace and flourishing. We do it by creating a society of individuals instead of races.
The great Per Bylund has claimed that “Experienced entrepreneurs are Austrians.” This is because they “Develop gut feel through trial-and-error,” but they “lack explanation (theory) and terminology.” In fact, Bylund goes as far as to say that “Most entrepreneurs fail most of the time often because they are not Austrians.” This makes sense considering Austrians put such heavy emphasis on entrepreneurship. A successful entrepreneur would greatly appreciate and understand claims like Mises’ “The driving force of the market, the clement trending toward unceasing innovation and improvement, is provided by the restlessness of the promoter.” A simple Austrian claim like the argument that the main issue for business is to lower costs below price which must be below the subjective value of the consumer makes perfect sense to a successful entrepreneur because he or she has spent his or her entire career doing exactly that. As Bylund explained, a career of trial-and-error has given these successful entrepreneurs a gut instinct for all of our principles.
In this past year, however, we have seen this fact begin to make itself much more evident. Back in August Jack Dorsey, co-founder and former CEO of Twitter, tweeted a link to Anatomy of The State by Murray Rothbard here on the Mises Institute’s website. Additionally, Dorsey regularly professes his interest in sound money with other Tweets claiming “#wtfhappenedin1971” as a reference to the US officially severing any remaining ties to the gold standard. More recently sharing “’Transitory’” as a shot at the fact that all the inflation we have been seeing has been sold to us as transitory despite the obvious untrue nature of this claim. As a proud Bitcoin maximalist it would make sense that Dorsey would have an interest in sound money, but it makes even more sense to take one step back and see that it is a gut instinct as an entrepreneur that would draw him to both Bitcoin and sound money thoughts as a whole. Menger once argued that
Entrepreneurial activity includes: (a) obtaining information about the economic situation; (b) economic calculation – all the various computations that must be made if a production process is to be efficient
Mises contributed to this that
What economic calculation requires is a monetary system whose functioning is not sabotaged by government interference.
Jack Dorsey, as an entrepreneur spent a career economically calculating. Whether he initially had the theory and terminology or not, he spent his entire professional life developing his instincts and learning more and more that he could do so better with sound money. As that went on he’s demonstrated a newfound interest in Austrian economics because entrepreneurs are at their core Austrians.
Dorsey was not the only big name in business that has come forward with Austrian adjacent beliefs. CEO of Tesla – as well as several other companies – and 2021 Time Magazine Person of the Year, Elon Musk, recently said in an interview “The government is simply the biggest corporation, with a monopoly on violence and where you have no recourse.” Whether he has actually read Anatomy of The State or not, one who has read it can clearly hear his gut channeling its inner Rothbard as it states something so close to Rothbard’s “Briefly, the State is that organization in society which attempts to maintain a monopoly of the use of force and violence in a given territorial area.” At another point in the same interview, Musk takes on another fairly Austrian stance:
The rules and regulations keep increasing every year. Rules and regulations are immortal, they don’t die. Occasionally you see some law with a sunset provision, but really, otherwise, the vast majority of rules and regulations live forever… eventually it just takes longer and longer and it’s harder to do things. There’s not really an effective garbage collection system for removing rules and regulations. And so gradually this hardens the arteries of civilization, where you’re able to do less and less over time. So I think government should be trying really hard to get rid of rules and regulations that perhaps had merit at some time but don’t have merit current.
Musk, with or without a series of economics textbooks, from his experience in the business world understands the dangers of these regulations which lead to the problems of the Seen, the Unseen, and The Unrealized as explained by Per Bylund:
In reality, regulations are not what politicians promise. They are not actions to help people. They are restrictions on entrepreneurs’ economic behavior. Entrepreneurs are aiming at satisfying customers’ wants as much as possible. Regulations aim to restrict this customer-satisfying action by forbidding certain innovations, or declaring that they must be designed and implemented in ways that have value for the regulator and not for the customer or entrepreneur.
Entrepreneurs are forced to abandon some of their efforts to generate new value by satisfying customers, or to redirect their efforts into less value-producing channels. The potential output of their creativity goes Unrealized.
Musk and Dorsey throughout this past year espousing Austrian adjacent principles have shown that those engaging in entrepreneurship pick up the logic of Austrianism by their experience matching exactly what we teach. However, while they are two high profile easy examples to demonstrate this, this happens with the millions of entrepreneurs all across the country. Everyone engaging in entrepreneurship, in “the pursuit of making productive factors more valuable than their current market prices indicate,” is learning more and more the principles of Austrian economics through their real-life experience. It is our job to recognize this, encourage this, and give them the theory and language to further dive into this and better serve their role – as Mises says – as “The driving force of the market.”
There is an alarming degree of uniformity between the governments of many western countries when it comes to instituting tyrannical measures like mandatory medical injections at workplaces and vaccine passports. In doing so, they have departed from liberal values and principles, by no longer recognizing or respecting private spheres, personal goals, or individual freedom and rights. They have also ignored the fact that living in a liberal democratic society means the state is limited to a reasonable level of activity or interference that is neither detrimental nor destructive to various types of freedoms, including negative, positive, individual, subjective, and objective freedom.
At this point, it is clear that vaccine passports and mandates have nothing to do with safeguarding public health or mitigating the COVID-19 pandemic. Rather, they are purely coercive measures designed to punish disobedience by taking away one’s ability to provide for his family, shape his future, engage in activities that bring him happiness, and live his life in ways that allow him to flourish and advance his well-being. That is to say, they are effectively capable of destroying people’s dreams, goals, self-respect, self-esteem, self-development, aspirations, etc. They are also damaging for public health and the common good, as a society cannot provide a safe, secure and healthy environment for its citizens without an adequate number of people to provide key social services, including police forces, health care workers, fire fighters, sanitation workers, and teachers.
Recent data from Israel, the UK, and other nations with high vaccination rates suggest that the COVID-19 injections are of very limited effectiveness in terms of preventing the spread of the virus, and it is unclear how long any personal protection that they might provide actually lasts. In the case of Israel, the poor performance of the COVID-19 injections has resulted in a third injection being pushed on people that were previously thought to be fully vaccinated (i.e., two shots). Consequently, the Israeli Health Ministry recently reported that, in less than one year, “nearly 90% of people over the age of 60 had their third shot, compared with around 70% of people ages 40-49 and fewer than 50% of people ages 20-29.” Israel managed to achieve such high inoculation rates for third doses despite the fact that Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech are still in the process of conducting or setting up clinical trials to test the effects of COVID-19 booster shots on people.
The COVID-19 injections did not follow the proper evaluation and approval processes for creating an effective vaccine, which typically takes between 10 to 15 years. Nonetheless, anyone that has dared to question the unknown future risks of these new vaccines, criticize vaccine passports and mandates, or point out inconvenient details like the fact that fully vaccinated people can still get infected and transmit the virus to others, has been publicly shamed and labelled as “unscientific,” “anti-vaxxer,” “selfish,” and “conspiracy theorists.” No one has been spared from the attacks of vaccine zealots, including professors, politicians, scientists, lawyers, nurses and doctors. Essentially, divergent views, ideas, approaches and perspectives, which are crucial for the progress and evolution of science, have been ridiculed or strongly rejected in the mainstream narrative. In fact, this has been true of virtually anyone that supports informed choice over obedience, and freedom over submission.
Totalitarian governments of the pandemic, unelected health experts and biased news reporters have been incessantly glorifying the vaccine mandates, often with religious undertones. In the United States, this has led to the emergence of a “false prophet” in the form of Dr. Anthony Fauci, whose dictates are widely treated with a deference that resembles a “divine pattern” by devoted adherents in a number of countries. Unfortunately, the faithful followers of this “false prophet” fail to understand that “prophecies are entirely beyond the scope of scientific method.”Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies. (1945: repr. London: Routledge, 2002). They also might not realize that science is concerned with objective facts and true images of the real world, while simultaneously opposing fear, hate, subjective opinions, coercion, faith and revelation. In fact, adherents of true scientific approaches renounce faith, revelation, and divine patterns on the basis that science explores the unknown “to establish what is,” rather than to “dictate what ought to be and what ends people should aim at.”Ludwig von Mises, Socialism: An Economic and Sociological Analysis, trans. J. Kahane (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1962), p. 539. They are of the opinion that “no science can tell anyone what one wants, what one should uphold, what one should grind into the dust.”Joseph Schumpeter, ‘Gustav von Schmoller and the Problems of Today.’ (1926; repr. Journal of Contextual Economics 138: 261 – 304. Berlin: Duncker & Humblot), p. 263. Accordingly, any true scientist would regard vaccine mandates as wholly unscientific.
The development of science throughout history has frequently featured significant disagreements between scientists on a wide range of issues, including concepts, priorities, principles, methodologies, procedures, points of view, explanations, theories, assumptions, approaches, and goals. Such disagreements and doubts have often led to the refutation and abandonment of theories, assumptions, principles, methods, and goals in favor of new ones that emerged. Ultimately, this process has resulted in the expansion of knowledge and realization of progress. That means, in science, progress and “advances consist in finding out” where people had been wrong.F.A. Hayek, The Constitution of Liberty, ed. Ronald Hamowy, vol. 17 of The Complete Works of F.A. Hayek (1960; repr. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011).
True scientists are fully aware of what they do not know, and are prone to exercising caution until they acquire more knowledge. They do not hide information and empirical evidence in order to defend certain ideas, or specific products. On the contrary, they would be more than happy “to prove” that their “anticipations were false” and overthrow them.Karl Popper. The Logic of Scientific Discovery. (1935; repr. London: Routledge, 1992), p.278-279. It is not the “possession of knowledge, of irrefutable truth, that makes the man of science, but his persistent and recklessly critical quest for truth.”Popper, The Logic of Scientific Discovery, p.281. True scientists would avoid “rash and premature prejudices” and developments.Popper, The Logic of Scientific Discovery, p.278-279. Meanwhile, the treatment of the COVID-19 injections by Dr. Fauci and his followers could be described as idolization, which halts the road to scientific progress. In fact, this sort of idolization is an abuse of science, in that it is the “wrong view of science” that “betrays itself in the craving to be right.”Popper, The Logic of Scientific Discovery, p.281. Many current western political leaders support the tyranny of abused science, which has played a crucial role in justifying their recently acquired totalitarian powers.
It would appear that the tyrannical leaders of the pandemic and their anointed “false prophets” regard the masses with disdain, believing that they do not possess intelligence or the ability to think critically. Much like “the eugenicists” that came before them, the current crop of unfit tyrannical rulers and “false prophets” have managed to “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.”Mises, Socialism, p. 582. They have not only concluded that people do not know what is best for themselves, their actions are destroying the progress made over the course of the entire history of Occidental civilization by eliminating various guarantees and protections of freedom, including the constitutions or charters of rights of individual countries, international laws and agreements like the Nuremberg Code, the Declaration of Helsinki, and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and the labor protections established and defended by trade unions.
People should be weary of the “false prophets” and totalitarian governments of the pandemic, as the “return to the closed society which they advocate is the return to the cage, and to the beasts.”Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies. Instead of unquestioningly accepting the fictitious oracles of these “false prophets,” individuals should find ways to once again become the makers of their own fates, if they are to breathe and think freely. Prior to the normalization of the present environment of fear, hate, discrimination and division, it would have been unimaginable that the leader of any western country would attempt to suspend so many types of freedom and mandate medical procedures for the entire population, essentially transforming the country into a laboratory. Doing so would have run the risk of landing them in a prison or an insane asylum. The mere existence of this type authority proves that “the forces which generated” Fascism and Nazism are not “dead.”Mises, Socialism, p. 578. Moreover, everybody around the world needs to be cognizant of the fact that if such a ruling party ever managed to gain the full backing of the police and military forces, then “the glorification of violence,” or the violent oppression and liquidation of dissenters, which characterized “the policy of Russian Sovietism, of Italian Fascism and of German Nazism” will become inescapable.Mises, Socialism, p. 480, 572. Accordingly, it might be fitting that any politician who advocates for the destructive, uncivilized, and inhuman policies associated with totalitarian regimes might be called a Bolshevist, Nazi or “fascist psychopath.”
In 1833, Uriah P. Levy commissioned two statues of Thomas Jefferson.
As the first Jewish commodore in the United States Navy, Levy overcame anti-Semitism within the ranks. Levy credited his ability to serve as a religious minority to “one of the greatest men in history … [who] serves as an inspiration to millions of Americans [and] did much to mould our Republic in a form in which a man's religion does not make him ineligible for political or governmental life.”
Eight years after Jefferson’s death, Levy purchased and restored the former president’s home at Monticello and commissioned the celebrated French artist Pierre-Jean David d’Angers, to create these two statues in his likeness. With a pen in his hand and the Declaration of Independence at his side, a bronze version stands today as the only privately commissioned statue in the Capitol Rotunda. Its twin in painted plaster was donated to New York City where it stood in the city hall for almost two centuries until this November when it was boxed up and carted away.
“It should be destroyed,” says former Assemblyman Charles Barron of Jefferson’s likeness in New York City. “A statue should be for those who we honor for their exemplary service and duty to all of this country, not just the white race.”
He has a point, but misses the target.
Our public statues should remember those who made contributions of universal value. That is why Levy commissioned statues to the Father of the Declaration of Independence. Not only did Jefferson author our country’s mission statement—“Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness”—he devoted his life to advancing that mission through every institution of American life, including religious freedom, universal education, and the abolition of slavery.
Born into a wealthy slave-owning family, Jefferson was a slave owner. This much his critics have right. Focusing on this fact in isolation, however, is “ahistorical” and “ripped out of context,” says Kevin Gutzman, Professor of History at Western Connecticut State University and author of Thomas Jefferson: Revolutionary, in a recent conversation I had with him.
Gutzman notes that “slavery once was a universal institution,” crediting leading founders for deciding, “at a given point in the history of the world, this needs to go—we need to get rid of it.” They did not have the power to overturn the system all at once, but “having been born into a world in which [slavery] was a very important part of life, they left a world in which it was doomed and going to end.”
Among this generation, Jefferson stands out in his lifelong pursuit of abolition.
Elected at twenty-six to the Virginia House of Burgesses, one of Jefferson’s first acts was an effort to gradually abolish slavery in Virginia. With little standing to advance the radical cause, he recruited a senior lawmaker to cosponsor a proposal to emancipate every enslaved person born after a date certain upon adulthood. The legislature turned against them, calling his elder cosponsor an enemy of the country. In his autobiography, Jefferson reflected that Virginia was not ready to abolish slavery. Still, he persisted.
Through his law practice, Jefferson represented enslaved persons suing for their freedom. Before the court, he argued, “under the law of nature, all men are born free, and every one comes into the world with a right to his own person, which includes the liberty of moving and using it at his own will.” In the years that followed, these antislavery arguments echo throughout his revolutionary writings, including the Declaration of Independence.
Nikole Hannah-Jones of the 1619 Project may claim the Declaration of Independence “a lie” drafted by “white men” who implied a black exemption in the words “all men are created equal,” but four of the five members of the drafting committee went on to lead abolition efforts in their own states. John Adams and Roger Sherman wrote the laws outlawing slavery in Massachusetts and Connecticut. Ben Franklin was the president of an abolition society that petitioned Congress to abolish slavery during its very first session.
In addition to his own efforts in Virginia, Jefferson’s first drafts of the declaration decried slavery as a “cruel war against human nature, violating its most sacred rights of life and liberty.” Congress—reacting to opposition from South Carolina, Georgia, and northern states profiting from the triangular slave trade—struck these words from the final document. Still, Jefferson poetically amended John Locke’s liberal credo, “life, liberty, and property,” to remove any claim “property” might imply the right to own people.
As he rose in national politics, Jefferson authored the first draft of the Northwest Ordinance, which outlawed slavery throughout the Midwest. Additionally, his Ordinance of 1784 sought to outlaw slavery in new western states admitted to the Union. The provision failed by a single vote. "The voice of a single individual … would have prevented this abominable crime from spreading itself over the new country,” he wrote years later. “Thus we see the fate of millions unborn hanging on the tongue of one man, and Heaven was silent in that awful moment!"
Once in the White House, Jefferson called on Congress to ban slave importation at the earliest constitutional date, signing the policy into law in 1806 Even Paul Finkelman, a legal historian and one of Jefferson’s most ardent living critics, concedes in his book, Slavery and the Founders, this law saved hundreds of thousands of Africans from enslavement.
“Jefferson took more substantial steps against slavery than anyone else in his generation,” says Barbara Oberg of Princeton University. Like many liberal ideals of the American Revolution, however, he could not complete the project in a single lifetime.
In his later years, however, writing to a young supporter in the Virginia abolitionist movement, he told of his long-held hope that young people—raised in a republican society—would be more sensitive to the wrongs of slavery than the prerevolutionary generation who had once scolded him as a young man in the House of Burgesses. “The hour of emancipation is advancing in the march of time. It will come.” Jefferson would not live to see the day, but future generations would adopt his cause and make it so.
Commodore Levy commissioned these statues for a man who set high ideals for a nation. Whatever personal failings Jefferson may have held in life, those statues have stood two centuries for the advancement of individual human liberty. If those ideals remain our guideposts as a country, then those statues of Jefferson must continue to stand.
So much of our time, energy, and resources have been sacrificed to the Global Warming Hysteria without subjecting the issue itself to rationality and logic. I intend to provide a logical step-by-step approach that may be used for evaluating just about any controversial issue, whether it be personal or worldwide such as global warming.
Step One: Is the earth really warming?
The Global Warming Hysteria posits that the earth is warming and that our economies need to be altered to stop it. But there are a lot of assumptions built into that single claim. First of all, is the earth warming? I've been told that it is. Maybe it is so, but there's much more to this assumption. What is the starting point and what is the ending point? How were these points chosen? Was there a steady rise from start to finish? Probably not. So, what caused the ups and downs? According to NASA the earth's temperature has risen point eight of one degree Celsius (.8C) since 1880. Why since 1880? Why not since 1780 or 1280? Or, why not just a decade? Furthermore, why is point eight of one degree Celsius considered to be too much? What is an acceptable amount? One half degree? Zero change? How was this standard chosen? How accurate is it? How can we know the temperature of the entire earth over one hundred and forty years ago with any confidence? Actually, the earth has cooled and warmed several times in the past three hundred and fifty years. The last cooling period began in 1850. Now, isn't that interesting, since NASA's report of a slow warming period began thirty years later in 1880!
Step 2: Would global cooling be preferable to global warming?
We can we assume that the earth's temperature is never static. It's always warming or cooling. Would it be better if the earth were cooling? This seems to be implied in the Global Warming Hysteria; i.e., if we fear the warming periods, we should celebrate the cooling periods. I doubt it. The last ice age ended just shy of twelve thousand years ago, a blip in time for planet earth. Ice covered most of North America to a depth of between one and two miles, hardly conducive to human existence.
Step 3: Might not global warming be a net benefit?
Even if the earth is warming, might not warming be beneficial on net? More favorable climate for food production. Longer ice-free passages for global trade. Fewer resources expended for heating in the shorter winters. Better health due to more favorable climate for enjoying the advantages of the great outdoors. It's really hard to come up with any advantages to global cooling.
Step 4: Is man a major contributor to global warming?
Assuming that malign global warming does exist, is man a major contributor? If not, end of inquiry. If so, how so? The earth has warmed and cooled over the previous several hundred years. Man could not have been a major contributor to these events, so there must have been some other phenomenon causing them. Perhaps that phenomenon, even if we can't identify it, is the major contributor to global warming now. The key point is that we must identify the man-made significant cause of global warming--if it's really happening, of course--before we can ask the next question.
Step 5: Would the mitigation action produce a net benefit?
Assuming that we have gotten this far--i.e., the earth is warming; warming is bad, and man is the cause-- what actions should be taken that will not cause even greater harm than simply letting man continue doing what he's doing? Trashing economies around the world by restricting the benefits of fossil fuels would inflict horrendous hardship on billions of people. Might it not be wiser to adapt to global warming than to revert to a more primitive economy that cannot support existing human life on earth at its current level of comfort and with the promise of even more comfort for billions more in the future? By what criteria do we assume that stopping or slowing global wealth creation is a net good?
Conclusion: The hidden assumptions to the Global Warming Hysteria need to be challenged
The Global Warming Hysteria has been subjected to very little serious, logical, and rational inquiry. The hidden assumptions to the movement need to be challenged. It is incumbent on those who wish to inflict great harm on worldwide economies to justify their proposed actions. World leaders need not act until they have done so.
Mises.org reader Brad Cole writes:
A great-great-grandfather Montgomery Cole, got imprisoned during the Civil War because of speaking out against the draft policies. His arrest, along with others, resulted from President Lincoln's invoking his Proclamation 94 in September of 1862.
As for a bit of background, Montgomery Cole was 39 years old when arrested. He was married with six children (my great-grandfather came along two years after the Civil War) and nearly 100 acres of fields and livestock to work. He had registered correctly for the draft and was legally excused by furnishing a substitute. Scanned copies of his draft documents are below.
President Lincoln's Proclamation enabled Montgomery Cole's arrest by suspending the writ of habeas corpus during the War—no charges necessary for an arrest. In short, Grandfather Cole and other Democrats in the rural part of the northeastern Pennsylvania (Columbia County) area believed that the prolonged War, particularly the draft, caused disproportionate hardships on northern Columbia County, Pennsylvania's people, and their families. The men were undoubtedly not Confederate sympathizers. However, he and the others arrested got accused by Republicans of discouraging volunteer enlistments and criticizing the draft policies.
Many of today's citizens don't know—or care—that in 1864 Lincoln was not necessarily the favored candidate for all. In Columbia County, that was certainly the case. Democrat rival, General George McClellan, carried every district in the County except for the Town of Bloomsburg, Catawissa, and Berwick. The farming communities voted overwhelmingly for McClellan. The vote tally in the County was 3,367 for McClellan and 1,914 for Lincoln.
The horrible injustice of military arrest without charges and imprisonment of Cole and his fellow Democrats got named the "Fishing Creek Confederacy"—catchy name but a misnomer. To boil down a complicated story to its essence, it was the wrongful treatment of men who were otherwise upstanding community members.
Montgomery Cole's release and the Oath of Allegiance he signed are also in my possession (attached with draft documents). It is moving to hold the papers in my hand and imagine what being arrested and imprisoned without charges was like for him and the other Columbia County men. Shortly after the War's end, Cole was elected a County Commissioner and served from 1866 to 1869. He died of Tuberculosis, known then as consumption, at the young age of 51 in 1877.
As an aside, I turned 18 two years before the draft during the Vietnam War got abolished. Thankfully, I did not have to face getting drafted to head off to an unpopular war by then.
_____
Sep. 24, 1862 proclamation by President Abraham Lincoln:
A Proclamation
Whereas, it has become necessary to call into service not only volunteers but also portions of the militia of the States by draft in order to suppress the insurrection existing in the United States, and disloyal persons are not adequately restrained by the ordinary processes of law from hindering this measure and from giving aid and comfort in various ways to the insurrection;
Now, therefore, be it ordered, first, that during the existing insurrection and as a necessary measure for suppressing the same, all Rebels and Insurgents, their aiders and abettors within the United States, and all persons discouraging volunteer enlistments, resisting militia drafts, or guilty of any disloyal practice, affording aid and comfort to Rebels against the authority of United States, shall be subject to martial law and liable to trial and punishment by Courts Martial or Military Commission:
Second. That the Writ of Habeas Corpus is suspended in respect to all persons arrested, or who are now, or hereafter during the rebellion shall be, imprisoned in any fort, camp, arsenal, military prison, or other place of confinement by any military authority of by the sentence of any Court Martial or Military Commission.
In witness whereof, I have hereunto set my hand, and caused the seal of the United States to be affixed.
Done at the City of Washington this twenty fourth day of September, in the year of our Lord one thousand eight hundred and sixty-two, and of the Independence of the United States the 87th.
Abraham Lincoln
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I just received an intriguing email. The author suggests that Ayn Rand's novel Atlas Shrugged features Ludwig von Mises in one of the secondary roles (yet still as a hero). I had not at all seen the point that my correspondent raises, but I think he is right. When I wrote the Mises biography, I did not take the time to look up Atlas Shrugged again (I had read it in the mid-1990s), otherwise I might have noticed. Anyway, here is the message:
Dear Prof.,
I'm going through your profound "The Last Knight of Liberalism". It made me pause a couple of times, just to be able to read entire books before I continue (e.g. "Critique of Interventionism", "Bureaucracy"), and there were several fine points of Mises' thinking that I had overlooked or misunderstood - your brief summaries of deep ideas are invaluable for making such errors apparent.
So, first of all, thank you for the amazing work. Plus your lectures, of which I've watched a few. (I think that there was a list of lectures, following the book, which I watched before reading the book, but now I can't find, do they still exist somewhere?).
Though this message is not to express my gratitude, but rather, to ask you whether you made the same connection or not. I recently read Atlas Shrugged, and years ago I finished Human Action (which itself took years...). In your book, at some point you say:
Mises was not a man to attach too much importance to material things. He once told Margit that, if she was after riches, she had married the wrong man. But neither was he the type of intellectual that Ayn Rand depicted in her novel Atlas Shrugged: the libertarian philosopher who in dire straits would descend stoically from his chair at the university to work behind the counter of a small-town burger joint. Had Mises ended up flipping hamburgers, his heart would have broken.
I'm dying from curiosity to know whether you spent a minute pondering about the name of that professor in "Atlas Shrugged", which was: Hugh Akston. What are the chances that this was a coincidence? Hugh Akston? Really?
Isn't this an "obvious" easter egg, hidden in plain sight, paying tribute to nothing other than Mises' Human Action? (I checked online, nobody seems to have noticed this).
Though I seem to recall that Ayn was not particularly impressed or appreciative by the first part of the book, i.e. praxeology, where the title comes from, but maybe she had a different opinion when she wrote the book, who knows.
Best, D.A.
While enjoying some Saturday afternoon college football, I was treated to about a dozen reruns of a commercial produced by the Department of Veteran Affairs (VA). Let me paint the scene for you.
A lone figure rests upon his pickup truck beside a lone oak upon a ridge in an otherwise rolling green prairie. The sky is a canvas of orange and purple as the sun sets on a peaceful day in the foothills of rural America. Suddenly, the imagery fades to a small silver case: a gun case for a pistol. Notably unloaded, the hands of the otherwise off-screen figure emerge to affix a lock to his sidearm, as even the case and separated magazine weren’t enough to keep this soldier safe.
But safe from what? The voice-over then chimes in:
A simple lock puts space between the thought and the trigger. Learn how securing your firearms can prevent suicide.
Look, I get it. The message they’re trying to convey is most suicides are an act of impulse. A veteran’s life may be saved if a little patience and deliberation is introduced into the equation. But it’s really hard to receive this advert as anything but a hollow gesture when the prescription provided by the VA is a gun lock, without an ounce of reflection on the root cause of the crisis.
According to estimates, a little over seven thousand soldiers have died during military operations since the start of the “war on terror” following the attacks of September 11. Meanwhile, suicides among both active duty personnel and veterans of those conflicts have exploded to over thirty thousand, or more than four times the number lost in combat. While these numbers are sobering, and possibly even err on the conservative side, the real focus should be on what is driving the dilemma and how best to put an end to it. With the war on terror now exceeding two decades, experts’ reasoning for the cause of the veteran suicide epidemic has evolved just as the wars themselves have evolved over those twenty-plus years. The most avid participants in regime apologism blame the diminishing public support for the terror wars for the rise in veteran mental health issues. While it’s true that Americans’ appetites for forever war are reaching all-time lows, as evidenced by the support for withdrawal from Afghanistan, no matter how mismanaged, this explanation lacks an ounce of self-awareness for how long and costly the wars have been. Others have put forth that a rash of sexual assaults among personnel and a culture of “toxic masculinity” has led to increased mental health issues among service members. Nearly one in four servicewomen have reported cases of sexual assault, an embarrassment and a disgrace to the institution. The “boys club” may be to blame in equal parts for betraying its sisters in arms and for convincing its brothers that they are weak to feel ill at ease. However, the weakest and most deceitful reason suggested may be that veterans are at severe risk of suicide because of their access to firearms. The rate of suicidal persons electing to turn to a firearm to commit the act has been used as fodder by gun prohibition advocates to attack the Second Amendment. This tactic not only belies an agenda totally divorced from concern for military veterans, but it also implies veterans are among the least qualified to possess firearms for personal use rather than among the most qualified.
There’s another explanation worth considering, and it was perfectly illustrated right as the American occupation of Afghanistan was coming to a close. In an attempt to straddle the fence between bringing the war in Afghanistan to a long-overdue end and appeasing hawks who consider “withdrawal” to be synonymous with “surrender,” President Joe Biden signed off on a drone strike against an alleged ISIS-K target. The unfortunate victims of said drone missile were not militants, but rather one Zamarai Ahmadi and his children, as even US military officials have openly admitted. Despite this admittance, no disciplinary action is expected, as senior officials continue to “stand by the intel leading to the strike.” This is quite a callous and remorseless defense of “the intel” that ultimately concluded that Ahmadi, an aid worker who helped Americans during the occupation, deserved to die for the crime of loading his white sedan with jugs of water for his family. This incident is merely a microcosm of the role unmanned combat aerial vehicles (UCAV) have played in the war on terror. According to a recent report, upwards of 90 percent of the people killed in drone strikes in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia were “not the intended targets.” In other words, nearly nine out of ten people executed by the American government were likely innocent civilians. Service members returning home are being confronted with reports of American atrocities and war crimes; actions that they may have been party to. For some, the guilt of being responsible for creating terror abroad when they believed themselves to be in a war to end terror is overwhelming.
It’s certainly a welcome change to acknowledge the suicide epidemic among American service members. But acknowledgement of the problem without any meaningful introspection on the cause signals that the US government is more concerned with its PR problem than with stemming the creation of more psychologically damaged veterans. There may be several reasonable explanations for the trauma American troops are experiencing, but no list is complete without a willingness to confront the damage that US forces have caused, as well as the damage they have received. Regardless of your position on the cause of the crisis, or of America’s foreign policy generally, it is disrespectful and offensive to the nation’s veterans to recommend that their best foot forward against depression is to secure their firearms.
What asset price bubbles are is fairly uncontroversial, even if a fast and hard definition is elusive. At their most basic, bubbles are said to exist when a sharp upward departure in the price of an asset, from its historic or otherwise reasonably expected value, occurs over a relatively brief period of time, however defined. These dramatic, often parabolic, rises can be driven by rushes into new sectors, like dotcoms, new tech, or cryptocurrencies—while some economists consider their occurrence completely random.
Whatever the case, it almost invariably happens that when talking of bubbles in this or that asset class someone brings up the Dutch tulip bubble. Despite its predictable regularity, a closer look at what occurred in Holland around the mid-1630s casts serious doubt on the comparison, for, as will be outlined, the sudden brief spike in the prices of certain tulips wasn’t due to any change in the underlying assets, emergence of new assets, or the preferences of buyers, but rather innovations in how tulips were briefly bought and sold.
By the seventeenth century Holland was the most advanced economy in Europe, with a recognizable and relatively sophisticated stock market. In 1602, for example, the Dutch East India Company was founded as a joint stock company, generally recognized as the first of its kind. As for tulips, they had begun to make their way to Europe via trade with the Ottoman Empire a century prior. As it happened, women’s fashion by the early seventeenth century had come to incorporate flowers, tulips specifically. Even more specifically, certain tulips, called “broken bulbs,” were highly sought after and came to command hundreds, even thousands of guilders each from European elites.Unlike ordinary tulips, which are a single color—typically red, yellow, or pink—broken bulbs produce a range of multicolored, distinctly patterned petals. Smaller, slower-growing, and rare, botanists now know the flowers were actually infected with a mosaic virus, which stunted their growth and caused the erratic coloring.
The tulip market in 1630s Holland, then, was multitiered, with select broken bulbs being traded for many hundreds, even thousands, of times the value of ordinary tulip bulbs—until, that is, the two months spanning late 1636 and early 1637, which saw twenty- to thirtyfold increases in the price of standard tulips, which had traded weeks before at the equivalent of tenths of a cent per handful.
Let’s take a closer look at the mechanics that caused this to happen, and see why there is little to nothing to be gained by comparing what happened during “tulipmania” to asset price bubbles in the modern context.
As already stated, the Dutch stock market was the most sophisticated in Europe in the mid-seventeenth century, and already had a brisk futures trade. Similar to today’s futures trading, most Dutch traders at the time weren’t actually interested in owning the underlying asset. Rather, it was a simple bet on the future price of the asset. If the price went down, the seller got paid the difference, and vice versa for the buyer of the future if the prices went up.
Importantly, because of moral strictures much of this futures trading was done informally—contracting to sell something you didn’t yet own seeming an activity close to, if not indistinguishable from, gambling. And it was in late 1636 that informal futures markets for standard tulips began sprouting up. Because it was outside the existing market framework, these informal markets had their own rules but no real means of enforcing them; and it is here, in the structure and rules governing these emerging tulip futures markets, that we find the origins of the actual bubble of tulipmania.
First, everyone involved had to bid on every lot of tulips; second, new buyers were prohibited from immediately selling; third, all buying was fractional, with only one-fortieth of the price of the contract due down; fourth, there was a maximum cap of three guilders down, no matter how large the contract; and finally, while social exclusion would follow for anyone who reneged on what they owed, the contracts were technically unenforceable in Holland’s courts.
Reading over these conditions, it isn’t difficult to imagine how a bunch of bored Dutch traders with little else to do in the middle of a northern European winter, blew up and then popped an enormous bubble in the lower-tiered tulip market in just a few weeks: contracts were cheap; you might make some money; and if things somehow got out of hand, the contracts weren’t enforceable, anyway. Of course, no one wanted to have their name come under opprobrium, which is why virtually no one apparently reneged—at least at first. It also helps to explain why the bubble burst so quickly after forming. A lot of standard tulip bulbs worth only a guilder or two per bucketful quickly rose to hundreds of guilders in value. This was a huge sum, and no one wanted to risk being on the end of it.
Recognizing the mess they’d gotten themselves in, virtually everyone involved agreed to rip up the contracts and walk away. No damage was done to the Dutch economy, the price of ordinary tulips almost immediately returned to what it had been, and the value of high-tier broken bulbs, like the Semper Augusta continued to steadily appreciate.And this is a key part of the story, for while the tulip bubble is generally said to have occurred between 1633 and 1637, this claim is contradicted by both Peter Gerber and Connel Fullenkamp, economists who have gone back and searched for tulip sales made in the years preceding and following that period. Their research and writings reveal that broken bulbs had been seeing a steady, almost 10 percent rise in value for at least a decade prior. To take just one example, as early as 1626 a single broken bulb had sold for just over two thousand guilders (the equivalent of around a half million dollars priced in today’s dollars). And while 10 percent is certainly brisk growth, it’s nowhere near today’s bubble level—except perhaps in housing, though this bubble is of the Fed’s creation. Lastly, as Kindleberger points out in his Manias, Panics, and Crashes this steady appreciation in high-tier tulip bulbs was happening within the context of broader asset price inflation following the economic hard times during and after the War of Spanish Succession.
In short, the Dutch tulip bubble, or tulipmania, had virtually nothing in common with modern bubbles, though it is an interesting episode of economic history to be sure.
Eighty years ago, the American economist Paul Samuelson published his acclaimed doctoral dissertation "The Observation Significance of Economic Theory," which would later form the basis of his book Foundations of Economic Analysis. These works were instrumental in convincing the majority of economists that the use of mathematical and statistical methods are the indispensable means of investigating economic phenomena. Any economist who objects to the “Samuelsonian consensus” is derisively referred to as a literary economist. The literary economist is not really an economist at all because he refuses to use the superior methods delineated by Samuelson and other mathematical economists. To the mathematical economists, the Austrians are the vanguard of literary economics and thus not authentic economists; they are aberrant logicians who obstinately cling to anachronistic methods, which have been rendered defunct by the advent of quantitative economic methods.
Yet, this was not always the case. Before empiricism-positivism swept through the economics discipline, virtually all economists conceived of economic theory as a purely deductive framework. Indeed, Lionel Robbins' book The Nature and Significance of Economic Science, which was first published in 1932, is essentially praxeology in all but name, and it was heralded as the gold standard of economic methodology for almost twenty years. In his preface, Robbins expresses his intellectual indebtedness to Ludwig von Mises, whom he identifies as the foremost influence on his own methodological position.
Moreover, while mathematical economics can be traced back to the marginal revolution of the 1870s, it was not, as aforementioned, until Paul Samuelson’s treatise appeared in 1947 that the quantitative approach usurped the traditional qualitative approach – the approach to economics propounded so eloquently by Carl Menger in his 1871 Principles of Economics. Clearly, then, the qualitative economics practiced by the Austrians is not a mere idiosyncrasy peculiar to the Austrian school; it was once the dominant methodology.
The fundamental defect of quantitative, mathematical economics is manifest. Quantitative analysis implies the possibility of measurement, but measurement implies relating something to a standard. Without a standard, there is no measurement. In the realm of economic phenomena, there are no standards and, therefore, there can be no measurement. Mises has poignantly articulated this point, "There are, in the field of economics, no constant relations, and consequently no measurement is possible."
Menger postulated that all economic phenomena are ultimately caused by the purposive actions of individuals. But there is no objective, fixed standard for measuring the minds and values of men; they are not perfectly predictable inanimate objects, but conscious actors with minds of their own. In short, there is no constancy in the province of human behavior. Accordingly, mathematical economics is nothing but an epistemologically sterile exercise in symbolism. It cannot yield explanations of economic phenomena and has contributed nothing but confusion and intellectual incoherence to the science of economics.
In sum, the absence of empirical constants precludes the fruitful use of mathematics in economic theorizing. Contrary to the prevailing doctrine, economics is not an empirical, a posteriori science—it is a deductive, a priori science. The whole corpus of economic theory can be deduced from the axiom of purposeful human behavior. And since it is strictly impossible to derive true economic propositions from the use of mathematics, the attempt to do so can produce nothing but empirically redundant formalisms. The adoption of mathematical economics by the great body of economists represents a profound regression in our economic understanding, and it is the noble endeavor of the Austrians to oppose this inherently unscientific and perverse doctrine.
The implementation of voter ID laws to prevent fraud has led some to argue that voting rights are under assault by the state. But this mistaken assumption is predicated on a false premise, because voting is not a right. Rights exist independent of the political regime, so even though communist states abrogate human rights, this does not alter the fact that people still have a right to own property and express religious beliefs. Essentially, voting is a mechanism implemented by the state for political purposes.
Voting permits citizens to participate in governance by declaring support for various policies. But failing to entertain some opinions could enhance living standards, as economist Bryan Caplan intuits in his provocative book The Myth of the Rational Voter. Caplan rightly argues that politicians fixate on delivering the goods of democracy instead of enabling markets to facilitate the long-term development of society. The average voter rarely appreciates the intricacies of governance, and as a result, succumbing to his demands may prove to be disastrous. After all, it is not unusual for voters to espouse support for economically harmful policies like trade protectionism and occupational licensing.
Moreover, voting offers an opportunity to undermine rights, because individuals are given the prerogative to determine benefits for other people. In 2013, for example, Swiss voters rejected a proposal to cap executive pay. Despite the logic of their choice, Swiss voters really had no business influencing the compensation of executives. Politicians and citizens alike should direct their focus toward elevating the caliber of governance rather than expanding democracy. But ultimately doing so requires a recalibration of our perception of the state.
Like the corporation, the state is a legal fiction entitled to select the criteria for participating in governance. For instance, in a company, board members are not obliged to act on the recommendations of junior employees. Yet this stance does not deter directors from advancing the interests of workers. Hence the fear that voting restrictions ensure that the concerns of some groups are avoided is unwarranted. A case in point is that though children are unable to vote, politicians still champion their cause. Their devotion to children is illustrated by laws against child labor and abuse. Likewise, people suffering from serious cognitive deficits are unable to vote, yet this has not discouraged politicians from lobbying for the mentally disabled. Neither did the exclusion of women from the political arena prevented politicians from privileging their concerns, as Ernest Bax noted in his 1896 publication The Legal Subjection of Men.
At some point, we must confront reality by admitting that prioritizing development by limiting voting is a feasible strategy to promote progress. As such, we should discuss groups that must be barred from voting. Undoubtedly, disallowing lobbyists from voting would protect democracy from becoming enslaved to special interest groups. Such groups exert enormous influence on the political system at the expense of other citizens. When these groups obtain subsidies and political privileges, taxpayers feel the brunt. One estimate suggests renewable energy subsidies will cost taxpayers more than $40 billion from 2018 to 2027.
Another disadvantage of interest groups is that public-sector unions make it costly to dismiss reprobate employees. Richard Berman in the Washington Times details the daunting task of sacking sexual predators due to the rigidity of union protection rules:
Longtime teacher John Vigna was recently sentenced to 48 years in prison for repeated sexual abuse of his students. Cases of teacher-student sexual abuse are all too common. Hundreds occur nationwide each year. What’s worse is that teachers often demonstrate warning signs of perversion before they offend—or before their offenses amplify—but cannot be fired because of union protection rules. In Vigna’s case, sexual abuse complaints were lodged against him as far back as 2008. In 2013, a top district official called his conduct “indefensible, inappropriate, and intolerable.” But he was allowed to stay in the classroom.
Teachers' unions wield phenomenal power, and according to Education Next, since 1990, the American Federation of Teachers and the National Education Association have usually been among the top ten contributors to federal electoral campaigns. Even more striking is that union members regularly constitute at least 10 percent of the delegates at the Democratic National Convention, making them the single largest organizational bloc of Democratic Party activists.
Therefore, if members of these bodies are unable to vote, then politicians will no longer be inspired to indulge their demands. So, consequently elected representatives will have a stronger incentive to govern in the interest of citizens. Similarly, the privilege of government employees to vote should also be rescinded. Officials in the public sector depend on state resources, so by exerting political clout, they can obstruct the course of democracy.
The power of bureaucrats to corrupt governance is artfully captured by Ludwig von Mises in his book Bureaucracy: “Representative democracy cannot subsist if a great part of voters are on the government payroll. If the members of parliament no longer consider themselves mandatories of the taxpayers but deputies of those receiving salaries, wages, subsidies, doles, and other benefits from the treasury then democracy is done for.” Likewise, beneficiaries of welfare should equally be prohibited from voting to deter politicians from becoming susceptible to requests requiring the distribution of wealth. Resultantly, when fewer people are permitted to vote, the political system will be better insulated from the costs of populism.
To foster development, we must recast the state as a corporation preserving society’s resources for the future benefit of the unborn. Hence its long-term outlook will favor development to democracy. The truth is that universal voting is not a positive feature of democracy, but rather an impediment to progress.
Today is Walter Block’s 80th birthday. The title of most famous book, Defending the Undefendable, best captures his way of looking at the world. He will take a libertarian principle and deduce consequences from it with iron consistency, often using imaginative examples while doing so. You may think he is wrong, but you will find it more difficult than you first suspect to show this. If you write to him with an objection, you will probably soon find yourself the co-author of a paper with him. His is an amazingly prolific scholar in both libertarian theory and Austrian economics and an outstanding educator as well. Happy Birthday Walter!
The collapse of the American-backed state in Afghanistan brings home the wisdom of Murray Rothbard’s essay “The Death of a State,” written in July 1975. The lessons that Rothbard drew from the fall of South Vietnam apply equally to the present crisis. Among these were the importance of guerilla warfare, the dependence of all states on majority support, and the blow to US imperialism with its false doctrine that “the United States has the moral duty, and the permanent power, to install, prop up, and rule governments and peoples throughout the world. We are being forced into a policy of ‘neo-isolationism,’ unfortunately not through the adoption of moral principle, but through the concrete realization that imperialism is no longer realistically viable.” We should follow Rothbard’s advice and end all American overseas military commitments.
Beginning in the early 1700s, a hitherto rather peripheral group of Native Americans called the Comanche swept into a vast area comprising much of what is now the southwestern United States, creating an empire that spanned parts of the modern states of Colorado, Texas, New Mexico, Oklahoma, and Kansas. In the process they dispossessed rival Native American tribes already occupying those lands – among them the Apache, who were fortunate to be able to relocate and preserve their nation further to the southwest.
Others were not so lucky. As Oxford University Professor Pekka Hämäläinen recounts in his book, The Comanche Empire (Yale University Press, 2008), the Comanche were ferocious and often brutal, wiping out opposing tribes, enslaving, or forcibly assimilating them—until they themselves were defeated and marginalized by the westward-moving Americans in a series of conflicts in the mid-nineteenth century.
The Comanche were far from singular in this regard, and the history of their empire is meant to illustrate the futility, and sometimes inanity, surrounding much of the discussion regarding the prospective return of Native American land by the federal government. Much of the latter comes from an ahistorical unwillingness to accept that for most of human history what was described above was the norm. It is how all of us got here: competition between opposing groups over scarce resources, with all other considerations being secondary. Sometimes the groups were big, sometimes they were small. Large confederations or patrimonial clans, it doesn’t matter; the basic logic of what groups want and how they go about getting it is the same.
This isn’t to excuse violent dispossession, only to observe the historical fact of power’s preeminence in geopolitical relations. All the major Native American nations and confederacies came about in this way. Further, unequal treaties are, and have been, the rule, not the exception, throughout human history: just ask the Germans, Japanese, or anyone else that has lost a war to a recognizably superior power capable of dictating terms at war’s end.
Therefore, while we may be appalled by the accounts of atrocities that transpired in the forging of the nation, reflect too on the impact of scientific racism in the shaping of American society, the economy, and government, these considerations cannot be allowed to stand in the place of an examination of the evidence and the logic underlying claims on the US government by members of a given tribe.
As Robert Nozick argued in his masterpiece of political philosophy, Anarchy, State, and Utopia, violation of a moral side constraint, in this case any nonconsensual transfer of one party’s property to another, renders the transaction, or should render it, void—morally if not legally.
To illustrate the implications of this, what I presume to be a principle almost universally accepted, take the example of the Comanche presented in our opening. They seized their lands from numerous other tribes. As a further look back into history shows, those tribes had taken the land from others before them—and so on. At what point did anyone have a clear title apart from by violent means? If the land were to be turned over to the remaining members of the Comanche by the US government, should they in turn give it to the Apache? What greater right do they have, and on what grounds?
The logic of continuing on in this way is futile and readily apparent.
The US Constitution clearly states, under article VI, clause II, that any treaties ratified by the legislature are to become part of the supreme law of the land. Having entered into over three hundred treaties with various Native American tribes since the nation’s founding, it is impossible to make any sweeping generalizations: each must be analyzed in its own right. In some cases treaties were never ratified, such as in California. In others, like the Black Hills, land that had been granted to the Lakota via ratified treaty was seized illegally shortly after gold was discovered there—a fact recognized by the Supreme Court. More opaquely, other treaties were ratified but various circumstances precipitated warfare between the Americans and the various Native American tribes party to the agreements. These would need to be considered in detail on a case-by-case basis before any verdict could be promulgated.
While the process of returning any lands might be messy or even outright impossible, that is not our concern here. We seek only to establish a clear picture of what the federal government is obligated under the Constitution to do. The Constitution isn’t a moral document; it is a legal document; and the federal government’s obligations should therefore be considered only in this light and in the proper historical context.
Economists frequently tout trade as a mechanism to boost growth and living standards. Yet some continue to extol the virtues of protectionism. However, the internecine debate between free traders and protectionists is less interesting than interrogating why countries erect barriers to international trade. A basic explanation is that opposition to trade is a consequence of nationalism and this assumption is partially true.
During the early twentieth century, trade policies in several European countries were cultivated by national sentiments, and more recently Donald Trump advocated imposing tariffs on China, so undoubtedly nationalism can stimulate demand for protectionist policies. Likewise, protectionism also gains traction when leaders perceive trade as a zero-sum game by not recognizing that the savings derived from trade are incomparable to the deficit.
Like most transactions, we engage in international trade because it increases utility. For example, when we purchase consumer goods, clearly, we lose money, but in exchange, we are provided with commodities that enrich the quality of life. Hence, in this regard, international trade is no different, since it is essentially about maximizing utility. A fundamental misunderstanding in the perception of international trade is that it should privilege the national good, when, in reality, trade serves to elevate the preferences of individuals.
States have political agendas that are usually incompatible with the interests of individuals. As such, advocating the national good is a rhetorical trick employed by politicians to guilt citizens into embracing their policies. Ideally, the state and the individual are separate entities, and the former should refrain from encroaching on the rights of the latter. When the state limits the choices of consumers by instituting protectionist measures, this violates one’s right to choose and by extension property rights.
Although we have exposed the fallacies inherent in political and economic critiques, the puzzle remains unsolved. Such arguments articulate why countries renounce international trade under certain circumstances, but they do not demonstrate why trade is more likely to be parochial than global. In brief, direct opposition to trade is not the only barrier to international distance, cultural distance also explains obstacles to international trade.
Though libertarians would prefer a stateless society, the truth is that governments are primarily responsible for economic policy, and like people, they select trading partners based on commonalities. Although trading occurs to ensure that both parties obtain products that cannot be sourced locally, states must respect each, before trading is initiated. Of course, culturally similar states do compete, but due to commonalities, they are more likely to be appreciative of individual differences.
On an anecdotal level, it is evident that regional trade blocs are more popular than global ones. A perfect example is that despite the glorification of global trade, bureaucrats in Europe and Asia are passionately promoting regional trade, supranational trade blocs encompassing several regions are failing to gain steam. Unsurprisingly, research has captured the impact of cultural distance on trade. Tadessa and White in a 2007 paper tracking the effect of cultural distance on US state-level exports during the year 2000, submit that greater cultural distance reduces aggregate exports, alongside the exports of cultural and noncultural products.
Furthermore, after employing bilateral trade data that cover the period 1996–2001 for nine Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries and fifty-eight other countries for which cultural distances can be calculated, researchers conclude that cultural dissimilarity has a statistically positive and negative influence on the volume of trade flows. According to the results, a 1 percent increase in the cultural distance between OECD countries and their trading associates would reduce aggregate imports of the typical OECD country by 0.7758 percent.
In addition, according to a 2017 meta-analysis exploring the nexus between cultural distance and firm internationalization, companies are unlikely to establish operations in culturally distant locations. The researchers further report that cultural distance has a negative effect on subsidiary performance, but no effect on the performance of the whole multinational corporation (MNC). A possible reason for this is that MNCs can use the experiences of the subsidiary as a guide to improving performance in other markets, thus compensating for the negative performance of the subsidiary.
Undeniably, cultural distance inhibits trade, but luckily economic analysis suggests that immigration might play a role in countering the trade inhibiting effects of cultural distance. Immigrants through their diverse preferences can generate demand for foreign products thereby accentuating partnerships with non-traditional trading neighbors. Moreover, by possessing intimate details relating to their country of origin, immigrants can enhance the quality of information available to local businesses; therefore, lowering information costs for producers.
For example, in a groundbreaking paper, Burchardi et al. (2018) assert a relationship between the number of residents with ancestry from a foreign country and the propensity of firms to engage economically with that country. Further, they also contend that immigration achieves these results by reducing the cost of information transmission.
In sum, cultural distance is not a prominent topic in economic debates, but it deprives people of major opportunities, by acting as a barrier to trade. Therefore, policymakers must consider this hurdle when crafting trade policy. We cannot afford to lose the benefits of trade due to an inability to transcend cultural differences.
My thanks to Carlo Lottieri for publishing an Italian translation of "A Brief History of Secession Referenda in Europe" in the publicationL'indro: "Breve storia dei referendum sulla secessione":
La Scozia non ha ancora rinunciato all’idea di tenere, nei prossimi anni, un altro referendum sull’indipendenza. Anche se Londra si oppone, è da rilevare che il dibattito sulla secessione scozzese non riguarda se un voto su tale questione sia morale oppure se sia legale. Piuttosto, la questione è se tale voto sia prudente o quanto meno in questo momento.
Tutto ciò è abbastanza diverso da quanto avviene nella politica americana, dove qualsiasi ipotesi di indipendenza per qualsiasi area degli Stati Uniti -un Paese che non è nemmeno vecchio come l’unione tra Inghilterra e Scozia, la quale dura da trecento anni- è ovviamente considerato illegale ed estraneo a una seria discussione politica.
Read the full article.
Luke Burgis’s Wanting: The Power of Mimetic Desire in Everyday Life (St. Martin’s Press, 2021) is a popular exposition of the theories of the great French thinker René Girard. The book includes a passage that is of great value in understanding contemporary politics. “Obviously, the defense of victims is a good thing. At the same time, it brings new dangers. In the same way that scapegoating rituals in archaic religions were entirely practical—that is, they were used to achieve practical ends—so too can the defense of victims be used for practical purposes, James G. Williams, in his foreword to one of Girard’s most well-known works, I See Satan Fall Like Lightning, attempted to sum up Girard’s thinking on this point. ‘Victimism uses the ideology of concern for victims to gain political or economic or spiritual power.’ he wrote. ‘One claims victim status as a way of gaining advantage or justifying one’s behavior.’ Victims now have the power to make new scapegoats of their own choosing. An open and honest memory is needed to prevent that power from becoming tyrannical” (pp. 128–29).
The greatest conspiracies are open and notorious—not theories, but practices expressed through law and policy, technology, and finance. Counterintuitively, these conspiracies are more often than not announced in public and with a modicum of pride. They’re dutifully reported in our newspapers; they’re bannered onto the covers of our magazines; updates on their progress are scrolled across our screens—all with such regularity as to render us unable to relate the banality of their methods to the rapacity of their ambitions.
The party in power wants to redraw district lines. The prime interest rate has changed. A free service has been created to host our personal files. These conspiracies order, and disorder, our lives; and yet they can’t compete for attention with digital graffiti about pedophile Satanists in the basement of a DC pizzeria.
This, in sum, is our problem: the truest conspiracies meet with the least opposition.
Or to put it another way, conspiracy practices—the methods by which true conspiracies such as gerrymandering, or the debt industry, or mass surveillance are realized—are almost always overshadowed by conspiracy theories: those malevolent falsehoods that in aggregate can erode civic confidence in the existence of anything certain or verifiable.
In my life, I’ve had enough of both the practice and the theory. In my work for the United States National Security Agency, I was involved with establishing a Top-Secret system intended to access and track the communications of every human being on the planet. And yet after I grew aware of the damage this system was causing—and after I helped to expose that true conspiracy to the press—I couldn’t help but notice that the conspiracies that garnered almost as much attention were those that were demonstrably false: I was, it was claimed, a hand-picked CIA operative sent to infiltrate and embarrass the NSA; my actions were part of an elaborate inter-agency feud. No, said others: my true masters were the Russians, the Chinese, or worse—Facebook. Contrary to what a surprisingly large number of people on Twitter believe, that is very much not me.
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As I found myself made vulnerable to all manner of Internet fantasy, and interrogated by journalists about my past, about my family background, and about an array of other issues both entirely personal and entirely irrelevant to the matter at hand, there were moments when I wanted to scream: “What is wrong with you people? All you want is intrigue, but an honest-to-God, globe-spanning apparatus of omnipresent surveillance riding in your pocket is not enough? You have to sauce that up?”
It took years—eight years and counting in exile—for me to realize that I was missing the point: we talk about conspiracy theories in order to avoid talking about conspiracy practices, which are often too daunting, too threatening, too total.
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Historians still ponder why, despite its dominance in prior centuries, China failed to industrialize before Europe. Some contend that the culture of conformity engendered by Confucianism prevented the influx of disruptive ideas able to spark an economic revolution. Meanwhile, there are those who posit that the Chinese preferred employment in the government service, instead of pursuing commercial activities. Although there is a kernel of truth in these arguments such assumptions are insufficient to explain the sluggishness of China, relative to Western Europe.
For example, notwithstanding the perceived conformity of medieval Europe there were pockets of intellectual dissent. Eminent medievalist Edward Grant posits that contrary to the stereotype of medieval Europe being mired in ignorance - the academy was characterized by lively debates. It is also largely unknown that during this era most students studied law and natural philosophy, since theology was a graduate degree requiring mature students. Moreover, Aristotle was the undisputed king of medieval philosophy and his arguments were frequently applied to the study of religion. Medieval scholars were never slaves to the scriptures as some would have us believe. Neither were they unwilling to engage with scientific experimentation. Let us not forget that the monk Theodoric provided scientific explanations of rainbows in the 14th century, using experiments with a water-filled spherical flask designed to imitate a raindrop.
However, compared to contemporary societies medieval Europe may seem conformist, but critics forget that the character of conformity is equally important. Whereas students in China were encouraged to regurgitate classical philosophers, the medieval scholar Bernard of Chartres promoted the view that one ought to enhance learning by refining the ideas of his intellectual ancestors, this outlook is expressed by the metaphor “Standing on the shoulders of Giants.” Hence the substance of conformity can positively impact creative output. By this account both medieval Europe and China were conformist, but they differed in their concept of conformity.
Furthermore, like in China, some scholars in Europe avoided technical professions, yet their ideas nonetheless revolutionized society. For example, the Protestant reformers placed a high value on literacy. Because people were becoming literate, they acquired an interest in books other than the bible, so indirectly the Protestant Reformation resulted in the secularization of society. Essentially the individualistic ethos of the Reformation implored people to seek knowledge on their own. As such, with the diminished importance of religion, men were primed to pursue science, economics, and other non-religious affairs.
Therefore, the Reformation indicates that ideas are crucial to revolutionary changes. Hence the paucity of highly intelligent men working in technical professions is an inept explanation for the failure of China to industrialize, because gifted people do not need to be industrialists for their ideas to promote growth. We have explored theories proffered by academics to describe China’s inability to industrialize before Europe, so we will now discuss possibilities offered by economic studies.
According to economist Mark Elvin, China suffered from a high-level equilibrium trap meaning that the efficiency of production processes limited the demand for innovations. Yet Jan Luiten Van Zanden and Bozhong Li in a 2010 paper note that lower labor costs in China did not stimulate the adoption of machines to minimize labor expenses. Based on these findings and those of Stephen Broadberry, it is apparent that economists exaggerated the productivity of pre-industrial China.
Another intriguing theory is proposed by scholars who argue that the clannish nature of Chinese society obstructed the formation of institutions facilitating large-scale partnerships. Avner Greif and Guido Tabellini write: ‘Clan loyalty and the absence of formal impartial enforcement limited inter-clan cooperation. There were, obviously cities in China. Yet, intra-clan loyalty and interactions limited urbanization, city size and self-governance. Considering large cities, China’s urbanization rate remained between three and four percent from the eleventh to the nineteenth century, while the initially lower urbanization rate in Europe rose to about ten percent. Including small cities, urbanization rates were comparable, but China’s small cities were venues for cooperation among members of local clans rather than their melting polt. While the European cities gained self-governance, this did not happen in China until the modern period.”
Unfortunately, kinship structures in China hindered institutional transfers across cities since they precluded the formation of associations independent of tribal ties. By impeding the creation of widescale trust kinship groups deterred the networks required to create successful innovations and boost growth.
Evidently, examining the failure of China to industrialize is a complicated task. Though it appears that this is due to an intricate interplay of factors ranging from economics to culture. Therefore, it is prudent for economists to adopt a multi-faceted approach by exploring how dynamic interactions between cultural beliefs and institutions aided in delaying the rise of an industrial China.
Societies are more prosperous when citizens produce and innovate without government intervention. Undoubtedly, regulations can slow the progress of innovation and by extension economic growth. Because economically free societies enable the efficient creation of wealth it is unsurprising that the Fraser Institute and the Heritage Foundation have documented a positive relationship between economic freedom and income growth.
However, less appreciated is that economic freedom improves well-being in ways not easily calculated on any ledger. Higher incomes afford people the opportunity to purchase high-quality amenities thereby enriching their quality of life. When increasing affluence allows people to secure better health care and superior schools they can expect to live longer and acquire lucrative jobs. Freed from worrying about the bare necessities of life makes it easier for people to pursue leisure and invest in building quality relationships.
As expected, Belasen and Hafer (2012) argue that across American states improvements in economic freedom led to higher levels of well-being even after controlling for other factors. Economic freedom gives people a sense of control over their affairs by ensuring the pursuit of entrepreneurial projects unfettered by government regulations. As such, economically free societies breed optimism. In a 2017 paper Boris Nikolaev and Daniel L. Bennett contend that people residing in economically free societies are more likely to report positive feelings. The authors further note that such people are also inclined to report feelings of excitement, success, and jubilation. Interestingly, those living in these societies are also less likely to feel restless, bored, or lonely.
Indeed, by boosting incomes, economic freedom avails us of new opportunities beyond mere material possessions. The truth is that having money increases our propensity to purchase worthwhile experiences. In fact, related research indicates that the degree of economic freedom in US states has a positive effect on both individual reported happiness and state average happiness. These findings are predictable since economic freedom boosts life satisfaction by directing people to chart their own course.
Another channel through which economic freedom improves society is tolerance. Open markets permit people to socialize and conduct business with outsiders thus engendering trust and respect for cultural differences. Nicolas Berggren and Therese Nilsson in the research article “Economic Freedom as a Driver of Trust,” posit that in economically free societies people are motivated to be trustworthy and entertain connections with outsiders in order to succeed in the marketplace. Moreover, doing business with outsiders forces us to become appreciative of diversity and embrace our universal humanity. Furthermore, it must be noted that the absence of government regulations ensures that people interact with each other as individuals with unique preferences and not as impersonal agents. In general, government regulations create barriers to commercial interactions.
Similarly, research by Thomas Coyle, Heiner Rindermann, and Dale Hancock shows that in free and open economies, innovative people are more productive with the human resources available.
Obviously, when government regulations do not hinder innovation, people are more likely to embark on risky ventures. Adam Thierer in Permissionless Innovation opines that the American start-up Free World Dialup (FWD) failed, because it sought approval from the FCC to operate whereas the founders of Skype bypassed U.S. regulatory approvals; therefore enabling the company to build a user base, so in the long-term it was able to outperform FWD.
But economic freedom is not only useful in the economic realm. Research reveals that it mitigates the effects of pandemics. Vincent Geloso and Jamie Pavlik in a fascinating paper exploring the effects of economic freedom on the Pandemic of 1918 submit that countries with higher levels of economic freedom tempered the damage induced by the pandemic because they were allowed to recover faster than regulated economies whose policies dampened recovery. Intriguingly, more recent research has confirmed the findings of Geloso and Pavlik by arguing that open economies in Europe demonstrate greater resilience in adjusting to the crisis of Covid-19.
Despite the rantings of regulators and politicians economic freedom is an ideal strategy for creating prosperous and resilient societies. Our failure to remained wedded to the principles of economic freedom will redound to our detriment, because it is the solution to ensuring a strong society, not the problem.
Because of the deep division in America between red states and blue states, there has been much talk of secession. Is the United States too big? Would people be happier in smaller communities? Frank Buckley, a distinguished professor at the Scalia Law School, breaks with most of his fellow legal academics by taking these questions seriously. In a recent article in the American Mind, he suggests that secession today would be difficult but not impossible. “As I argued in American Secession (2020), a civil war would be unlikely, and we’d be more likely to see a pacific James Buchanan in the White House than an indominable Abraham Lincoln.”
Against those who argue that secession is unconstitutional, Buckley offers some strong arguments: “Finally, the legal barriers to secession are weaker than most think. Originalists on the Court would recognize that the framers had thought secession permissible, while its more liberal members would find it difficult to ignore the expressed wishes of voters in a state. Is an indissoluble union a more fundamental constitutional norm than democracy? Canada and Great Britain posed that question, and answered no. While the Supreme Court held that secession was unconstitutional in Texas v. White, that was a decision of a unionist Court right after the Civil War. Moreover, the decision assumed that the 1781 Articles of Confederation, which spoke of a “perpetual” union, had survived when the Constitution was adopted. Had that been the case, however, the Constitution would not have been ratified until the last state signed on in 1790, and George Washington’s election two years earlier would have been a nullity.”
Buckley is someone who “thinks outside the box,” and we badly need this quality today.
Voluntaryism. It is an awkward term. Yet that was what political philosopher Auberon Herbert called the only social arrangement that respected people’s self-ownership—mutually voluntary, noncoercive cooperation. Government compulsion, on the other hand, inherently violates it. Herbert saw that preventing violations of others’ self-ownership was the core of the moral case for liberty.
At a time when the practical philosophy of governments is that they own as much of any individual as they choose, it is worth commemorating Herbert’s June 18 birthday by reconsidering his challenge to the idea that others have “a commission to decide what [their] brother-man shall do or not do.”
This is the question…. Do you believe in force and authority, or do you believe in liberty?The weight of argument is strongly on the side of liberty of action and unrestricted competition.Rights of self-ownership are … supreme moral rights…. All social and political arrangements, all employments of force, are subordinate to these universal rights.Force may be employed on behalf of these rights, but not in opposition to them.Force rests on no moral foundations … [because] without freedom of choice … there are no such things as true moral qualities.Each man must be left free … with one most important limitation. His freedom … must not interfere with the exactly corresponding freedom of others.Reject compulsion in every form.Private property [is] inseparably connected with liberty or self‑ownership…. It is idle to say in one breath that each man has the right to the free use of his own faculties, and in the next breath propose to deal by the power of the State with what he acquires by means of those faculties, as if both the faculties and what they produced belonged to the State and not to himself.The fullest recognition of property [provides] both the material and the moral foundations of liberty.To all … belong their own faculties, and as a consequence, equally belongs to them all that they can honestly gain in free competition, through the exercise of those faculties.If we are self-owners, neither an individual, nor a majority, nor a government, can have rights of ownership in other men.Justice requires that you should not place the burdens of one man on the shoulders of another man.Voluntaryism … denies that any good or lasting work can be built upon the compulsion of others…. It invites all men to abandon the barren problems of force, and to give themselves up to the happy problems of liberty and friendly co‑operation; to join in thinking out … how we can do all these things, without at any point touching … the hateful instrument of an aggressive and unjustifiable compulsion. Under voluntaryism the state would defend the rights of liberty, never aggress upon them.[Groups], without any exception … exist for the sake of the individual…. If they did not minister to his use, if they do not profit him, they would have no plea to exist.No man can have rights over another man unless he first have rights over himself. He cannot possess the rights to direct the happiness of another man, unless he possess rights to direct his own happiness: if we grant him the latter right, this is at once fatal to the former.If you lose your belief in liberty … what can all the gifts of politicians give you in return?There is only one result you can get out of the suppression of the individual, and that is the organized dominant faction triumphing over the defeated faction.You will gain far more by clinging faithfully to the methods of peace and respect for the rights of others than by allowing yourselves to use the force that always calls out force in reply.Far the larger amount of intolerance that exists in the world is the result of … political arrangements, by which we compel ourselves to struggle, man against man. In our era, where myriad government bodies tax and regulate away our self-ownership in many ways, either ignorant or uncaring about “the odiousness of compelling men to act against their own wishes,” we need to reflect on, and act on, Auberon Herbert’s compelling case for liberty and voluntary arrangements as the only morally defensible organizing principle of society. Only that allows us to cooperate with one another “without at any point touching with the least of our fingers the hateful instrument of an aggressive and unjustifiable compulsion.” As he recognized, the alternative involves the widespread abuse of people’s rights in themselves and is ultimately futile, because “all the methods of restriction … are wrong and will only end in disappointment.”
In a 30 minute lecture for the Research Platform on Economic Thought, Dr. Per Bylund looks at the history of the Austrian School and its future prospects in academia and beyond.
Many socialists think that protectionism benefits the poor. But these views deviate from the free trade tradition that can be found in some corners of socialist thought. Like liberal economists in the nineteenth century, some socialists also argued that protectionism served the interests of corrupt entrepreneurs. The forgotten contribution of socialists to the free trade tradition is clearly fleshed out in an article titled “Marx and Manchester: The Evolution of the Socialist International Free-Trade Tradition, c.1846-1946,” featured in The International History Review.
For scholars interested in unlocking the complex relationship between socialism and free trade this article is a must-read. Marc-William Palen ably disputes the notion that socialists are universally in favor of protectionism. However, he admits Marx and Engels proposed free trade because of the perception that it accentuated the socialist revolution: “Marx and Engels viewed the international turn to free trade as an advancement of the global capitalist project, the dawn of a new epoch of capitalist internationalism. For Marx, free trade was a progressive condition of industrial capitalism, moving it a step closer to socialist revolution. Protectionism, by contrast, was regressive and belonged to the pre- and proto-industrial capitalist era. For Marx’s close friend and patron Friedrich Engels, too, free trade was preferable to protectionism as the former would ‘expand as freely and as quickly as possible’ the capitalist system and thus hasten the destruction of ‘the whole system.”
Based on Palen’s presentation it appears that Marx and Engel advocated free trade due to the assumption that it would accelerate revolution. Yet he offers evidence indicating that both expressed genuine dislike for protectionism. Like classical liberals, Marx perceived protectionism as a function of backward economies. As Palen notes his condemnation of protectionism as archaic is quite revealing: “People are thus about to begin in Germany with what people in France and England are about to end. The old corrupt conditions against which these countries are rebelling in theory and which they only bear as one bears chains, is greeted in Germany as the dawn of a beautiful future.’’
Engel in his description portrays protectionism as being “at best an endless screw, and you never know when you have done with it. By protecting one industry, you directly or indirectly hurt all others, and have therefore to protect them too. By so doing you again damage the industry that you first protected and have to compensate it . . . and so on ad infinitum.” Interestingly, even Marx thought that protectionism fueled interstate conflicts, since antitrade policies could be construed as an act of aggression.
The tendency of protectionism to lead to war was also asserted by Karl Kautsky, as Palen reminds us: “The higher the tariff barriers between individual capitalist states grow, the more each of them feels the need to assure itself of a market which no one can exclude them from, and to gain supplies of raw material which no one can cut off,’ thereby creating an ‘arms race’ that ‘must grow ever greater and the danger of a world war come ever nearer.” In this arena, Kautsky, is like Kant who taught that trade nurtured international peace.
Probably, in the socialist tradition Eduard Bernstein is the most strident critic of protectionism. As such, Palen will be cited at length:
Like Kautsky, Bernstein was consistent in his support for free trade over the course of his socialist political career. Bernstein believed free trade was not only progressive but also good for both the proletariat and the bourgeoisie. Also, like Kautsky (and Marx), Bernstein condemned List-inspired ‘infant industrial’ protectionism for creating geopolitical tensions and for being reactionary and atavistic, a throwback to the era of mercantilism and a stumbling block to modernization. His critique of militarism – for which he blamed jingoism, nationalism, protectionism, and the undue influence of arms manufacturers on German policymaking — owed much to the influence of later Engels. And like Kautsky, Bernstein’s critique shared much in common with Hobson and Schumpeter, as did his belief that free trade and industrialism were the foundation stones of a peaceful economic order, such that R. A. Fletcher posits that Bernstein was ‘not only fundamentally more British than German but also thoroughly imbued with the values of Cobdenite radicalism.
Moreover, the hostility of some socialists to protectionism was not unique to Europe. Palen contends that during the Great Depression, American labor leaders were vehemently opposed to protectionism:
A Marx-Manchester ‘utopian’ planned supranational vision of free trade and peace prevailed not only among European socialist federal unionists, but also among socialist internationalists in 1930s and 1940s America. Under the political and intellectual leadership of Norman Thomas and Scott Nearing, American socialists renewed their Marx-Manchester commitments in response to the Great Depression and continued Republican protectionism.
Palen singles out Thomas for his raging denouncement of protectionism: “Under his leadership, the Socialist Party of America made sure to single out the GOP’s protectionist 1930 Smoot-Hawley Tariff, calling it ‘the most monstrous tariff legislation in the history of the country. . . . It has, in effect, declared economic war against the rest of the world and served to aggravate the instability of world economy and world trade.” Clearly, unlike their contemporary counterparts, socialists in an earlier tradition understood that protectionism did not elevate the poor.
Yet despite the evidence against protectionism as a tool to improve living conditions, it is gaining traction on the left and right. But socialists and their friends on the right can save us from the dangers of protectionism by applying the wisdom of the maverick thinkers discussed in this piece. I urge them to read Dr. Marc-William Palen.
Some readers might enjoy this this interview I conducted conducted with Václav Klaus, the former Prime Minister of Czech Republic, on the current Covid-19 situation and the prospect for human freedom. He has a rich perspective and experience having spent most of his life under a communist system and shares his views freely.
This interview is was conducted as apart of a full length documentary, Planet Lockdown, and is being released in advance of the film for those that wish to learn more about the world and where we are.
Though rarely stated the nuclear family—as opposed to the extended family or clan—played a seminal role in the growth of Western capitalism. Success in a modern economy requires us to trust strangers and think creatively. These traits were nurtured by the individualistic ethos of the medieval nuclear family. Not only were nuclear families, child-centered, but there was no obligation for parents to provide children with an inheritance. As such, children were motivated to plan long-term and work hard. Upon transitioning to adulthood, one was expected to exit the family home by relocating elsewhere and acquiring relevant skills.
Moreover, in northwestern Europe working prior to marriage was the norm for both men and women. Because people often pursued marriage at a later age, historians dubbed this development the Western European Marriage Pattern. This idea was popularized by John Hajnal who noted that since the sixteenth century parts of Europe have been characterized by late female marriage, high female celibacy, and the establishment of separate households for married couples resulting in the dominance of nuclear families.
Human capital formation also became an important pillar of the nuclear family. Parents were socially ambitious and wanted their children to eclipse them in status, so investing in education became a priority. Sociologist Brigitte Berger in her pathbreaking text The Family in the Modern Age opines that nuclear families could adapt to changes easier because they were freed from the constraints of the traditional extended family. So, essentially, the flexibility of the nuclear family stimulated creative thought that could unleash innovations.
Without a doubt, the transition to industrial capitalism for Western societies was more efficient, because the prevalence of the nuclear family minimized reliance on clans. Since citizens were no longer beholden to the strictures of the extended family, one had to develop a universal morality transcending loyalty to kin groups. So consequently, trusting strangers was not viewed as unfavorable. By increasing trust, the universal morality engendered by the nuclear family made it profitable to form business relationships with foreigners. Even in contemporary societies tribalism cultivates low outgroup trust and by extension prevents the emergence of pro-market institutions. Taking these factors into account the importance of the nuclear family in generating widespread trust is indeed an achievement.
Similarly, courtesy of economist Avner Greif, there is hard data indicating that medieval societies dominated by kinship groups were less efficient: “Monasteries, fraternities, and mutual-insurance guilds provided social safety nets against famine, unemployment, and disability. Most of the population belonged to such fraternities and guilds, at least in England. Because corporations provided social safety nets that were alternatives to those provided by kinship groups, they enabled individuals to take risks and make other economic decisions without interference by members of such groups. Relative to a society dominated by kinship groups, the nuclear family structure increased capital per worker by encouraging later marriages and fewer children, and it led to a more efficient distribution of labor and knowledge by facilitating migration.”
Interestingly, apart from the role of the nuclear family in fostering impartial norms, anthropologist Peter Frost suggests that evolution may have selected for weaker kinship ties in the west: “In North and West of the Hajnal line, kinship has been a weaker social force in relations since at least the early Middle Ages and perhaps the Mesolithic. Because of this weaker kinship environment, northwest Europeans cam to view social relations more through the lens of universal moral rules. Such rules were enforced by monitoring not only other community members but also oneself. The new mindset eventually developed within the bounds of phenotypic plasticity, but over time it would have been gradually hardwired through selection for independent social orientation and universal rule adherence...”
One cannot appreciate the rise of capitalism in the West without studying its relationship to the nuclear family. Studying the family can yield important insights into the socio-cultural evolution of society and capitalism. Economists commit a massive disservice by de-emphasizing the relevance of the family as an economic institution.
In 1759, economist and philosopher Adam Smith wrote one of the greatest descriptions of the free market ever produced. Writing about a market economy based on voluntary exchange, Smith likened the process of self-minded producers catering to the consumers’ interests as a process managed by an invisible hand. He states, “Every individual … intends only his own security; and by directing that industry in such a manner as its produce may be of the greatest value, he intends only his own gain, and he is in this, as in many other cases, led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention.”
This quote, perhaps the most famous passage from his book The Theory of Moral Sentiments, reveals both the morality and simplicity in which a free economy operates. We, as individuals, are not guided by some altruistic vision for the betterment of others, but rather the fulfillment of our interests and gains. Yet in the free market, pursuing our own self-interest makes all of society better off.
This is because in order to get what we want, we must voluntarily trade. The only way voluntary trade can happen is if each individual likes what the other has more than what they have. Therefore, in the process of obtaining what we want and enjoy, we enable someone else to also obtain what they want and enjoy. Otherwise, the trade wouldn’t happen in the first place, and we wouldn’t be benefiting others.
In a bigger picture, this means that we work jobs, sell products, and own businesses not for the sake of our customers or bosses, but for our own individual interests. Yet in the process of obtaining the money to further our own interests, we contribute a good or service that can benefit many others; whether that be working at a restaurant, owning a store, or running a lemonade stand, we contribute to a larger, common good. Through voluntary exchange, the prerequisite for furthering our own desires is by fulfilling others’.
The invisible hand of the free market, fueled by voluntary exchange, translates the intricate and subjective interests of ourselves into benefitting the interests of others and, when compounded, ultimately caters to the common interest.
Yet, there exists another invisible hand, in the realm of politics; one also predicated on voluntary exchange, yet moving opposite to the motion of the free market’s invisible hand. Understanding it is crucial to deciding just how far we should replace economic activity with political and bureaucratic control.
The Invisible Hand of Politics Outside of the political process, self-interested individuals exchange and thereby benefit others in the pursuit of their own goals. Yet in the political process, politicians elected on the basis of representing the “general interest” ultimately must cater to much more specific causes. Economist Milton Friedman writes in his coauthored book Free to Choose, “There is, as it were, an invisible hand in politics that operates in precisely the opposite direction to Adam Smith's invisible hand. Individuals who intend only to promote the general interest are led by the invisible political hand to promote a special interest that they had no intention to promote.”
This is mainly due to the expansive role that the government has usurped over the years, writing and enforcing detailed legislation that directly threatens a small sum of citizens while negligibly affecting the rest. When the state has such a capability of writing specific laws, laws that greatly concern only a few number of individuals, those individuals will be incentivized to lobby government for favorable decisions.
Take Friedman’s example of the US’s policies regarding coastal traffic, which is greatly restricted to American flagships. He estimates the costs of such legislation to be, in 1980 costs, around $600 million a year, yet divided among the populace, costs the average taxpayer just $3 a year. His conclusion:
“Which of us will vote against a candidate for Congress because he imposed that cost on us? How many of us will deem it worth spending money to defeat such measures?”
The ones who will deem it worth spending money on such policies are the ones mostly affected by the legislation, that is, the 40,000 individuals actively involved in the industry, who have much more to win or lose than $3. Indeed, Friedman confirms, “they spend money lavishly for lobbying and political contributions.”
Thus, almost always, the activists and lobbyists that guide the activity of elected officials represent not the common interest, but the special interests that are much more financially contingent on their decisions. Company executives seek to limit foreign competition, farmers seek price floors on their products, and public sector unions seek to protect state monopolies. The incredible costs of these policies are widely dispersed among the people, and so the outcome of Congress doesn’t reflect the general interest, but the special interest that has the most to lose.
Market or State Between these two invisible hands comes a choice: which one do we want to promote more? Should we promote a free market, where individuals voluntarily exchange and benefit a more general interest? Or should we want to expand the domain of politics, letting more aspects of the economy be dictated by special interests?
Hopefully, the answer is clear. In the market economy, producers will always have greater incentives to work in the people’s interests than do politicians. This is because producers can only obtain money through voluntary exchange, and so they must produce what the consumers want.
Similarly, we may think that politicians have a great incentive to work in our interests. We elect them, and so we think they work in the general interest of their constituents. Yet ultimately, the issues they are most pressed about don’t concern the majority of their constituents, but rather select interest groups that have much more to lose. Such groups are the reason why much of the issues politicians vote on concern special interests. The votes and money from these groups are why they support them.
Furthermore, as we expand either the domain of the free market or the grasp of government, either of the invisible hands become stronger. For example, if we were to privatize the postal service, this means that the agency, although assumed to be self-interested, would have greater incentive to cater to the interests of the people than if it were in government hands. This greater efficiency would put more pressure on politicians to actually work in the general interest.
Alternatively, if the state was expansive, intervening in the economy at will and catering to different interest groups, the more producers will pull away from the free market invisible hand, and lean more towards political handouts. And as the state expands in its role, the more companies will be compelled to look for government assistance, thus extremifying the political invisible hand. This phenomenon is known as crony capitalism.
The choice is ours over which invisible hand to favor, the market’s or the state’s. Will we judge the intentions behind them, or focus on the outcomes? As we build towards a freer society, the choice couldn’t be any more clear.
Even if “won,” endless wars like our 20 year assault on Afghanistan would not benefit our actual national interest in the slightest. So why do these wars continue endlessly? Because they are so profitable to powerful and well-connected special interests. In fact, the worst news possible for the Beltway military contractor/think tank complex would be that the United States actually won a war. That would signal the end of the welfare-for-the-rich gravy train.
In contrast to the end of declared wars, like World War II when the entire country rejoiced at the return home of soldiers where they belonged, an end to any of Washington’s global military deployments would result in wailing and gnashing of the teeth among the military-industrial complex which gets rich from other people’s misery and sacrifice.
Would a single American feel less safe if we brought home our thousands of troops currently bombing and shooting at Africans?
As Orwell famously said, “the war is not meant to be won, it is meant to be continuous.” Nowhere is this more true than among those whose living depends on the US military machine constantly bombing people overseas.
How many Americans, if asked, could answer the question, “why have we been bombing Afghanistan for an entire generation?” The Taliban never attacked the United States and Osama bin Laden, who temporarily called Afghanistan his home, is long dead and gone. The longest war in US history has dragged on because … it has just dragged on.
So why did we stay? As neocons like Max Boot tell it, we are still bombing and killing Afghans so that Afghan girls can go to school. It’s a pretty flimsy and cynical explanation. My guess is that if asked, most Afghan girls would prefer to not have their country bombed.
Indeed, war has made the Beltway bomb factories and think tanks rich. As Brown University’s Cost of War Project has detailed, the US has wasted $2.26 trillion on a generation of war on Afghanistan. Much of this money has been spent, according to the US government’s own Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, on useless “nation-building” exercises that have built nothing at all. Gold-plated roads to nowhere. Aircraft that cannot perform their intended functions but that have enriched contractors and lobbyists.
President Biden has announced that the US military would be out of Afghanistan by the 20th anniversary of the attacks of 9/11. But as always, the devil is in the details. It appears that US special forces, CIA paramilitaries, and the private contractors who have taken an increasing role in fighting Washington’s wars, will remain in-country. Bombing Afghans so that Max Boot and his neocons can pat themselves on the back.
But the fact is this: Afghanistan was a disaster for the United States. Only the corrupt benefitted from this 20 year highway robbery. Will we learn a lesson from wasting trillions and killing hundreds of thousands? It is not likely. But there will be an accounting. The piper will be paid. Printing mountains of money to pay the corrupt war profiteers will soon leave the working and middle classes in dire straits. It is up to non-interventionists like us to explain to them exactly who has robbed them of their future.
Reprinted with permission.
Believing that Western civilization is not unique is a fashionable sentiment. Today many argue that the West has no distinctive traits. However, critics suggest that individualism, freedom and human rights are innately Western constructs. Yet there is more to the West than its history of freedom. Western civilization is easily rejuvenated by creative elements. Throughout history, other cultures have relied on new knowledge to justify old beliefs, but Westerners have consistently allowed foreign ideas to unleash their revolutionary potential.
During the medieval ages, for example, the Latin West was mesmerized by the teachings of Islamic scholars. Such knowledge was appropriated to create novel intellectual inquiries. Historian Peter O’brien offers a glimpse of this spectacular development: “The knowledge transmitted to Latin Christendom via Islamic civilization touched and upset virtually every discipline. Thomas Aquinas, for instance, devoted the lion's share of his scholarly attention to wrestling with theological and epistemological quandaries stemming from Arab philosophy…Lettered Europeans scrambled to absorb this torrent of new knowledge pouring in from their rivals. Those who could, journeyed to loci of Islamic erudition. "Since at present the instruction of the Arabs...is made available to all in Toledo," explained Daniel of Morley, "I hastened there to attend the lectures of the most learned philosophers in the world." Both Adelard of Bath and Ramón Llull travelled to the Levant to learn Arabic, study Arab texts and carry the newly acquired knowledge back to Europe.”
Earlier in his text, O’brien recounted evidence that may suggest that Western civilization is not unusual in this regard: “Cultivated Muslims embraced ancient learning. Not only did they preserve and venerate the works of Greek masters such as Plato, Aristotle and Euclid that were lost to the Latins, Islamic and Jewish sages the likes of Musa al-Khwârizmî, al-Farabi, al-Ghazzali, Abu Ma'shar (Albumasar), Ibn Sina (Avicenna), Ibn Rushd (Averroës), and Maimonides augmented and improved the inherited storehouse of knowledge.”
But what O’Brien failed to say is that the Islamic Golden Age was inspired by a few dissident Muslims who were influenced by Hindu, Greek, and Persian learning. Furthermore, Christian intellectuals who were trained by the scholars at Jundi Shapur played a crucial role in translating ancient texts. It was only in the West that intellectual revolutions became a permanent fixture. Notwithstanding the brilliance of some Muslim scholars in the Islamic faith, reason is intertwined with revelation. Up until the nineteenth-century the principle of natural causality was denied by Muslim intellectuals. Whereas though Christians believed that natural laws were instituted by God – there was the expectation that one would explore the natural world without resorting to religion.
The destruction of the Abbasid Caliphate by the Mongols negatively affected the course of science in the Islamic world, but nonetheless there was already a revival of traditional schools that were hostile to scientific inquiry prior to the invasion. Islam lacked a culture able to sustain the passionate debates that would lead to continuous revolutions. Ali. A Allawi in the Crisis of Islamic Civilization lucidly explains the tension between Islam and non-theological reasoning: “The Arabic word “individual”- al -fard - does not have the commonly understood implication of a purposeful being, imbued with the power of rational choice…The power of choice and will granted to the individual is more to do with the fact of acquiring these from God, at the point of a specific action or decision – the so-called iktisab – rather than the powers themselves which are not innate to natural freedoms or rights…Therefore to claim the right and responsibility of autonomous action without reference to the source of these in God is an affront, and is discourteous to the terms of the relationship between human beings and God…None of the free thinking schools in classical Islam – such as the Mu’tazila – could ever entertain the idea of breaking the God-Man relationship and the validity of revelation, in spite of their espousal of a rationalist philosophy.”
Similarly, the Chinese are excessively praised for their successes during the Song Dynasty. Using Chinese history as a case study, multiculturalists often posit that the West is not peculiar. Although as David Landes informs readers, the Chinese did in fact build a great civilization, but under the spell of hubris they shunned foreign technologies thinking that outsiders could not enrich a superior culture: “Along with Chinese indifference to technology went imperviousness to European science. The Jesuits and other Christian clerics brought in not only clocks but (sometimes obsolete) knowledge and ideas. Some of this was of interest to the court: in particular, astronomy and techniques of celestial observation were extremely valuable to a ruler who claimed a monopoly of the calendar and used his mastery of time to impose on the society as a whole…Little of this got beyond Peking, however, and the pride some took in the new learning was soon countered by a nativist reaction that reached back to long forgotten work of earlier periods. One leader of this return to the sources, Wen Ting (1635–1721), examined the texts of mathematicians who had worked under the Song dynasty (10th–13th centuries) and proclaimed that the Jesuits had not brought much in the way of innovation.”
Unlike countless societies Western civilization is willing to admit when its culture requires regeneration from outside forces, and this is a major reason for its dynamism. Had the West not been a self-critical society there is no doubt that it would have stagnated like other areas of the world. Another interesting point about the West is the centrality of the idea of progress. Because Western culture is self-reflective it can objectively judge the true state of society. As such, innovation often trumps traditionalism. The Renaissance, for example, repudiated much of medieval scholasticism.
Yet one cannot discuss the concept of progress in Western civilization without examining its link to the Christian notion of linear time. Contrary to the Greeks, Chinese, and other civilizations, Christianity asserts that time will not revert to older cycles. Based on this reasoning, society can only go forward. Obviously, developments can either be progressive or regressive, but one must always strive to attain progressive ends by not returning to the ignorance and superstition of the past. In short, despite the rantings of multiculturalists Western civilization is indeed special.
President Biden has just appointed a commission to study Supreme Court reform. However, I noticed that no one seems to be talking about reform to mean “re-form to better reflect the Constitution than under current precedents and interpretation,” reflected in the notable paucity of defenders of the Constitution as understood at the time it was adopted. That is why the commission could use some guidance from James Wilson for insight.
James Wilson signed both the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. Earlier, his Considerations on the Nature and Extent of the Legislative Authority of the British Parliament argued that it had no authority to legislate for the colonies. At the Continental Congress, he was a member of the Committee on Detail, which produced the first draft of the Constitution. He also argued forcefully for ratification of the final version in Pennsylvania. In fact, his October 6, 1787, ratification speech before the Pennsylvania legislature received more coverage than The Federalist.
George Washington appointed Wilson to the first Supreme Court in 1789. Then, in a set of law lectures beginning in 1790, he became America’s first homegrown legal philosopher, spelling out the thinking behind the Constitution and early Supreme Court decisions. He articulated the purpose of government as to secure citizens’ preexisting rights and that the Constitution was crafted to create such a government. Remembering those ideas, now seriously compromised and threatened with further erosion, would be a reform actually likely to benefit Americans.
Wilson clarified our founders’ understanding of law: “The defense of one’s self, justly called the primary law of nature, is not, nor can it be, abrogated by any regulation.” What does each individual’s self-ownership, and right of self-defense that derives from it, mean for government? “All men are by nature equal and free. No one has a right to any authority over another without his consent.”
Wilson spelled out the implications of government consistent with that understanding of law: “The liberty of every member is increased … each gains more by the limitation of the freedom of every other member, than he loses by the limitation of his own. The result is that civil government is necessary to the perfection and happiness of man.” In consequence, government “should be formed to secure and enlarge the exercise of the natural rights of its members; and every government which has not this in view as its principal object is not a government of the legitimate kind.”
Since all must be better protected to expand everyone’s rights and liberties, law had to treat everyone equally. “In the enjoyment of their persons and of their property, the common law protects all.” No one’s liberty could be invaded; no one’s property could be violated. Instead, “private property and personal liberty … will be guarded with firmness and watchfulness.” This is what led America’s founders to agree with Wilson that “without a good government, liberty cannot exist.”
Because good government was considered central to liberty, “A good constitution is the greatest blessing which a society can enjoy.” And because “in this government, liberty shall reign triumphant,” Americans were bequeathed “that system of government which would best promote their freedom and happiness.”
Because some would override our free choices with their dictates, an important consequence follows: “Among the virtues necessary to merit and preserve the advantages of good government [are] a warm and uniform attachment to liberty and to the Constitution,” because “enemies of liberty are artful and insidious…. Against these enemies … the patriot citizen will keep a watchful guard.”
James Wilson was a great American statesman whose words reveal what was truly revolutionary about our experiment in liberty. His discussion of “those principles upon which we ourselves have thought and acted,” which echoed John Locke’s recognition that just government exists for the good of its people, not the other way around, is worth relearning. And just as for other Americans, the Supreme Court Reform Commission would benefit from proposals that recognize, with Wilson, that “without liberty, law loses its nature and its name, and becomes oppression,” because our liberties have grown far scarcer than the Constitution was designed to provide.
A recent post by Francis P. Sempa on the University Bookman site offers valuable information on the genesis of James Burnham’s Cold War global crusading. Burnham, who worked after World War II as a CIA agent, was the dominant intellectual influence behind William Buckley’s efforts at National Review to purge Old Right advocates of a noninterventionist foreign policy from American conservatism. Sempa points out that during his Marxist period, Burnham saw the world as a struggle among rival imperialist powers.
“In a February 1938 piece in Socialist Appeal, [a Trotskyist publication] Burnham analyzed the geopolitical evolution of U.S. foreign policy…. And in Franklin Roosevelt the U.S. as it approached a world war had ‘the most daring and brilliant politician whom this country has yet produced.’ Burnham called FDR a ‘close and critical student of international politics.’ Roosevelt, Burnham continued, was a bold and imperious leader who was ‘extraordinarily sensitive to the moods of the masses, and unscrupulous to the last degree in exploiting those moods.’
Roosevelt recognized that ‘modern capitalism can work only with the extension of the function of the state into wider and wider spheres.’ The New Deal was an ‘ideology’ used “to convince the masses that the government … is their government.’ Moreover, FDR had implemented policies ‘deliberately and consciously set toward war, and toward the creation of the most favorable circumstances for the conduct of war.’ In fact, Burnham opined, ‘war is Roosevelt’s solution for the economic crisis.’ In other words, war was part of the New Deal. It would save capitalism and serve Roosevelt’s political interests. In later columns, Burnham called it the ‘War Deal,’ and called Roosevelt ‘the chief War-Monger.’
The coming world war, Burnham wrote in Socialist Appeal, will be ‘a new world struggle for the re-partition of the world among the major imperialist rivals.’ ‘All the fine moral ideals,’ he wrote, ‘from democracy to religion to national independence, are, for the imperialists, only so much grist to the mills that turn out the cynical demagogy whereby they hope once more to delude the people.’”
It would appear, though the conclusion is mine and not Sempa’s, that after World War II, Burnham decided to join the imperialists rather than continue to oppose them.
Today marks the anniversary of a fateful day in the history of the Western world. On March 15, 44 BC, a group of Roman senators assassinated Gaius Julius Caesar. Caesar, dictator for lifetime, was seen by these senators, many of whom were personally indebted to him, as a tyrant and a threat to Roman liberty. His death was supposed to restore the republic. It is well known that the assassination of Caesar succeeded, but the republic fell into a civil war and ultimately became a monarchy.
The revolting senators thought the public to be on their side in the battle against tyranny, but the public turned against them, driving them out of the city. For a long time, these men were considered traitors. The quest for liberty may be a horrible struggle where its proponents face defeat and defamation for centuries, not knowing their reputation may be restored only long after their death. Nothing illustrates this better than the fate of the driving force behind the revolt against Caesar: Marcus Iunius Brutus. It was Brutus, the classic republican, who argued against the assassination of Marcus Antonius (Mark Antony), Caesar’s general. While the others viewed Antonius as a threat, to Brutus only Caesar was the tyrant and only his death was just. Yet Brutus was condemned based on the senate-backed lex pedia, persecuted, and ultimately committed suicide after losing the Battle of Philippi against Octavian and Antonius.
The fall of the republic shows that a people can lose its liberty by voluntarily submitting themselves to tyranny. It does not need a coup d’etat to suppress freedom. The question has recently been asked in an article by Ethan Yang for the American Institute of Economic Research: do we still have the will to continue as a free society? The citizens of the Western world have submitted themselves under the yoke of the lockdowns. The need for the feeling of security has certainly caused a great many citizens to abandon the idea of liberty. The ostracism of people presenting alternative views like Dr. Sunetra Gupta is the equivalent to the Roman proscription against Caesar’s assassins.
For centuries, Brutus was considered a traitor, on the same level as Judas—Dante placed the two in the inner circle of hell in his Divine Comedy. But when people rediscovered their striving for liberty, Brutus was elevated from hell. Michelangelo’s bust, depicting Brutus with proud posture and a decisive gaze, clearly expresses the republican resentment of tyranny. Scholars argue about Brutus role in Shakespeare’s Tragedy of Julius Caesar, but it is clear that he is not the scumbag traitor he has been before, and his portrayal is likely in opposition to Elisabethan absolutism. The example of Brutus shows that not abandoning the principle of liberty, despite facing present setbacks, might ultimately prove to keep the idea of liberty alive.
But there is something else Brutus shows us: that liberty is a value. It is not simply something that comes with some poorly defined “progress”, and nothing that, as unfortunately so many of us do today, can be taken for granted. We cannot assume it to simply return when the pandemic is over, because ultimately, the decision when it is over rests on us. The importance of liberty as a value means that it is something that motivates action. We have taken it for granted, we have placed many values before liberty, hence we are losing liberty. In a time where the republic was on the verge of falling to a despot, where the people have lost the value of liberty, Brutus had to abandon his ideals of pietas and amicitias for libertas and still lost the battle. But if we can revive the ideal of liberty in our fellow humans again, if we can encourage action based on this value and the revocation of consent to the modern despotism, no Brutus needs to make a sacrifice which is appreciated only after centuries.
I value liberty. I believe it is the task of those who do so to propagate liberty, and to keep in mind that, even if we might fail in the present, we might succeed later. This is why, in times where political statements can lead to ostracism and where the government tramples on our liberty, I keep a picture of Brutus at my desk.
I was sitting in my office at Washington and Jefferson College chatting with my department chairman, Felix Livingston. It was late spring of 1988. When the phone rang, Felix motioned for me to take the call. “Hello, this is Jeff Herbener.” “Jeffrey this is Murray, Murray Rothbard.” “Dr. Rothbard…” As soon as the words left my mouth, Felix stood up, nodded his head approvingly and left me to my conversation. Murray asked me about my background, what I had been reading, and projects I was working on. Then, to my surprise, he invited me to lecture at the upcoming Mises seminar in Advanced Austrian Economics at Stanford. He wanted me to deliver the lectures designed for William Hutt, who had taken ill and regrettably passed away on June 19 six days before the conference began. Although I had been reading into the Austrian literature for a few years, I wasn’t familiar with Hutt’s work yet or his lecture topics, such as labor economics, especially at an advanced level. With just a few weeks to go before the conference, I thought it ill-advised to accept. I figured that when I refused his invitation, our conversation would end. Instead, without missing a beat, he invited me to lecture at the Introduction to Austrian Economics seminar at Dartmouth in August. I was both surprised and delighted to accept his gracious second offer.
The conference opened with a social event the evening before classes began. I met and talked with other faculty members, David Gordon, Hans Hoppe, Roger Garrison and, of course, the founder and president of the Mises Institute, Lew Rockwell. But, I couldn’t get close to Murray, who was continuously surrounded by a flock of students and supporters. Without a doubt, he was the most gregarious person I had ever known. It was amazing to see how effective he was in interacting with everyone. Never a question too basic or advanced, never a student too timid or aggressive, never monologuing, never overbearing, never flagging, Murray was truly remarkable. He left others better than he found them.
Murray gave a spellbinding lecture to open the conference and an inspirational talk to end it. His lectures were bristling with insights and delivered winsomely. Meanwhile, I had prepared a lecture on the wrong topic. I was assigned to talk about the history of thought on capital theory. Mistakenly, I thought my lecture was on the theory of capital, a topic which had been assigned to Roger. He, manfully, saved my bacon by lecturing on my topic instead of the one he had prepared. Later that day, I was walking on the campus with David and Murray and they both graciously complimented me on my lecture never mentioning that I nearly derailed the train. Despite my blunder, Murray invited me back to the next Mises University.
My favorite moment at the conference was during a Q&A session. All students and faculty were convened in a large lecture hall. A student stood up with a question which he prefaced with “my question is for anyone on the faculty panel who is not an anarcho-capitalist.” After a few moments of silence, it was clear that none of us qualified to field his question. Murray broke the silence with a brief cackle. I’m sure I wasn’t the only one to detect a sense of satisfaction in his outburst.
Murray’s writings will continue to make a deep impression on generations to come. For those of us who were privileged to know him, he has blessed us further with a gift of personal inspiration.
I met Murray in 1988 and I will never forget the experience. The story begins the previous year, as I was completing my bachelor’s degree in economics at the University of North Carolina and considering pursuing a PhD. I was familiar with Murray’s writings as a semicloseted Austrian in a mainstream economics program. I had seen an advertisement for some strange group called the “Mises Institute” which was offering fellowships for graduate study in economics, and I eagerly applied. Sometime later I received a letter—it was all snail mail back in the day—saying that my application had received a favorable initial review, and that the next step was “to have a telephone interview with our Vice President for Academic Affairs.” You guessed it! A phone call with Murray was arranged. You can imagine how nervous I was the day of that interview! But Rothbard was friendly and engaging, his legendary charisma coming across even over the phone, and he quickly put me at ease. (I also applied for admission to New York University’s graduate program in economics, which got me a phone call from Israel Kirzner. Talk about the proverbial kid in the candy store!) I won the Mises fellowship, and eventually enrolled in the economics PhD program at the University of California, Berkeley, which I started in 1988.
Before my first summer of graduate school, I was privileged to attend the “Mises University,” then called the “Advanced Instructional Program in Austrian Economics,” a week-long program of lectures and discussions held that year at Stanford University and led by Rothbard, Hans-Hermann Hoppe, Roger Garrison, and David Gordon. Meeting Murray and his colleagues was a transformational experience. They were brilliant, energetic, enthusiastic, and optimistic. Graduate school was no cake walk—the required core courses in (mathematical) economic theory and statistics drove many students to the brink of despair, and some of them doubtless have nervous twitches to this day—but the knowledge that I was part of a larger movement, a scholarly community devoted to the Austrian approach, kept me going through the darker hours.
That week-long experience in the summer of 1988 was amazing, not just for the instructional content per se, but also for the social and informal aspects. Nearly all reminiscences of Murray note his indefatigable spirit, his incredible energy, and his humor, as well as his penchant for late-night dining, drinking, and discussion. There was plenty of that, and it was a privilege to hang out with Murray and the other faculty (though few could hang in there until the wee hours) and students. In these conversations, while Murray was the center of attention, he didn’t dominate the conversation, but asked questions, listened, and engaged. Along these lines, Murray was what people today call a “lifelong learner.” I remember one session of the conference at which one of the other faculty was presenting. Murray was in the audience and I was sitting right behind him. At one point I leaned forward and was shocked to see that he was taking copious notes. I thought, Doesn’t this guy already know everything? But no, he was paying close attention to the other speakers—themselves younger Rothbardians—hoping to pick up a few nuggets of insight, some new perspective or approach, a new interpretation, or another way of increasing his own understanding. I have tried to model that behavior in my own career.
Women’s History Month celebrates many who have made incredible contributions. But I have never seen a woman who “could literally save the world” by how she advanced liberty honored during it. It is time to rectify that omission and recognize Isabel Paterson.
Her most notable contribution came in 1943, when, according to David T. Beito, “Defenders of the free market were under siege and in decline.” But then, the “three furies” of libertarianism, as William F. Buckley Jr. called them, “[e]ach helped to build the foundation for the modern libertarian movement.” Isabel Paterson published The God of the Machine, Ayn Rand published The Fountainhead, and Rose Wilder Lane published The Discovery of Freedom. But “[o]f the three, The God of the Machine was the most explicit and sophisticated discussion of free markets, constitutional structures, and the fallacies of interventionism.” In fact, it was a letter from Ayn Rand that said it “could literally save the world.”
Ron Paul provided an example of Patterson’s influence in End the Fed when he wrote, “Having read Isabel Paterson, I was not only influenced but convinced that a philosophy that embraced personal liberty, private property, and sound money was the only political philosophy worth championing.” So it is not surprising that among her accolades Paul A. Cantor called Paterson “one of the great champions of freedom in the twentieth century” and her biographer, Stephen D. Cox, called her the “earliest progenitor of libertarianism as we know it today.” Jim Powell considers that Paterson’s The God of the Machine “secured her immortality in the annals of liberty.”
All of those endorsements make it clear that The God of the Machine’s wisdom is also important today, because freedom still has far too many defenders, among a host of attackers:
If everyone were invariably honest, able, wise, and kind, there should be no occasion for government. Everyone would readily understand what is desirable and what is possible in given circumstances, all would concur upon the best means toward their purpose and for equitable participation in the ensuing benefits, and would act without compulsion or default.Since human beings will sometimes lie, shirk, break promises, fail to improve their faculties, act imprudently, seize by violence the goods of others, and even kill one another in anger or greed, government might be defined as the police organization. In that case, it must be described as a necessary evil. It would have no existence as a separate entity, and no intrinsic authority; it could not be justly empowered to act excepting as individuals infringed one another’s rights, when it should enforce prescribed penalties. Generally, it would stand in the relation of a witness to contract, holding a forfeit for the parties. As such, the least practicable measure of government must be the best. Anything beyond the minimum must be oppression.The power to do things for people is also the power to do things to people.Politics consists of the power to prohibit, obstruct, and expropriate … it always tends to encroach on the primary field of freedom, in such manner that the producer may be compelled to obtain permission before he can get to work. Where permission is required, or expropriation possible, a consideration may be extorted.Government cannot “restore competition,” or “ensure” it. Government is monopoly; and all it can do is to impose restrictions which may issue in monopoly, when they go so far as to require permission for the individual to engage in production. This is the essence of the Society of Status.No law can give power to private persons; every law transfers power from private persons to government.Poverty can be brought about by law; it cannot be forbidden by law.Now the sole remedy for the abuse of political power is to limit it; but when politics corrupt business, modern reformers invariably demand the enlargement of the political power.The least practicable measure of government must be the best. Anything beyond the minimum must be oppression.Men are born free … since they begin with no government, they must therefore institute government by voluntary agreement, and thus government must be their agent, not their superior … the individual has the precedent right.In reason if one man has no right to command all other men—the expedient of despotism—neither has he any right to command even one other man; nor yet have ten men, or a million, the right to command even one other man, for ten times nothing is nothing, and a million times nothing is nothing.Any time when finance is under attack through the political authority, it is an infallible sign that the political authority is already exercising too much power over the economic life of the nation through manipulation of finance, whether by exorbitant taxation, uncontrolled expenditure, unlimited borrowing, or currency depreciation.Every politically controlled educational system will inculcate the doctrine of state supremacy sooner or later…. Once that doctrine has been accepted, it becomes an almost superhuman task to break the stranglehold of the political power over the life of the citizen. It has had his body, property and mind in its clutches from infancy. An octopus would sooner release its prey.Education under the political power … once it has obtained full control … routes human energy into the dead-end political channels.As now the case, [people] will even forget the larger principles they have applied, and on which their well-being depends.If it were promised that from the hour of his birth no man should ever again stand in his naked skin, who is to produce the clothes? who is to have such absolute power over every person? The only condition in which no one can experience poverty, want, or fear, is that of rigor mortis.If profit is denounced, it must be assumed that running at a loss is admirable. On the contrary, that is what requires justification. Profit is self-justifying.If a man were paid to pick up pebbles on the beach and throw them into the ocean, it would be just the same as if he were in a “government job,” or on the dole; the producers have to supply his subsistence with no return.In arguing against free enterprise capitalism, the collectivist always adopts the false assumption of a fixed number of jobs in that system. Conversely, in arguing for collectivism, he always assumes that there will be as many jobs as there are workers. The government will make the jobs.Why did the humanitarian philosophy of eighteenth-century Europe usher in the Reign of Terror? … it followed from the original premise, objective and means proposed. The objective is to do good to others as a primary justification of existence; the means is the power of the collective; and the premise is that “good” is collective.The biggest pests are the people who use altruism as an alibi. What they passionately wish is to make themselves important.The humanitarian in theory is the terrorist in action.Most of the harm in the world is done by good people, and not by accident, lapse, or omission. It is the result of their deliberate actions, long persevered in, which they hold to be motivated by high ideals toward virtuous ends. Isabel Paterson wrote a great many things people did not want to hear. But whether those things involved pipe dreams of imagining scarcity out of existence, of government invokable as a presumed universal panacea, with magical powers over finance, rather than a ubiquitous threat to freedom, or any other delusion, social cooperation possibilities expand by thinking more accurately. As she said, “In human affairs, all that endures is what men think.” And she made a central contribution to our ability to think that can endure if we pay it heed. Perhaps that is why Ayn Rand thought The God of the Machine could “save the world.” But that hope for improvement also highlights the alternative—the risk of continuing to degrade our thinking rather than elevating it. And Isabel Paterson left us an appropriate warning of that, as well:
Whoever is fortunate enough to be an American citizen came into the greatest inheritance man has ever enjoyed. He has had the benefit of every heroic and intellectual effort men have made for many thousands of years, realized at last. If Americans should now turn back, submit again to slavery, it would be a betrayal so base the human race might better perish.
Today would have been Murray Rothbard’s ninety-fifth birthday. He was an unforgettable friend whose immense knowledge of many different fields was unsurpassed in my experience. In a lecture on the Austrian theory of the business cycle, he mentioned the common objection that the expansion of bank credit might have no effect if investors anticipated trouble. After the lecture, I asked whether Mises had answered this point. He said, “See his response to Lachmann in Economica 1943.” I often went to used bookstores with him, in both Palo Alto and Manhattan, and listened to him as he commented on nearly every book on the shelves. When he was a student at Columbia, he admired the philosopher Ernest Nagel, who he said would always encourage students to do new work. Murray was like this himself. He constantly encouraged students to work on Austrian and libertarian topics. As I think about him today, another story comes to mind. He would stay up very late and also get up late. Once at a conference, I stayed up until 1:30 in the morning listening to him talk to a group of people. When I told him I had to leave, he said, "The night is still young!" His support for me was never failing, and I owe him everything. If only he were still here now, to guide and instruct us!
This month, UCLA economist William R. Allen, whom Peter Boettke called “a force in the great UCLA tradition of economic education,” passed away at ninety-six. As I was privileged to work with him both as a graduate student and subsequently, I would like to offer a few thoughts.
Bill influenced me even before graduate school. I used his phenomenal book with Armen Alchian, University Economics, as an undergraduate. I was blown away by its clarity and power (Don Boudreaux called it “Among the ten greatest books ever written in economics,” with “keener instincts into economic forces at work than are had by some Nobel laureates in economics.”), which was a major reason I chose UCLA for graduate school. Then I used it there as a teaching assistant.
I was unable to take classes from Bill. But I worked with him on various free market projects. Mainly, I worked in connection with his famed Midnight Economist broadcasts. Named for its radio time slot, it clearly and consistently developed the principles of economics to a lay audience from 1978 to 1992. In doing so, I “caught” some things that have stuck with me. I saw the importance of good writing. My “tastes” became for a good argument were heightened. And I became (and stayed) sold on communicating economic principles to “real” people in understandable language, because I think that has the greatest potential to change the world for the better.
After leaving graduate school, Bill let me use his Midnight Economist scripts for a booklet of some of my favorites, which I edited, with added questions, to stimulate class discussion.
Since my closest connection to Bill Allen is via The Midnight Economist, I would like to mark his passing with some of my favorite wisdom from it, which stands in sharp contrast with public policy discourse.
Economic analysis…elegant tools and rigorous techniques of thought must be supplemented with accumulated learning and developed wisdom in order to distinguish the profound from the superficial, the appropriate from the inapt and the inept, and the feasible from what cannot work well.A world of scarcity is inherently a hard world. But…what ground rules and institutions can we evolve and adopt which will enable people to live together peacefully and productively?People usually have done as well in their personal affairs as they have been permitted to do….Much of our misery has stemmed from dumb economics—inefficient institutions, inappropriate property fights, wasteful processes, debilitating policies.The best of achievable worlds will still be a world of scarcity—and thus a world of choices, costs, and competition. But good economics will help us to do best, even if not well, in a hard world.Market processes, with efficient production and exchange…do not require that we like one another and are inspired by purity of heart to cooperate with one another. Market institutions and prices provide options and incentives to use our privately-owned resources well…we individually prosper by supplying valuable goods and services to others.With appropriate ground rules of the market, we can—quite amazingly—channel acquisitive instincts and aggressive inclinations to mutual advantage and the common good.Do we ration goods among competing claimants through fighting and force? That is suicidal anarchy. Do we ration through governmental directives? That is stultifying repression. Do we ration through market processes? That is efficient freedom.Negotiated harmony…[is] a matter of rights to use of property. When those rights rest with a governmental third-party dispenser of privileges, the society and the firms inevitably fight and resources are badly used as alternatives are restricted and costs are ignored. But when those property rights are privately owned, market negotiations replace grabs for politically exercised power and persuasion is used through appeals to the interests of the other party. The choice…is not difficult.Freedom of individual choice is compatible with—and, indeed, required for—socially efficient use of a scarce resource, with people paying and receiving market-clearing prices….To obtain more, one efficiently produces what others want… neither producer nor consumer…imposes his will on the other. Each has only the right to offer for sale or to purchase.Each person is the appropriate, relevant judge of his own condition…no matter what the preferences and assessments of others may be.Freedom must mean the right to choose among offerings….Give me options—and then stand aside while I make my own choices.When the objective is efficiency in using resources, the mind of man has not conceived, and the machinations of man have not evolved, a better arrangement than a private property, price-directed economy.The market produces sinews of adaptability to and survival in an unfriendly world.Economics is not to be the ultimate arbiter of morality and ethics. Indeed, economics is amoral, being simply a technique of thought to help explain—dispassionately—certain cause-and-effect relationships. In uncoerced exchange, both parties gain, and, if no one else is hurt, it might seem pretty clear that the transaction should be permitted.Moral outrage…is not an adequate substitute for systematic thought.In their own interests, people will listen to the market, and adjust to it, if government does not block the message….But…we can frustrate its beneficial operation.Political sorts commonly are not very good economists.There are those anxious to diddle with data, not to comprehend the world, but to promote a political purpose.Controls…bring only regimentation, shortages, less wealth, and loss of much personal liberty.In a purported spirit of “fairness” and a striving for “equity,” we sometimes stipulate maximum prices….Such stipulation does not eliminate scarcity. It does not eliminate competition. Rather, it simply curtails one form of competition, so alternative forms must now be used.“Taxes are what we pay for civilized society,” observed Oliver Wendell Holmes in an era of very low taxation. But more taxes do not necessarily produce more civility.Compared with the marketplace….The fundamental problem of government is not so much inadequate ethics as of deficient rules, which provide inadequate information, faulty guidance and ineffectual constraints.No politician’s quickie gimmick of market subversion will make us wealthy.In the world of economics….We can easily mislead ourselves by stopping the thought process too quickly, noting only immediate characteristics of problems and effects of policies, overlooking indirect implications and consequences. Rest in peace, Bill. Thank you for the lessons.
The first year of this decade has given us time to pause and think about how the world stands in terms of global development. One widely used statistic to examine development, which shall be called the “dollar-a-day” idea, measures the idea of poverty in an all too narrow manner. For this article, we will examine the limitations of this metric, as well as implications of a theoretical notion by John Maynard Keynes that predicted poverty would end by 2030.
A Brief History In an online lecture series based on his book, The Age of Sustainable Development, author Jeffrey Sachs puts forth the idea that poverty could be a thing of the past by 2030. For this, he draws upon a musing from John Maynard Keynes, where the father of modern macroeconomic theory wrote in 1930 about how poverty would end in the span of a hundred years. This view of poverty is associated with material wealth: John Maynard Keynes was, after all, a privileged Englishman in his day.
In this day and age, Jeffrey Sachs links this to the idea of extreme poverty being eradicated by ensuring that every person in the global population lives over the international poverty line, as dictated by the World Bank. This same poverty line was conceived in the 1990’s as a threshold of living off a dollar a day, or equivalent. There are, however, some problems with using this standard as the single benchmark for ending poverty within the next decade.
The Dangers of This Definition The first problem is that the dollar-a-day measure is based on an idea that is now three decades old. It is pegged to the currency of one economy, and, as some would argue, is still too low to be contextually appropriate in all cases. Should we still take this measure at face value?
There have been attempts to continue adjusting and salvaging the metric to suit the needs of today, such as drawing other thresholds to factor in inflation at $1.25, $1.90, or even rounding up to $2 a day, or by calculating against purchasing power parity for local currencies.
That said, there have also been great strides made in development studies since the 1990s, especially in the qualitative sense, to get a better and more holistic idea of poverty than by simply having a dollar a day, two dollars a day, or whatever other variation of this idea is being used, to dictate definitions of poverty.
Speaking of simplicity, that is the second problem. One appeal of the basic income approach to development is that it allows for easy, though sometimes arbitrary, ways to set simple standards to determine if someone is in poverty or not, just by picking a threshold and looking at what they earn as income. For example, if you happen to be earning and living off $2.00 a day as your basic income, then you are not considered to be poor by the dollar-a-day metric, end of story.
This idea has also formed the basis for national governments to form and create other simple metrics to set their own standards of poverty, and to enact policies that attempt to raise the standard of living for their citizens. However, the actions of citizens, influenced by local culture, personal subjectivity, and other factors, often reveal to us that such policies are inadequate relative to what people actually perceive as in their needs in life, which necessarily include more than just having money.
As a metric, the dollar-a-day measure is, pardon the pun, quite poor: indeed, it is argued that poverty statistics do suffer from a certain poverty, as posited by Don Mathews. The whole experience of poverty, and even the value of human life itself, cannot simply be captured and depicted in numbers and statistics. This is the third danger of defining poverty in such a manner.
The temptation to define poverty solely by income ignores other, deeper, and more complex issues related to it, such as the need for freedom and inclusion in society. Does having a dollar a day also mean that one's personal rights and liberties are respected? Or that one is happier with life, and not in a fleeting sense, but in a sense of lasting happiness? If not, then one continues to be in poverty and unfree as well, even if the number imposed on them says that they are no longer poor.
Listen to the Audio Mises Wire version of this article.
With Donald Trump safely out of the way, it is now safe for politicians and their friends in the media to begin scaling back their panicked hysteria over covid-19.
For example, last week the Democratic mayor of Chicago, Lori Lightfoot, suddenly had a change of heart on the city’s forced lockdowns and announced she’ll work to scale back the state’s covid-19 mandates. The local CBS affiliate reports:
Thursday morning, Lightfoot said she plans to have a conversation with Gov. JB Pritzker about how to begin rolling back virus mitigation efforts ASAP.
“I want to get our restaurants and bars reopened as quickly as possible,” she said.
Meanwhile, in Colorado, the governor announced a few hours before Biden was inaugurated that he was shutting down the state’s never-used emergency hospital. The local Fox affiliate reports:
The Colorado Division of Homeland Security and Emergency Management announced Tuesday evening that the Colorado Convention Center in downtown Denver will be decommissioned as an alternative care site for COVID-19 patients.
A spokesperson for the division confirms the Convention Center never housed any patients.
The Convention Center was prepared to house up to 2,200 patients if hospitals could not handle the demand. The conversion into a makeshift hospital was made in April 2020.
For months, the state’s governor, Jared Polis, insisted that the overflow hospital had to be maintained and that an enormous surge in cases could happen at any time. But then, at virtually the same time Biden was inaugurated, Polis announced these precautions weren’t needed anymore.
Meanwhile, the governor of Massachusetts (a Republican critic of Donald Trump) announced today that he “would begin lifting some coronavirus restrictions” including the stay-at-home advisory and the 9:30 p.m. curfew.
Keep in mind that the regular flu season doesn't peak until March, which means we ought to still be hearing about how we must fear the "twindemic" and how we still have a long, hard winter ahead of us. At least, that's what we were still hearing in December. But now, suddenly, with at least two months of the peak-mortality period to go, we're hearing that everything is headed in the right direction. It could all be a coincidence, but I remain skeptical.
Listen to the Audio Mises Wire version of this article.
On January 15, Wikipedia turns 20. Its anniversary is a good time to celebrate the success of a service that has become so useful to so many.
Members of my family, for instance, have undertaken university training in mathematics, economics, accounting, philosophy, English, art history, theology, counseling, women’s studies, education, and digital editing. All of us agree that Wikipedia is valuable. When used sensibly, it can be highly productive, particularly as a place to start learning about a topic.
A good place to see Wikipedia’s usefulness can be seen in its entry on itself. It is a lengthy piece (and recently updated, of course) which clearly strives for balance. My recent search turned up fifty major headings, 365 footnotes, and many references for further study. That it offers such easily accessible information and connections for further investigation has made it the most popular general reference work site on the internet, with 365 million readers, 55 million articles (over 6.2 million in English) in 285 languages, and still growing, and has ranked it among the fifteen most popular websites overall.
While almost everyone I have talked to about Wikipedia has a generally positive view of it, as an economist, I found certain things particularly important. As Wikipedia’s former executive director, Sue Gardner, wrote on its twelfth anniversary:
An encyclopedia is one of humankind’s grandest displays of collaborative effort, and Wikipedia takes that collaboration to new levels.
I don’t know of a comparable effort, a more diverse collection of people coming together, in peace, for a single goal.
Wikipedia has become an indispensable part of the world’s information infrastructure.
Each of these statements draws on something—the degree of collaboration, the extent to which it incorporates diversity, the degree to which it achieves its goal in peace, that it is an indispensable source of information for many—that should remind us that anyone who likes Wikipedia should like markets more, because voluntary exchange in markets is mankind’s most productive collaborative accomplishment.
Wikipedia, with its thousands of contributors and millions of beneficiaries, is still a much smaller demonstration of the beauty of collaboration than we find in the voluntary associations that make up markets. Exchange interactions bring everyone into collaboration, whether they intend to collaborate or not.
In markets, every participant’s preferences and values are incorporated into the results. Everyone who chooses to buy does so voluntarily, reflecting the fact that they place a greater value on what they receive than on what they give up. Everyone who chooses to sell does so voluntarily, reflecting the fact that they, too, place a greater value on what they receive than on what they give up. And those market relationships move goods and services to more highly valued forms, locations, and time periods, as well as to owners who place higher values on them, which are the only changes self-interested parties will mutually agree to. That is a far vaster field of social cooperation than Wikipedia. And everyone who uses the prices that result as information about the tradeoffs others are willing to make—that is, everyone—benefits from it.
Because markets reflect the choices—and therefore the preferences, abilities, and circumstances—of their participants, they also reflect the changes that impact them, communicating that information to others through relative price changes. While Wikipedia is far more nimble than other reference sources when it comes to incorporating new information, markets incorporate vastly greater amounts of useful new information far more quickly.
In fact, as Friedrich Hayek pointed out in “The Use of Knowledge in Society,” markets can incorporate information initially known only to one individual, even if she has no intention of benefiting others by that knowledge. That is because her self-interested market behavior will be reflected in price changes that communicate the consequences of that information, regardless of her intent. And that will allow for its productive use not just in the market where the information makes its initial appearance, but in markets for related products, such as substitutes, substitutes of those substitutes, complements, etc., in an expanding universe of effects.
Further, Wikipedia focuses on presenting facts that can be articulated and whose sources can be traced. But in markets, there is so much more information—including all the details of time and place that can change individual evaluations of goods and services—that it overwhelms our ability to know and process it. Much of that information is transitory and often not even articulable. Markets still incorporate that information by answering the question we are typically most interested in with respect to our productive associations: How much?
How much will someone else give me for something, or how much will someone else demand from me for it? While sparing us from the need to know all the infinitely complex combinations of who, what, when, where, and how, drastically economizing on information costs, it communicates the most essential things we wish to know through prices and changes in them.
When one thinks carefully about the beyond-remarkable feats of social coordination markets make possible, it is not hard to understand why Hayek concluded:
I am convinced that if [the market system] were the result of human design, and if the people guided by the price changes understood that their decisions have significance far beyond their immediate aim, this mechanism would have been acclaimed as one of the greatest triumphs of the human mind.
Add to these marvels the fact that the market’s amazing feats of cooperation are accomplished in peace. When one’s property rights are well defined and defended, only voluntary arrangements are possible. Or as Leonard Read put it in his most famous book, Anything That’s Peaceful is allowed, but nothing that is not. Force is employed only when necessary to stop those who would violate others’ rights.
Indeed, early leaders of the free trade movement emphasized not just markets’ advantages for society in general, and the poor in particular, but for the advancement of peace. In Richard Cobden’s words:
[We] advocated Free Trade, not merely on account of the material wealth which it would bring to the community, but for the far loftier motive of securing permanent peace [with] people…brought into mutual dependence by the supply of each others’ wants.
The peaceful nature of market interactions is all the more amazing in view of the fact that unlike the shared goals that motivate the writers of a Wikipedia article, markets do not advance a single agreed goal. They vastly expand social cooperation, but that cooperation is in service of individuals’ widely disparate, often conflicting, goals. For example, we all desire food, clothing, and shelter, but we do not want the same amounts or kinds of food, clothing, or shelter, nor do we want them for the same people, at the same time, in the same quality and form, or in the same place. And that holds for innumerable other things.
Markets are not just a far more “indispensable part of the world’s information infrastructure” than Wikipedia, they provide their services under a greater handicap: governments do not constantly attack and undermine the information Wikipedia provides. In contrast, the information infrastructure provided by markets is widely undermined by government through a panoply of intrusions, including price ceilings and floors, taxes and subsidies, protectionism (tariffs, quotas, and nontariff barriers), and regulations that deter entry and stifle innovation.
Wikipedia is an impressive success story. It is informative, collaborative, diverse, and peaceful. But it is not humanity’s greatest collaborative effort, nor its greatest source of useful information. Those arise from the incredible benefits of people’s peaceful, voluntary arrangements in markets, when they are not short-circuited by government interference and hindrances. Consequently, if we could only give voluntary market arrangements the kind of respect and freedom Wikipedia enjoys, it would provide a major step forward for humanity.
Recently, I told my wife that the 2020 election follies made me think of John Milton. She commented that I may have been the only one in America to make that connection to the second most important author in the English language, after Shakespeare, best known for his poetry. After all, very little of this year’s politics has been poetic (though it could be argued to fit somewhere in Paradise Lost). I was thinking of Milton’s prose.
The primary reason is that well before America was founded, Milton famously argued for freedoms of speech and the press, and against censorship in England. His defense of freedom of conscience and religious toleration later powerfully resonated with America’s founders, as is most evident in the First Amendment to the US Constitution.
In contrast, we have of late been experiencing a widespread attack of censorship, which has not just limited citizens’ freedom of expression, but undermined Americans’ ability to inform themselves before voting for who will represent them. Because it originated with private actors rather than government, even though the intent was to dictate the government chosen, it was not a violation of the First Amendment. But the consequences of multiple powerful actors putting all of their thumbs on the same side of the scales they intended voters to use was, and remains, a serious threat to America. So it is worth remembering John Milton’s words on behalf of freedom of belief and expression, and their connection to our ability to discover truth.
Give me the liberty to know, to utter, and to argue freely according to conscience, above all liberties.Truth….Let her and falsehood grapple.Who ever knew Truth put to the worse in a free and open encounter?Truth…needs no policies or stratagems…to make her victorious. These are the shifts and the defenses that error uses against her power.There is no learned man but will confess he hath much profited by reading controversies—his senses awakened, his judgment sharpened, and the truth which he holds firmly established. If then it be profitable for him to read, why should it not at least be tolerable and free for his adversary to write…it follows then, that all controversy being permitted, falsehood will appear more false, and truth the more true; which must needs conduce much to the general confirmation of an implicit truth.If it come to prohibiting, there is aught more likely to be prohibited than truth itself.No institution which does not continually test its ideals, techniques and measure of accomplishment can claim real vitality.When complaints are freely heard, deeply considered, and speedily reformed, then is the utmost bound of civil liberty obtained that wise men look for.Knowledge forbidden? Suspicious, reasonless. Why…?Truth and understanding are not such wares as to be monopolized.When language in common use in any country becomes irregular and depraved, it is followed by their ruin and degradation. For what do terms…which are at once corrupt and misapplied, denote but a people listless, supine, and ripe for servitude?How oft [have] nations gone corrupt…by their own devices brought down to servitude.Discern…in what things persuasion only is to work. Not only was Milton an important advocate for freedom to discover truth without artificial constraint, he was an influential defender of other liberties whose defense relies upon that discovery. America’s founding generation echoed him in several ways. In fact, one could say that is best reflected in the Declaration of Independence’s assertion of unalienable rights to “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness,” which, while more famously connected to the thought of John Locke, can also be collapsed into the word liberty, as Milton used it, as our right to life is part of our liberty and our ability to pursue happiness is the result of liberty.
In contrast, much of what has been proposed by politicians this year has involved widespread invasions of our liberties, disguised by focusing only on those promises to give, without much mention of the corresponding unavoidable promises to take from others to do so. His words sharpen our ability to judge that deviation from the ideas that created America.
No man…can be so stupid to deny that all men naturally were born free, being the image and resemblance of God himself.The whole freedom of man consists either in spiritual or civil liberty.[God] created them free and free they must remain.Liberty…who loves that, must first be wise and good.None can love freedom but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license, which never hath more scope than under tyrants.Nations grow corrupt, love bondage more than liberty.[Those] with their freedom lost, all virtue lose.Liberty of conscience…above all other things ought to be to all men dearest and most precious.Liberty hath a sharp and double edge, fit only to be handled by just and virtuous men; to bad and dissolute, it becomes a mischief unwieldy in their own hands: neither is it completely given, but by them who have the happy skill to know what is grievance and unjust to a people, and how to remove it wisely; what good laws are wanting, and how to frame them substantially, that good men may enjoy the freedom which they merit, and the bad the curb which they need.Love Virtue, she alone is free.Is it just or reasonable, that…voices against the main end of government should enslave [those] that would be free? They who seek nothing but their own just liberty, have always right to win it and to keep it, whenever they have power, be the voices ever so numerous that oppose it.Who can in reason then or right assume monarchy over such as live by right his equals, if in power or splendor less, in freedom equal?The power of Kings and Magistrates is nothing else, but what is only derivative, transferred and committed to them in trust from the People, to the Common good of them all, in whom the power yet remains fundamentally, and cannot be taken from them, without a violation of their natural birthright.It is lawful…for anyone who have the power to call to account a tyrant. Americans have been major beneficiaries of John Milton’s literary blows for liberty against tyranny through his political impact on our founders. But this year’s dramatic violations of our freedom to seek the truth and express our views to one another, and its widespread proposals to violate other core liberties, show that heritage to be at serious risk. Revisiting Milton’s arguments in these areas is a good way to recognize the risks we have already been exposed to and their ominous implications for the future and a good source of reinforcement for the principles our country was founded upon. And at their heart is his conclusion that free we must remain.
As is often pointed out by prolockdown publications like the New York Times, Sweden has experienced covid-19 deaths at a rate above that of some of its neighbors that imposed relatively strict lockdowns, such as Denmark.
What is rarely mentioned, however, is that Sweden's deaths per million are also similar to or lower than many countries that did impose harsh lockdowns. For example, as of October 18, the deaths per million in the United Kingdom were 643 in the UK for only 585 in Sweden. Meanwhile, Belgium's death rate was 897 per million, and Italy's rate was 606. Moreover, while cases and deaths are increasing in the UK, Spain, Italy, and Belgium, deaths are apparently flatlining in Sweden. Sweden has reported fewer than ten deaths in the past week.
Clearly, this trend calls into question the official narrative, which is that any country without harsh lockdowns will experience far higher death rates than the countries that lock down.
That narrative having failed in the case of Sweden, prolockdown critics have attempted other explanations. One is that population density is lower in Sweden, so therefore it will have lower deaths per million. This claim leaves much to be desired. New research suggests the data is, at best, inconclusive on that matter. While density is like a factor of some kind, there's no evidence it is a factor to the extent that would be necessary to explain why Sweden has performed better than the UK and Spain, for instance.
Another theory is that the Swedes have voluntarily practiced social distancing so studiously, that this explains away the apparent failure of the "forced lockdown or die" narrative.
As one reporter at Quartz claimed: "Citizens seems to be taking their responsibility seriously. Residents point out that they are practicing social distancing, with the elderly isolated, and families mostly staying home, apart from kids in school."
Or in an article at MedPageToday: "'Swedes in general have changed their behavior to a great extent during the pandemic and the practice of social distancing as well as physical distancing in public places and at work has been widespread,' said Maria Furberg, MD, PhD, an infectious diseases expert at Umea University Hospital in northeastern Sweden."
But, again, the data doesn't show this.
Using the Google Community Mobility Trends data, we find that the Sweden practiced social distancing far less than countries that had strict lockdowns in place.
For example, the amount of time spent at home surged 30 percent in the UK, Spain, and Italy during the harshest lockdown period. Yet during this same period, the Swedes's amount of time spent at home never exceeded 15 percent.
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Meanwhile, the decline in workplace visitors has tended to be relatively small compared to countries with stricter lockdowns and with higher death rates.
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We find similar trends in recreation and retail:
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And in the use of transit:
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Ancient Rome, Greece, Babylon, Egypt, India, China, and Africa too, all had slavery. None of them created the Industrial Revolution. Great Britain and the United States did create the Industrial Revolution, on a foundation of economic freedom and respect for individual rights.
The great blemish of slavery played no greater positive role in the history of the US than it had played previously in the world, which is to say virtually none. Ignoring its overwhelming negatives, its utmost positive contribution here may have been a temporarily larger supply of raw cotton. But even that is probably not true. Free labor could have picked cotton. True, it would have had to be paid more than a wage equal to the price of a slave's minimum necessities, but it undoubtedly would have been less expensive per pound of cotton picked.
Free labor would have done away with the cost of a system of overseers and the cost of acquiring slaves. It could easily have been accompanied by a system of piecework and thus eager competition among workers in picking more cotton and thereby earning more money. Free workers would also have been motivated to find brand new ways to increase production, because they would have financially greatly benefited from doing so. Thus, improvements in raw cotton production might have come generations sooner. People who believe that slavery is an efficient system of production are people who are ready to impose 100 percent marginal rates of taxation in the belief that doing so is economically harmless.
The alleged economic benefit of slavery is a core belief of the Left both in current politics and in the interpretation of economic history. It sees no connection between freedom and production and no difference between work for positive gain and work to avoid pain.
Fundamentally, the Left does not recognize the distinction between human beings and draft animals, in that it believes the value of human beings derives from their muscles rather than their motivated minds. So far is slavery from having been a source of gain in the United States that the actual truth is that had it never existed and had no African ever been involuntarily brought to the US, the effect would have been enormously positive economically, socially, and culturally. Incentives to produce and save would have been greatly increased. No portion of accumulated savings would have been constituted by the market value of human beings but only by that of physical assets, implying the accumulation of more physical assets. There would have been no need for a civil war to free the slaves, a war that killed six hundred thousand Americans. And today there would be no racial animosities traceable to slavery.
The US would be more the country that its fundamental principles have designed it to be: a country in which the material self-interests of men function harmoniously, to the benefit of all, because they deal with one another by means of voluntary trade, not physical force.
Slavery is as much an economic benefit as holding up gas stations. Not only does the gas station owner lose what the robber gains, but both his motivation to produce and his means of producing are reduced. A world of robbery, which is what slavery is, is a world of great poverty.
This is why the standard of living of even the kings and emperors of the preindustrial world was far below that of the average worker in any capitalist country today.
America is about growth and getting big, supersized, or bigly, as the president would say. There’s no debate, growth is good, in fact essential; bigger is better.
One man who believes the end of all this bigness is nigh is Kirkpatrick Sale, a prolific author, most notably of Human Scale and Human Scale Revisited, and a notable proponent of secession. Simply put, Sale believes the world is destroying itself. In a piece for LewRockwell.com Sale wrote, “the government we have in this country is too incompetent, inept, corrupt, wasteful, and inefficient, too centralized, undemocratic, unjust, and invasive, and too unresponsive to the needs of individual citizens and small communities, and all because it is too big.”
For readers wanting a warm-up before launching into the meaty Human Scale, Sale’s latest book is The Collapse of 2020, which started with a $1,000 bet Sale made in 1995 with Wired magazine editor Kevin Kelly that civilization would collapse by, well, 2020. At the time, that year sounded a long way off and Sale, who in those days had little more than a thousand bucks to his name, figured $1,000 would be inflated away to virtually nothing by 2020.
Not quite, of course, and civilization hasn’t completely collapsed, but Sale believes we are close and now puts the doomsday year at 2030. He has produced a pithy little book (44 pages) to give us a status report. The author tells us the earth has experienced five previous extinctions: a meteor strike which changed the climate and four others caused by greenhouse gases. The sixth is underway.
“Industrial civilization,” Sale writes, “in other words, is an inherently self-destructive system with limits beyond which it cannot survive, and utterly consumes itself like the self-burning tree of Gambia discovered by Mungo Park.”
Political collapse is underway in 43 percent of all nations on earth, without including “a dozen smaller nations that are locked into autocracy and poverty.” There are plenty of examples in the political collapse category for Mr. Sale to cite: Brexit, the Trump election “(and the subsequent attempt to overturn it),” and protracted protests in Poland and Hong Kong. Sale mentions the work of two political scientists who claim that “the state system seems to be failing all over the world” and believe work must be done to study “how to grow, maintain, and fund states so as to avert their collapse.” Anarchists would cheer “let them fail!”
Political collapse stems, Sale believes, from the world’s population, which, like everything else, has grown too big. There will be wars and competition, because “there will be no diminution in overpopulation--it has grown steadily and irredeemably by 83 million people a year since 1975.” Sale describes the United Nations as a waste of time and money; “in short,” he writes, “[the U.N.] is an example of the collapse of politics at the global level.”
Also collapsing on a global scale are capitalism, which Sale says “has everywhere turned into a disputative autocracy or a failed anarchy,” and the Catholic Church, which “has proven itself incapable of self-reform or doctrinal coherence.”
These examples of political collapse have led to increasing rates of addiction, suicide, and mental illness around the globe, while rates of marriage and religious affiliation have declined.
Individual contempt and distrust of government are increasing, with terms like “deep state” and “the swamp” being common pejoratives.
The author sees the economy as “the Sophoclean and Shakespearean heroes who go into disasters unable to change.” The problem in a word is debt—government, corporate, and individual combine to unsustainable levels. The weight of all that debt will collapse the dollar. Sale quotes a Swiss banker as saying that “The long-term trend of the dollar is clear: it will go into oblivion faster than anyone can imagine.” China and Russia are of the same opinion and have added to their gold holdings at an increasing pace while unloading the dollar.
In the end, Sale believes the collapse will be due to “Heedless technological advances pushing heedless exponential growth beyond human capacity to control…, just as I predicted.”
Although he wrote before the covid-19 outbreak, Sale predicted that new deadly infections would spread to all continents. Perhaps this is the canary in the coal mine.
Inflation targets are part and parcel of central banking policy, the Fed’s mandate centering around the 2 percent inflation target. But when was the last time anyone asked why a 2 percent inflation target?
To address this while avoiding potential "bias," we can look at history through the lens of one of the largest mainstream newspapers in the world, the New York Times. The following article takes us back to 2014 when the paper published "Of Kiwis and Currencies: How a 2% Inflation Target Became Global Economic Gospel."
It all started in 1989, when Don Brash, managing director of the New Zealand Kiwifruit Authority accepted the position of head of the Central Bank of New Zealand. Appearing to have no understanding of Austrian economics, he and his finance minister devised a plan to combat the surging price inflation of the '70s and '80s.
As fate would have it, Mr. Brash remembered the former finance minister telling the media he was “aiming for inflation of around zero to 1 percent.” Brash recalls that “it was almost a chance remark,” yet it sparked one of the most destructive policy decisions of all time, which has only worsened since. He admitted:
The figure was plucked out of the air to influence the public’s expectations.
Ultimately the bank settled on an "inflation target" between 0 and 2 percent. The announcement was considered a "radical idea" at the time, but lo and behold:
It created a kind of magic of its own. Merely by announcing its goals for inflation…New Zealand made that result a reality.
Of course, no proof has ever been offered of how an "inflation target" can be met simply by stating it as a goal. If it were that easy, the Fed would have met the target decades ago.
Luckily for Brash, inflation in New Zealand was 7.6 percent in 1989 when the target started and only 2 percent by the end of 1991. This bit of providence accelerated the idea as the head of the central bank
did a bit of a global campaigning, describing New Zealand’s success to his fellow central bankers at a conference in Jackson Hole, Wyoming.
Canada, Sweden, and Britain soon followed in New Zealand's footsteps and eventually even the Fed. Our fate was sealed on the whim of policymakers.
It was not without opposition, though, as there were some naysayers who believed that
A dollar today should have the same buying power as a dollar in a decade, or two or three.
However, the "alternate" view was that keeping inflation low could be dangerous. This was championed by an up and coming Fed governor, Janet Yellen, who expressed concern that zero inflation could "paralyze the economy," especially during economic downturns. In a 1996 July Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) meeting she offered an idea to support targeting:
To my mind the most important argument for some low inflation rate, is the "greasing-the-wheels argument" on the grounds that a little inflation lowers unemployment by facilitating adjustments in relative pay in a world where individuals deeply dislike nominal pay cuts.
Here we see the “Phillips curve” argument that is used to justify inflation by linking it to unemployment. This is move that now, twenty-four years later, the Fed is shying away from by claiming that the “Phillips curve is flat”—in other words, it’s not working as planned. Or, as Fed vice chair Clarida expressed it, models of maximum employment "can be and have been wrong."
Adding to the prophetic quotes, Yellen said in 1996:
A little inflation permits real interest rates to become negative on the rare occasions when required to counter a recession. This could be important.
The rest, as they say, is history. In time, the idea of a 2 percent target became economic orthodoxy—so much so that former Fed vice chair and Princeton economist Alan Blinder declared that
Central bankers have invested a lot and established a great deal of credibility on their 2 percent inflation target, and I think they’re right to be very hesitant to give it up.
By choosing an inflation target of 2 percent, the field of economics spent several decades barely advancing. Instead, academics and planners remained preoccupied with manipulating the data and providing guidance fueled by a narrative that was plucked out of thin air, aided by catchy phrases such as "greasing the wheels," and propagated by outdated economic models like the Phillips curve. Sadly, with 2 percent inflation the conclusion came first, followed by the theory. Economic explanation was only needed to support the theory at all costs.
If 2020 has taught us anything, it’s that police throughout the Western world will not hesitate to forcefully impose arbitrary and absurd government regulations.
Consider just a few examples from this month alone. In Australia a pregnant mother was arrested in front of her family for a Facebook post inviting fellow Aussies to an antilockdown protest. In Spain a fourteen-year-old boy who refused to wear a mask was thrown to the ground by an officer who then kneeled on the boy’s back as he screamed in pain. In the US two policemen removed a mother and her year-old child from an airplane, because the infant’s face was not covered.
Incidents such as these are often reported with indignation by pundits in the right-wing media. Conservative commentators rightfully warn us that government is overstepping its bounds and that we may be the next to get an unwanted visit from the police or even a shove to the ground and a knee to the back.
Yet it’s the same right-wing pundits who are the first to defend the most excessive police brutality whenever someone refuses to comply with an officer’s orders. They faithfully “back the blue” with almost blind loyalty and even support arming the police with military-style weapons and equipment.
Do these conservatives fail to see their own contradictions?
Ask yourself: If full-fledged socialism comes to the Western world, who will be on the front line imposing it? It won’t be the beta male bureaucrats forcing you to comply. It will be the “thin blue line” of the police—equipped with their military-grade weaponry—that will physically force you to obey orders. Don’t think they’ll do it? Just look at the cases I cited.
I am not advocating "defunding" the police. Nor am I suggesting that a security force is antithetical to a free society. We need some form of law enforcement personnel. Rather, I’m asking conservatives to reflect for a moment on their contradictory views. In our current system, government and law enforcement are one and the same organization. You cannot be critical of laws that infringe on our liberties while praising the men and women who dutifully enforce those laws—if necessary with violence.
Our freedom depends on a healthy skepticism toward government. That skepticism should be applied to all facets of the state, especially the police.
Ludwig von Mises's Human Action was published on this date in 1949. From the beginning, the Mises Institute's mission has been to champion this book's importance in the history of economic thought.
In the words of Henry Hazlitt, in his New York Times Review:
Human Action is, in short, at once the most uncompromising and the most rigorously reasoned statement of the case for capitalism that has yet appeared. If any single book can turn the ideological tide that has been running in recent years so heavily toward statism, socialism, and totalitarianism, Human Action is that book.
Thanks to our generous donors, the vital ideas in this book are more widely accessible than ever before. This is true not only due to translations that have birthed entire Austro-libertarian movements around the world, but also in the ways it is available to anyone sincerely interested in the ideas that build a peaceful and prosperous civilization.
The Mises Institute has long made the text of Human Action available for free online as an HTML, PDF, and EPUB, as well as an audiobook. Also available is Robert Murphy's invaluable study guide. Both are also available in physical form at the Mises Bookstore.
In order to make Human Action even more accessible to modern readers, Jeff Deist dedicated his Human Action Podcast to a full series on the book. Each episode pairs a section of the book with an important Austrian scholar, helping to flesh out and explain the most important parts of the book.
"Why You Should Read Human Action in 2020 with Dr. Shawn Ritenour""Human Action Part One with Dr. David Gordon""Human Action Part Two with Dr. Robert Murphy""Human Action Part Three with Dr. Per Bylund""Human Action Part Four with Dr. Jeffrey Herbener""Human Action Part Four with Dr. Joe Salerno""Human Action Part Four with Dr. Mark Thornton""Human Action Part Five with Ryan McMaken""Human Action Part Six with Dr. Peter Klein""Human Action Part Six with Jeff Deist""Human Action Part Seven with Dr. Tom Woods"
For those who prefer articles, the Institute also has a number of articles highlighting the book's historical significance, and modern relevance. These include:
"Human Action: A Chapter-by-Chapter Summary" by Martin Stefunko"Why You Should Read Human Action—Very Carefully" by Joseph T. Salerno"The Place of Human Action in the Development of Modern Economic Thought" by Joseph T. Salerno"Covid Lockdowns Crippled the Division of Labor, Setting the Stage for Civil Unrest" by Jonathan Newman"America's Riots Are Just the Latest Version of Marxist 'Syndicalism'" by Mark Thornton
The Mises Institute is proud to be the only American research organization dedicated to developing new generations of Misesian scholars. Thanks to our donors, the Austrian school of economics is stronger now than ever before, with scholars around the world. Our new graduate program will only further this cause in the future.
The world today needs the ideas of Ludwig von Mises, as articulated in Human Action, as much today as ever before.
A reader recently reminded me of this great old podcast from 2013. Lew Rockwell and I talk for half an hour about my little book Commie Cowboys, the politics of the Western genre, and why the anti-Westerns were better than those old John Wayne ones.
We cover lots of stuff about the frontier, war, pop culture, and more. Lew cracks some great jokes in here.
There is a decision that no person, nor foreign government, can make for Venezuelans: decide how Venezuela will be after Chavismo. We think and are always asserting that our fellow Venezuelans have to reject any “kind of socialism," because if the society accepts a return to the practices and policies that were in place before the Chavez era, they will be condemned to repeat history.
The truth is that there is not a nonsocialist or nonmercantilist option in the political arena. Indeed, some self-proclaimed “classical liberal,” “right-wing,” or “conservative” options are just mercantilists, liberal socialists, or social democrats trying to disguise their real nature. This is hopeless for our relatives, friends, and anybody who still lives in Venezuela, hopes to continue living there, or who must remain and is faced with deciding whom to support. Worst of all, the only thing that is true of all those options is that to support any of them is to support the imminent repetition of the corruption, cronyism, and bad policies of the past.
Neither a quick and painless international military operation nor a long, painful, and corrupt “democratic” negotiation to overthrow Maduro will be enough if people allow Juan Guaido and his comrades to apply the socialist agenda called “Plan País.” Keeping the status quo—a central bank, a minimum wage and other laws that increase the cost of starting a business, economic controls, barriers to international trade, state ownership of the commanding heights, and a high level of fiscal independence from the government—will not solve the problem forever.
We understand that eradicating tyranny would solve, in the short run, great problems for other countries, such as a massive and increasing migration, and for Venezuela, such as access to basic goods and services. Nevertheless, these solutions would just be short lived. Many of those more than 10 million Venezuelans living in other countries would not return, and all the economic, social, and political problems would arise in the middle to long run in a scenario like this. Why? Because, as in the past, the system that Guaido and his comrades propose will collapse at any moment and a new and stronger "kind of Chavismo" will grip the country once again and jeopardize freedom and stability in the region.
The GDP per capita has been widely criticized as an index of quality of living. Notwithstanding, we will use it to support our argument that the social democratic era paved the road to harder socialism like Chavismo with its policies. The following graph shows the average income per capita of Venezuelans:
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After a great and sustained period of economic growth (1950–57), Venezuelans enjoyed an average income of $8,400 (in 2011 US dollars). Immediately after the social democracy started, Venezuelans suffered a decrement in their incomes, and by 1963 they had incomes similar to 1953 levels. Nevertheless, from 1964 incomes started to increase, achieving their highest level in 1980, of around $10,500. After that year, incomes started to plummet, reaching around $6,400 in 1998, when Chavez won his first election. Strictly speaking, Venezuela passed the 1957 threshold during just fifteen of the forty years of the social democratic era. The maximum incomes represented 124 percent of the 1957 incomes, but the social democracy era closed with an average income of just 76 percent of 1957 levels, which is almost the same income that Venezuelans had in 1951. Then, Venezuelans suffered a sustained and continuous impoverishment process, one of the reasons they trusted the radical and harder socialist promises of Chavez.
From this graph, we can extract many undesirable truths. For example, not even with Maduro did the average incomes decrease as much as they did during the social democratic era. We are not saying that Chavismo has been better than social democracy (in fact, to us Chavismo is its offspring). We want to remark the unfeasibility of the “Plan País,” which is just an extension of a failed plan called “El Gran Viraje” (the great turn) that was in place from 1989 to 1993; even in that period the failure of such Keynesian policies is evident. Chavismo and social democracy have relied on oil prices, and you can see high instability and volatility in the graph for that reason. Plan País would be funded and supported with oil and international debt. Despite the fact that poverty was increasing before Chavez, there was not the great problem of scarcity and the humanitarian crisis that we see today. People should understand that these problems are the symptoms and what we have to eliminate is the bacteria that causes them. That is socialism.
Dr. Mark Thornton joined the Ammo.com podcast to discuss the economics of slavery and its long-lasting negative effects on the economy.
Today is Dr. Ron Paul’s eighty-fifth birthday. He has always been a voice of wisdom, from the End the Fed campaign to his fight against the Iraq War to being a voice of sanity in the current covid-19 hysteria. He is a great American and one one of the foremost people ever to serve in Congress. Happy Birthday!
[From the October 1969 issue of Libertarian Forum.]
It has come to our attention increasingly of late that many self-proclaimed libertarians balk at the idea of abolishing slavery. It is almost incredible to contemplate, for one would think that at least the minimal definition of a libertarian is someone who favors the immediate abolition of slavery. Surely, slavery is the polar opposite of liberty?
But it appears that many libertarians argue as follows: the slave-masters bought their slaves on the market in good faith. They have the bill of sale. Therefore, respect for their property rights requires that slavery be left intact, or at the very least that the slave-master be compensated for any loss of his slave at the market value.
I used to believe, and have written articles to that effect, that the idea that right-wingers uphold "property rights over human rights" is only a left-wing smear. But evidently it is not a smear. For these libertarians indeed go to the grotesque length of upholding property rights at the expense of the human right of self-ownership of every person. Not only that: by taking this fetishistic position these pro-slavery libertarians negate the very concept, the very basis, of property right itself. For where does property right come from? It can only come from one basic and ultimate source—and that is not the pronouncement of the State that Mr. A belongs to Mr. B. That source is the property right of every man in his own body, his right of self-ownership. From this right of self-ownership is derived his right to whatever previously unowned and unused resources a man can find and transform by the use of his labor energy. But if every man has a property right in his own person, this immediately negates any grotesquely proclaimed "property right" in other people.
There are five possible positions on the abolition of slavery question. (1) That slavery must be protected as a part of the right of property and (2) that abolition may only be accompanied by full compensation to the masters seem to me to fall on the basis of our above discussion. But the third route—simple abolition—the one that was adopted, was also unsatisfactory, since it meant that the means of production, the plantations on which the slaves worked, remained in the hands, in the property, of their masters. On the libertarian homesteading principle, the plantations should have reverted to the ownership of the slaves, those who were forced to work them, and not have remained in the hands of their criminal masters. That is the fourth alternative. But there is a fifth alternative that is even more just: the punishment of the criminal masters for the benefit of their former slaves—in short, the imposition of reparations or damages upon the former criminal class, for the benefit of their victims. All this recalls the excellent statement of the Manchester Liberal, Benjamin Pearson, who, when he heard the argument that the masters should be compensated replied that "he had thought it was the slaves who should have been compensated."
It should be clear that this discussion is of far more than antiquarian interest. For there are a great many analogues to slavery today, an enormous number of cases where property has been acquired not through legitimate effort but through State theft, and where, therefore, similar alternatives will have to be faced once more.
Some conservatives are now bending over backwards to try to justify their calls for more federal intervention in local law enforcement around the nation. This has been problematic for many because some of these people also have pretended to be in favor of decentralization, local control, and a strict reading of the Constitution when it suits them. But now that the actual respect for the Tenth Amendment and the federalism built into the Constitution for the moment favors left-wing protestors and rioters, the Right is now attempting to come up with reasons why the federal government should be called in to solve our problems after all.
I have dealt with some of the claims elsewhere, such as the claim that the federal government can do whatever it wants when there is an "insurrection"—however loosely defined. And some claim the feds can do whatever they want in order to "guarantee a republican form of government."
But for the more unsophisticated participants in this debate, the memo has apparently gone out stating that federal meddling of this sort is fine because George Washington once did it. While I have seen this stated more than once, an example from the Mises Institute's Facebook page, in response to this article, will serve as an example:
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The basic "argument" made by "Jack Jackson" here is that since Washington used federal troops against tax protestors in the 1790, then the president today can obviously do the same, and it must all be both perfectly moral and legal.
Yet Washington's invasion of western Pennsylvania was clearly immoral by the standards of the American Revolution, and thus a betrayal of what countless Americans had died for during the war. Not surprisingly, virtually no taxpayer in the backcountry supported Washington's expedition. After all, internal excise taxes imposed by outsiders had been a major cause of the American secessionist cause in the 1770s—what we now call the American Revolution. In other words, Jackson's interlocutor here, a "Robert Davis" is correct. Washington's grandiose ride to abuse and browbeat Pennsylvania farmers into submission was "the beginning of the end" of what most Americans imagined they were signing on for when they submitted to the US Constitution.
Moreover, contrary to what is simply assumed by those whose view of history extends not far beyond conservative talk radio, Washington's "suppression" of the tax rebellion failed. Murray Rothbard explains in detail how the Whiskey "rebels" were the good guys, and how Washington was a bumbling big-government wannabe who later—helped by the ever atrocious Alexander Hamilton—covered up his failure to get his way.
From chapter 44 of Making Economic Sense:
The Official View of the Whiskey Rebellion is that four counties of western Pennsylvania refused to pay an excise tax on whiskey that had been levied by proposal of the Secretary of Treasury Alexander Hamilton in the spring of 1791, as part of his excise tax proposal for federal assumption of the public debts of the several states.
Western Pennsylvanians failed to pay the tax, this view says, until protests, demonstrations, and some roughing up of tax collectors in western Pennsylvania caused President Washington to call up a 13,000-man army in the summer and fall of 1794 to suppress the insurrection. A localized but dramatic challenge to federal tax-levying authority had been met and defeated. The forces of federal law and order were safe.
This Official View turns out to be dead wrong. In the first place, we must realize the depth of hatred of Americans for what was called “internal taxation” (in contrast to an “external tax” such as a tariff). Internal taxes meant that the hated tax man would be in your face and on your property, searching, examining your records and your life, and looting and destroying.
The most hated tax imposed by the British had been the Stamp Tax of 1765, on all internal documents and transactions; if the British had kept this detested tax, the American Revolution would have occurred a decade earlier, and enjoyed far greater support than it eventually received.
Americans, furthermore, had inherited hatred of the excise tax from the British opposition; for two centuries, excise taxes in Britain, in particular the hated tax on cider, had provoked riots and demonstrations upholding the slogan, “liberty, property, and no excise!” To the average American, the federal government’s assumption of the power to impose excise taxes did not look very different from the levies of the British crown.
The main distortion of the Official View of the Whiskey Rebellion was its alleged confinement to four counties of western Pennsylvania. From recent research, we now know that no one paid the tax on whiskey throughout the American “back-country”; that is, the frontier areas of Maryland, Virginia, North and South Carolina, Georgia, and the entire state of Kentucky.
President Washington and Secretary Hamilton chose to make a fuss about Western Pennsylvania precisely because in that region there was a cadre of wealthy officials who were willing to collect taxes. Such a cadre did not even exist in the other areas of the American frontier; there was no fuss or violence against tax collectors in Kentucky and the rest of the back-country because there was no one willing to be a tax collector.
The whiskey tax was particularly hated in the back-country because whiskey production and distilling were widespread; whiskey was not only a home product for most farmers, it was often used as a money, as a medium of exchange for transactions. Furthermore, in keeping with Hamilton’s program, the tax bore more heavily on the smaller distilleries. As a result, many large distilleries supported the tax as a means of crippling their smaller and more numerous competitors.
Western Pennsylvania, then, was only the tip of the iceberg. The point is that, in all the other back-country areas, the whiskey tax was never paid. Opposition to the federal excise tax program was one of the causes of the emerging Democrat-Republican Party, and of the Jeffersonian “Revolution” of 1800. Indeed, one of the accomplishments of the first Jefferson term as president was to repeal the entire Federalist excise tax program. In Kentucky, whiskey tax delinquents only paid up when it was clear that the tax itself was going to be repealed.
Rather than the whiskey tax rebellion being localized and swiftly put down, the true story turns out to be very different. The entire American back-country was gripped by a non-violent, civil disobedient refusal to pay the hated tax on whiskey. No local juries could be found to convict tax delinquents. The Whiskey Rebellion was actually widespread and successful, for it eventually forced the federal government to repeal the excise tax.
Except during the War of 1812, the federal government never again dared to impose an internal excise tax, until the North transformed the American Constitution by centralizing the nation during the War Between the States. One of the evil fruits of this war was the permanent federal “sin” tax on liquor and tobacco, to say nothing of the federal income tax, an abomination and a tyranny even more oppressive than an excise.
Why didn’t previous historians know about this widespread non-violent rebellion? Because both sides engaged in an “open conspiracy” to cover up the facts. Obviously, the rebels didn’t want to call a lot of attention to their being in a state of illegality.
Washington, Hamilton, and the Cabinet covered up the extent of the revolution because they didn’t want to advertise the extent of their failure. They knew very well that if they tried to enforce, or send an army into, the rest of the back-country, they would have failed. Kentucky and perhaps the other areas would have seceded from the Union then and there. Both contemporary sides were happy to cover up the truth, and historians fell for the deception.
The Whiskey Rebellion, then, considered properly, was a victory for liberty and property rather than for federal taxation. Perhaps this lesson will inspire a later generation of American taxpayers who are so harried and downtrodden as to make the whiskey or stamp taxes of old seem like Paradise.
Ludwig von Mises was called several names and epithets in his life, by his admirers and enemies alike. His friends and colleagues dubbed him the “Last Knight of Liberalism,” while his critics called him intransigent, fanatic, and even less flattering epithets.
Just recently I came across another nickname the great Austrian had in the 1920s and 30s: the sunny pessimist. Writing to Bettina Greaves in 1974, Karl Menger, the son of the famous economist, recounts how this came about:
In the years 1927–36, I often met Mises in homes of common friends. In the second half of that period he mad[e] the most terrible predictions. (Once, I was told, a lady after listening to him for half an hour retired and had to be comforted.) All his gloomy prophesies (later surpassed by reality) were uttered with complete equanimity and a constant smile, which earned him the nickname of the sunny pessimist.
It is easy to understand how Mises could be pessimistic in the 1920s and '30s, as Europe was descending rapidly into the hell of socialism. He could explain almost in real time how the policies of the Nazis and the socialists they replaced in power led to the destruction of civilization and the world war. Omnipotent Government from 1944 is perhaps his fullest explanation of the process of the destruction of German civilization, but he saw the same trends in other European countries. Thus, in 1940, in the manuscript that was later published under the title Interventionism: An Economic Analysis, Mises wrote that the Nazis had practically won before they even invaded France; the policies of the western democracies were practically indistinguishable from the National Socialists’, and the French government found it more important to prosecute war profiteers than to ensure adequate provisioning of the French army.
It is more impressive that Mises kept calm and smiling throughout, just like Vera Lynn urged the British soldiers to. Already at the end of the First World War, Mises recounts in his Memoirs (p. 55), he had arrived at the “hopeless pessimism that had long pervaded the best minds of Europe.” Yet his personal philosophy allowed him to escape the apathy such pessimism can lead to. Already as a teenager he had chosen a line from Virgil: tu ne cede malis sed contra audentior ito (do not give in to evil but proceed ever more boldly against it) as his motto. This continued to be his attitude through the darkest days of European history.
Another anecdote recounted by Rudolf J. Klein, one of Mises’s pupils, may substantiate Mises’s prophetic abilities. Writes Klein:
In 1935 he [Mises] came back to Vienna from Geneva for a short visit. I saw him at his old office at the Chamber of Commerce and asked what he thought would be the final outcome of the Hitler regime. He replied (in 1935!), “When one wing of the German army will be at Vladivostock and the other at Gibraltar, the whole thing will break down!”
Aside from the geographic inaccuracies—as is well known, the Germans never invaded Spain and they were stopped at Moscow and Stalingrad, not Vladivostok—Mises’s foresight is eerie. Others, it is true, predicted German aggression throughout the thirties, but those predictions seem based on little more than Teutophobia. Mises, on the contrary, loved German culture, was well read in the German classics and German philosophy, and it pained him deeply to see the destruction of German and European civilization. Yet he understood the inevitable outcome of socialism and autarky: the breakdown of the international division of labor and war.
Mises’s social philosophy is just as relevant today as ninety years ago for understanding the chaos around us. Ideas rule the world, and the real factor supporting the ruling elite is always the dominant ideologies. Just like Mises had to battle the Marxist and non-Marxist socialists who took power across Europe in the first decades of the twentieth century (and in most places hold on to it to this day), so today we are faced with cultural Marxists and progressive mobs. Since there is no way to defeat them in the long run except by exposing their erroneous and antisocial doctrines, and since the “progressive” barbarians may well remain in control for the foreseeable future (and cause untold damage to the economic and spiritual civilization of the West—or what’s left of it), it’s well to keep before us Mises’ personal example. There are reasons enough to be pessimistic, but let us at least be sunny pessimists.
Tu ne cede malis sed contra audentior ito.
In his noneconomic magnum opus, The Ethics of Liberty (henceforth TEoL), Murray Rothbard outlined what he considered to be the fullest and most complete ethical system of freedom and libertarian natural law. Additionally—at least up until Hans-Hermann Hoppe introduced his argumentation ethics—Rothbard also considered this book to contain the strongest available ethical case for libertarian self-ownership, property, and the nonaggression principle. The most famous and elaborate component of Rothbard’s moral case is his natural law system, which was a renovation of older Scholastic and Thomistic natural law and took up the majority of TEoL’s early chapters. I do not, however, consider his natural law to be Rothbard’s strongest case for liberty, even though he seemed to think it was.
Natural law is very interesting and enlightening, but Rothbard’s real strongest argument is one which I rarely see mentioned (besides Kuznicki’s interesting summary) and which I call the Rothbardian trilemma. Rothbard lays it out almost offhand, to the side of what he seems to think is his primary argument, in chapter 8, “Interpersonal Relations: Ownership and Aggression.” Here is how he introduces it:
Here there are two alternatives: either we may lay down a rule that each man should be permitted (i.e., have the right to) the full ownership of his own body, or we may rule that he may not have such complete ownership. If he does, then we have the libertarian natural law for a free society as treated above. But if he does not, if each man is not entitled to full and 100 percent self-ownership, then what does this imply? It implies either one of two conditions: (1) the "communist" one of Universal and Equal Other-ownership, or (2) Partial Ownership of One Group by Another—a system of rule by one class over another. These are the only logical alternatives to a state of 100 percent self-ownership for all.
Essentially, the argument goes like this: someone must control our bodies, because otherwise we are left in a contradictory state where we can do nothing with ourselves, not even commit suicide, because we would be controlling (or, in the case of suicide, damaging) property that we do not own. Now, if someone must control our bodies, there are three different ways we can arrange that right of control—which is what we call right of ownership—of bodies:
Everyone owns (“the libertarian natural law for a free society”)Everyone owns everyone else equally (“Universal and Equal Other-ownership,” as Rothbard calls it)Some (group of) people own others (“Partial Ownership of One Group by Another”) Only some of these are tenable, as we shall see.
Rothbard next begins to knock down alternatives (2) and (3)—either showing them to be untenable or unethical. First, he deals with (3):
here, one person or group of persons, G, are entitled to own not only themselves but also the remainder of society, R. But, apart from many other problems and difficulties with this kind of system, we cannot here have a universal or natural-law ethic for the human race. We can only have a partial and arbitrary ethic, similar to the view that Hohenzollerns are by nature entitled to rule over non-Hohenzollerns.
Essentially, option (3) fails the universalizability test: if you would choose this option, the burden of proof falls on you to show why some should rule. Ask yourself, what is it about a king or an aristocracy that gives them the right to rule their subjects? The the divine right of kings previously supplied just that sort of justification—yet even that justification fails, because it is an impossible task. Although there are many differences between rulers and subjects, there are none which are ethically relevant.
Next, Rothbard takes (2) out of the running. First, he points out that “if there are more than a very few people in the society, this alternative must break down and reduce to…partial rule by some over others.” This is because, he says, “it is physically impossible for everyone to keep continual tabs on everyone else, and thereby to exercise his equal share of partial ownership over every other man.” It is impossible, in other words, for every man to get permission from every other man before he does what he wants to do: we would all die before that was possible. Moreover, as Rothbard says in the next paragraph, “it is surely absurd to hold that no man is entitled to own himself, and yet to hold that each of these very men is entitled to own a part of all other men!” For, how could they vote on what the other people should do, without exercising unilateral control over their own decision and mouths? If they did not exercise such unilateral control, there would first have to be a vote on how everyone could vote—ad infinitum! In this way, we can see that universal and equal other-ownership is already an impossible situation.
Now, it is possible that such control rights, which Rothbard would call ownership, could be exercised on a “retroactive” basis: essentially, everyone is free to exercise unilateral control over themselves until there are enough votes telling them to do something else to outweigh their partial share in their own bodies—two votes, in the case of equal other-ownership. This would solve the problem of infinite voting regress, but it would likely result in first-come-first-served aristocracy, where whoever can jet around the fastest (along with a buddy) and “command” the most people would own all of those people, including how those people vote. Additionally, this assumes that one needs only a majority of those present, and not a unanimity, to make a decision—an assumption which is in fact contrary to universal equal ownership. All this really devolves back to (3), since those who aren’t around currently don’t get to exercise ownership rights and become slaves of the person with the bigger army unless they bring an army of equal size. Also, this arrangement, where everyone has de facto control over themselves, but a different kind of control over others, which requires not their permission before their “property” is used, but their assertion of a contrary rule, is a double standard which would actually have to be voted for by an equal other-owning collective like the one described above, therefore not actually escaping infinite regress.
There are a few other options which Kuznicki mentions in his article which I would like to address briefly as well, since the natural objection to the Rothbardian trilemma is to attempt to break out of it. First, he muses that “in the real world, people may acquire use rights not only through ownership, but also through lease, rent, borrowing, or other forms of agreement with the owner….it is not necessarily clear that all types of use rights must stem from someone’s ownership somewhere.” My challenge to this, then, is to find just such a moral claim which does not simply regress to option (3) as the use-until-contradiction option I covered above does. This is a claim which would have to be substantiated, because as far as I am aware, partial ownership, no ownership, and whole ownership cover the entire breadth of possible arrangements of control rights. After mentioning briefly a possible theological turn for this, Kuznicki moves on to his final point on the subject: “if we have use rights, but not ownership, many of the same assertions Rothbard later makes will still be valid.” Here I would ask, What is the difference between having use, or control, rights, and having ownership? If I have a right to control every aspect of something, that is identical to full ownership: if someone else tries to control it, that means that for a time I do not have control of it. If I have only partial control rights over something, then I have partial ownership, which is already covered in the trilemma. Hence, we return to option (1): libertarian self-ownership, which reveals itself to be the only option which is both desirable and logically possible.
In conclusion, I find this to be a much stronger case for libertarian self-ownership than any other that I am aware of. It requires, moreover, very little buildup or framework, and makes almost no assumptions, making it ideal for those not already willing to consider libertarianism. In light of this, I am very surprised to find that it is not mentioned all that often. I think that, with some extending and defending, it could even be stronger than argumentation ethics.
Oftentimes, people unfamiliar with the Austrian school tend to bundle it with political anarchism. There are—I believe—different possible explanations for that, but the most prominent ones seem to me the following two. First, it’s true that some Austrians can in effect be considered political anarchists as well. Second, the Austrian school is not only a school of thought about economics, but also (at least) about epistemology and political philosophy—i.e., it’s concerned with issues such as the relationship between individuals and states.
However, all Austrians share a common denominator: they all accept the teachings of Human Action, Mises’s magnum opus. Hence, in order to determine whether Austrianism does necessarily imply political anarchism as well, it might be sensible to scrutinize Human Action: What does it say about the role of state and government in society and how far they can go in subjecting individuals?
Is Unfettered Individual Freedom a Natural Right? Many anarchists ground their anarchism on the concept of “natural law” or “natural rights”—namely, the idea that something as “natural law” does really exist and that it mandates the inalienability of individual freedom to the government or the sovereign.
However, such a stance entails two logical problems. First, one needs to postulate the existence of enforceable rights which do not coincide with the ones established by law. Second, one needs to compellingly conclude that such rights are objectively in favor of freedom rather than some other ideal—say, equality, tribalism, nationalism, etc.
On the first topic Mises’s answer is straightforward enough: justice exists only insofar as it is established by law. As a matter of fact, he writes,
The notion of justice can logically only be resorted to de lege lata [i.e., the law as it exists]. It makes sense only when approving or disapproving concrete conduct from the point of view of the valid laws of the country….There is no such thing as an absolute notion of justice not referring to a definite system of social organization. (Human Action, [1949] 1998, p. 717, emphasis added)
Moreover, Mises does not only agree on ultimately resorting to laws in order to asses justice, but he goes even further—embracing a viewpoint about freedom and, more generally, human cooperation, rooted in a contractualistic philosophy. In fact, Mises writes,
It is therefore nonsense to rant about an alleged “natural” and “inborn” freedom which people are supposed to have enjoyed in the ages preceding the emergence of social bonds. Man was not created free; what freedom he may possess has been given to him by society….Liberty and freedom are the conditions of man within a contractual society. (Human Action, [1949] 1998, p. 280, emphasis added)
On the second topic Mises is manifestly skeptical when it comes to hypothesizing that we can find, or prove, any kind of objectivity about “natural laws”—or about “natural morals” that we can derive cogent “natural laws” from. In fact, he writes that
There is, however, no such thing as natural law and a perennial standard of what is just and what is unjust. Nature is alien to the idea of right and wrong. “Thou shalt not kill” is certainly not part of natural law….The notion of right and wrong is a human device. (Human Action, [1949] 1998, p. 716, emphasis added)
Furthermore, Mises goes as far as stating that, were a “natural law” to really exist, it would be sensible to think of it as a ruthless law of abuse and aggression—in accordance with which no social cooperation nor division of labor would be feasible. As we can read,
nature does not generate peace and good will. The characteristic mark of the “state of nature” is irreconcilable conflict. Each specimen is the rival of all other specimens. The means of subsistence are scarce and do not grant survival to all. The conflicts can never disappear. (Human Action, [1949] 1998, p. 669, emphasis added)
Lastly, Mises clearly lays out his skepticism about “natural rights” as a useful concept when it comes to defending property rights—a fallacious argument that can be refuted, on a priori grounds, by those claiming that “equality” rather than “property” is what “nature” imposes upon human beings. In Mises’s own words,
It is useless to stand upon an alleged “natural” right of individuals to own property if other people assert that the foremost “natural” right is that of income equality. Such disputes can never be settled. (Human Action, [1949] 1998, p. 281)
The Right Place for Government Once the “natural law” argument in favor of anarchism is refuted, we are left with an open question: Is Government useful to human beings? For Mises, the answer is “yes, it is”—but with a few caveats.
Without entering into the details about how detrimental government interventionism is for the economy (part six of Human Action is entirely devoted to it, and Austrians are well aware of the damages caused by currency manipulation, trade barriers, legal monopolies, labor unions, etc.), we cannot deny that Mises conceived of government as something that, taken with a grain of salt, could foster human cooperation and prosperity.
For instance, he writes about taxes and government that
As far as the government fulfills its social functions and the taxes do not exceed the amount required for securing the smooth operation of the government apparatus, they are necessary costs and repay themselves. (Human Action, [1949] 1998, p. 738)
Lastly, Mises’s distrust of natural spontaneous social order and anarchism is clearly set out at the very beginning of part two of Human Action, where we can read:
An anarchistic society would be exposed to the mercy of every individual. Society cannot exist if the majority is not ready to hinder, by the application or threat of violent action, minorities from destroying the social order. This power is vested in the state or government. (Human Action, [1949] 1998, p. 149, emphasis added)
Therefore, we can conclude that Mises accepts indeed a role for governmental intervention, that is, the enactment and the enforcement of the rule of law—whereby “naturally” weak members of society are protected against violence and abuse on the part of stronger ones.
Conclusion Contrarily to what is often claimed, one can consider him/herself an Austrian disciple even without feeling necessarily compelled to be bundled with political anarchism: Austrian sound teachings about economics do not necessarily imply that no room whatsoever is left for governmental intervention.
Nonetheless, the government's role should be kept to the bare minimum, and its attempts to meddle with resource allocation—via fractional reserve banking, fiat money, legal monopolies, trade barriers, etc.—must be forcefully and explicitly opposed.
As soon as it became clear that the Swedish state had no plans to implement harsh lockdowns, global media organizations like the New York Times have implemented what can only be described as an ideological jihad against Sweden.
For many weeks, there has been an incessant drumbeat of articles with titles touting the "the failure of the country's no-lockdown coronavirus strategy," that "Sweden Has Become the World's Cautionary Tale," and "How Sweden Screwed Up."
It is common to read articles stating that Sweden has one of the world's worst death rates for COVID-19.
This, however, remains a matter of perspective.
Sweden's total deaths per million in population as of July 14 is 549. That's considerably lower than the deaths per million rate in the UK, which is 662, and in Spain, which is 608. In Belgium, the death rate is 884.
Moreover, the Sweden deaths per million is many times better than the rates found in New Jersey and New York: 1,763 and 1,669.
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An astute reader, however, will quickly notice that articles condemning Sweden's "failure" rarely if ever mention these comparisons. Instead, anti-Sweden articles are careful to only mention countries with far lower deaths per million, usually Denmark and Norway. A nonspecific stock phrase is generally inserted which repeats that Sweden has: "a far higher mortality rate than its neighbours."
Articles about countries with far more deaths per million than Sweden often make excuses for those governments. In May, for example, the BBC repeated the Belgian government's talking points, which attempted to explain that things aren't as bad as they seem in Belgium. In places where harsh lockdowns were implemented—such as New York or the UK— the explanation is that these countries implemented their lockdowns too late.
But no matter what the data shows, it is always assumed that lockdowns work well, and the fact that nonlockdown Sweden has a death rate similar to harsh-lockdown France can only be explained by claiming France didn't lock down harshly enough or long enough.
Meanwhile, the evidence that lockdowns actually work remains spotty at best. The results we get from lockdown countries vary wildly, yet commentators ignore this and stick to a dogmatic refrain: lockdowns always work, and Sweden "screwed up."
Now, global "experts," such as those at the World Health Organization (WHO), are claiming that Sweden is among the countries most likely to have a resurgence in COVID-19.
So far, there is no evidence of this at all. Two weeks after the WHO's prediction, both cases and deaths in Sweden continue to trend downward.
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Indeed, looking at this, one might conclude that thanks to Sweden we know what both lockdown and nonlockdown countries look like: they look remarkably similar in some cases.
Similarly, in the US we have some states that had relatively short and less-harsh lockdowns, which we can compare to states with very strict lockdowns. In many cases, the states with the mild lockdowns continue to have total deaths that are small fractions of those in areas with far more harsh measures.
Advocates of lockdowns insist that we must only "wait two weeks" and matters in Texas will look just like those in New York. Anything's possible, but it's pretty clear any sort of equivalence between the two areas is going to require more than "two weeks" to come about. After all, after failing to implement a lockdown for months, Sweden is still nowhere near matching the death rates reported in New York.
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Using Sweden's standard we're still too early in the game to declare victory for one method or the other. Sweden's authorities have always maintained that their strategy was much more of a long-term strategy. They are looking a year down the line and suggesting that both lockdown and nonlockdown countries will become more similar over time. In some countries, that certainly looks to be the case, although there is yet no indication of this in others.
Due partly to big increases in deaths attributed to COVID-19 in the northeastern United States, total mortality increased to more than 34 percent above the 2017–19 average in the US during April. According to CDC data, For week 14 (ending April 4) through week 18 (ending May 2) total mortality was 366,592. That was up 34.9 from the average for the same weeks from 2017–19 (274,096). For the weeks of May, on the other hand, we found that from week 19 (ending May 9) to week 22 (ending May 30) total mortality was up by 15 percent in 2020 (totaling 241,095) compared to the average for the same weeks during 2017–19 (213,358).
We are now five weeks out from the end of May, so it is likely totals will still be adjusted up somewhat, perhaps resulting in an increase of around 20 percent above the 2017–19 average.
This percentage increase is likely to be even smaller for the weeks of June once those numbers are compiled more completely. As we see in the first graph, total mortality was sizable during April, coming in above even 2018's fairly severe mortality attributed to a particularly deadly flu season.
Since May 2, no weekly total has matched 2018's high of 67,495.
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Looking at total mortality is important in gauging the full impact of COVID-19. In a typical week in the United States, 50,000–60,000 Americans die. It is important to examine total deaths attributed to COVID-19 in this context. That there has been "excess" death is clear at this point. Total deaths were up by around 40 percent during mid-April in the US. Not all of this could be attributed to COVID-19, but much of it could be, or at least to diseases with similar symptoms.
Nonetheless, the US never reached true crisis-level strains on its medical infrastructure, as noted by physician John Ioannidis in a recent interview:
Greek Reporter: We had been told that we needed to “flatten the curve” — and we did so in the US, did we not? No health system was completely overwhelmed, not even in NYC, where they did not completely run out of ventilators.
Dr. Ioannidis: The predictions of most mathematical models in terms of how many beds and how many ICU beds would be required were astronomically wrong. Indeed, the health system was not overrun in any location in the USA, although several hospitals were stressed. Conversely, the health care system was severely damaged in many places because of the measures taken.
Greek Reporter: Finally, you had stated in March that, regarding lockdowns, they may be “bearable for a time, but how can policymakers tell if they are doing more good than harm?” if they are protracted. “School closures,” you stated, ”may reduce transmission rates” but may also “diminish the chances of developing herd immunity.” Even more important, perhaps, is this point you made — “One of the bottom lines is that we don’t know how long social distancing measures and lockdowns can be maintained without major consequences to the economy, society and mental health.
“Unpredictable evolutions may ensue, including financial crisis, unrest, civil strife, war and a meltdown of the social fabric.” Your thoughts, please, on how many of these things have indeed come to pass in this country as you had feared.
Dr. Ioannidis: I feel extremely sad that my predictions were verified. “Major consequences on the economy, society and mental health” have already occurred. I hope they are reversible, and this depends to a large extent on whether we can avoid prolonging the draconian lockdowns and manage to deal with COVID-19 in a smart, precision-risk targeted approach, rather than blindly shutting down everything. Similarly, we have already started to see the consequences of “financial crisis, unrest, and civil strife.” I hope it is not followed by “war and meltdown of the social fabric.”
Indeed, many deaths factored into total mortality during April and May can be attributed not to COVID-19 itself, but to the closures and shutdowns mandated by governments. We still have yet to see the full effects reflected in any government statistics, but we know severe child abuse, domestic abuse, suicides, drug overdoses, and cancer deaths all increased due to government-imposed stay-at-home orders and the government-forced deferment of necessary medical procedures for non-COVID conditions. Many of these medical procedures were arbitrarily labeled as "elective" procedures, and many Americans were unable to receive important diagnostic tests or medical procedures.
The government officials who caused their deaths and injuries continue to ignore these impacts, and are again hinting at enforcing new stay-at-home orders.
I have recently been reading Helen Zia’s Last Boat out of Shanghai, which presents a narrative history of a handful of refugees who fled Shanghai as the Communist Party took control of China in the late 1940s. In framing this flight from the city, Zia details the experiences of the refugees during the Japanese occupation during the Sino-Japanese War, as well as just after the Chinese Civil War. Naturally, there is a lot of heart-wrenching suffering documented in these pages, from people of various backgrounds, but I found the experience of hyperinflation during the late 1940s to be particularly interesting as something I had not heard of before.
Zia first describes the experience of that hyperinflation from the view of the people trying to pay for what they need:
Everyone in Shanghai had had the unsettling experience of looking in a shopwindow as a clerk reached in to cross out one price and scrawl a new, much higher price, often x-ing out prices several times in a single day. Not even the belt-tightening inflation during the war had prepared them for costs that seemed to multiply by the minute. In June 1948, a sack of rice had cost 6.7 million yuan; within a few weeks the price had reached 63 million.
In response to the out-of-control inflation, the Nationalist government of Chiang Kai-shek did what most governments in history have done. Chiang Kai-shek appointed his son, Chiang Ching-kuo, finance minister and had him go after “hoarders” and “speculators.” Most egregiously, the younger Chiang ordered Chinese citizens to hand over all gold, silver, and foreign currency to the government, as well as outstanding yuan, for a new version of the yuan supposedly backed by gold. Zia quotes Chiang Ching-kuo as threatening, “Those who damage the new gold-based currency will have their heads chopped off!”
This policy did not last long, however. Chiang Ching-kuo made the mistake of arresting the wrong person for “speculation”:
Chiang Ching-kuo also arrested David Kung, the nephew of his stepmother, Madame Chiang. Upon learning that her favorite nephew was in jail, Madame Chiang stormed into her stepson’s office and slapped his face. Then she wired her husband, the generalissimo…
This severe loss of face put an end to Chiang Ching-kuo’s attempted currency reform process. Forced to abandon it, he released the “hoarders” and “speculators” from prison. The new version of the yuan failed spectacularly:
The newly issued currency collapsed, becoming instantly worth less than the paper it was printed on. Everyone who had obeyed the government’s orders to use the new currency lost everything; their assets of gold, silver, and foreign currency were now locked in Chiang Kai-shek’s treasury.
It is important to note that Zia is not an economist, and takes essentially for granted that the inflation was due to hoarding and speculation rather than the printing of money by the Nationalist government to fund their war efforts (though she does not explain why, if that is the case, foreign currency was still “better than gold against the collapsing new Chinese yuan”). There is, however, still a lot of value to be gleaned from this narrative history and it is worth examining in detail. I highly encourage the reader to consider purchasing this book for that alone.
Reprinted from Disinthrallment.
Owen Holzbach recently wrote in Power and Market "How Public Schools Teach Economics." I had a similar experience in my high school macroeconomics class. As taught, Keynesian economics provides a "toolkit" for wannabe central planners.
After high school I attended Grove City College, where I am learning real economics. What my Austrian school professors do differently from their mainstream cousins is demonstrate the truth of their conclusions from the first principles of human action and the empirical reality of the world.
Every economics student, and many other GCC students, take Dr. Shawn Ritenour's class Foundations of Economics. This is the class that got me interested in economics. Following Mises, the class covers basic epistemology before starting with the action axiom, that is, purposeful behavior, and proceeding to carefully derive economics.
With a firm understanding of economic method, subjective preferences, cooperative vs. aggressive interaction, division of labor, the emergence of money, time preference, and entrepreneurship students receive a firm foundation in economic law.
Sprinkled in the class is discussion of ethics, consequences of policy, and the view of man. Students, for example, are introduced to (and shown the error in) the ideas of Gustav Schmoller on historicism, Milton Friedman on positivism, Marx on labor exploitation, and Malthus on population.
Some of my favorite advanced classes thus far are intermediate micro and intermediate macroeconomics. In both classes differing views are presented on their own terms. Students appreciate this level of intellectual honesty.
In intermediate macro, for example, Dr. Ritenour explains the capital structure and derives Austrian business cycle theory. But we also learn the Keynesian simple system, the IS-LM (investment-savings, liquidity preference–money supply) model, Friedman's plucking model, Real business cycle theory, and more.
In intermediate microeconomics, Dr. Caleb Fuller teaches the mainstream calculus-based approach to utility and welfare analysis. We learn and critique the perfect competition model as well as neoclassical consumer theory and cost-based producer theory.
Understanding the roots of ideas provides a grounding that many economists lack. This past spring, I took History of Economic Thought since 1870, where we concentrate on the Marginal Revolution as well as the economic thought of Keynes, Marshall, Friedman, Hayek, Mises, Böhm-Bawerk, Veblen, and much more. Both of the History of Economic Thought courses are now required for economics majors at the college.
For example, it is easy to take the Marginal Revolution for granted. However, there is a lot more to the story than three economists independently discovering the same idea. It turns out that the marginalism of Carl Menger is a bit different from that of William Stanley Jevons and that of Léon Walras.
For Walras, marginal utility is the key to complete his model for general equilibrium. Rather than moving from first principles, he starts with an idea of perfect competition and climbs down to marginal utility. This model is rigorously static and devoid of action. Instead, a timeless Walrasian auctioneer equilibrizes markets.
Jevons bases his marginal utility analysis on Jeremy Bentham's utilitarian calculus of pain and pleasure. This use of cardinal utility functions and assumption of infinitely divisible goods, as opposed to ordinal demonstrated preference, has led to neglect of qualitative aspects of human choice that are irreducible to a mathematical function.
Menger also takes the subjective value approach, but it is embedded in the structure of means and ends rather than a calculus of pain and pleasure. In his book Principles of Economics, Menger emphasizes the real-world process of action, as opposed to an equilibrium model that abstracts from action.
These differences, minor at the time, have borne out over the last 150 years to where mainstream economists, fixated on their perfect competition models, have advocated for government intervention in markets in to ensure competition. The reality is the opposite, that antitrust action to break up large firms harms consumers. It is not the number of firms itself, but the threat of both actual and potential competition that incentivizes firms to act competitively.
This is a microcosm of what I have learned from my "heterodox" Austrian school professors. The Austrians bring a lot more to the table in terms of intellectual honesty and curiosity, real-world relevance, depth of understanding, and solid first principles. I am graduating this December, and in spite of everything going on in the world right now, I must consider my education in causal-realist Austrian economics a success.
In a bit of ironic vandalism, San Francisco protestors painted "bastard" on a bust of Miguel Cervantes and defaced it in other ways. It's hard to imagine what the motivation was behind attacking the Cervantes bust, beyond, of course, total ignorance of who he even was. Cervantes was a sixteenth-century writer who penned Don Quixote, possibly the most influential work of Spanish-language literature ever written.
Did the protestors even know who Cervantes was? It's impossible to know. Perhaps his "crime" was being a white man, although that is not even known for sure, and Cervantes may have been descended from Spain's large Sephardic Jewish population, as were many Spaniards whose ancestors had been "encouraged" to convert to Christianity in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.
Crowd beat up on the statue after and tagged it, plus a nearby statue of Cervantes for good measure pic.twitter.com/F7foXW1ez6
— Joe Rivano Barros (@jrivanob) June 20, 2020 The great irony here, however, is that Cervantes, unlike every person "protesting" his image, knew what it was like to be a slave. As described by Fiona MacDonald for the BBC:
In 1575, after fighting in military campaigns against the Turks in the Mediterranean, the Spaniard was captured by Barbary pirates and taken to Algiers. There, he was kept as a slave for five years. When he was freed – with a ransom raised by Trinitarian friars attached to the convent he was to be buried beneath – he had become the man who would write one of the greatest novels in history.
“His five-year captivity in Algiers left an indelible impression on his fiction,” Cervantes scholar María Antonia Garcés tells BBC Culture. “From the first works written after his liberation, such as the play Life in Algiers (c. 1581–1583) and his novel La Galatea (1585), to his posthumous book The Trials of Persiles and Sigismunda (1617), the story of this traumatic experience continuously speaks through his work.”
Cervantes was just one of countless Europeans enslaved by slave traders (especially the Muslim Barbary pirates) over the centuries, kidnapped in coastal raids by pirates along the coasts of Italy, Britain, Ireland, and the eastern Mediterranean. Saint Patrick, of course, had been enslaved in such a way, by Irish pirates.
Such nuances of history, of course, matter nothing to the protestors or indeed to Americans in general. The average American (whether white, black, left, or right) knows about as much about the sixteenth century (or any century before the twentieth) as he knows about the intricacies of astrophysics.
So we should not be surprised that the protestors are also vandalizing statues of abolitionists, as happened to a memorial for Philadelphia abolitionist Mathias Baldwin.
June 14 marks Flag Day, commemorating the Second Continental Congress's authorization for a new American flag. But it is an unusual holiday.
Flag Day is little celebrated, sort of a poor relation to Memorial Day and Independence Day, which bracket it. And since what is being celebrated is a symbol, and symbols are slippery, it involves substantial amounts of ambiguity. To some, a flag might represent the ideals of a country at its founding. To others it might represent support for the current government of the country. To still others, it might represent the failings of a country to live up to its ideals and promise. And when you add the connections between the flag, the Pledge of Allegiance, the national anthem, and a contentious history of flag burning, it can lead to disagreement and divisiveness over a host of issues, rather than unity. Those issues have included charges that the flag represents nationalism, colonialism, imperialism, American exceptionalism, racism, xenophobia, not to mention what questions of what symbolic meaning should be attached to refusing to stand for the national anthem.
Given all the ambiguity and potential for confrontation between people whose veins are throbbing on their foreheads that our flag can cause today, it makes sense to clarify what the flag represents to us, to minimize such confusion-fueled confrontations. So, because of my commitment to liberty, I choose to see the flag as a symbol of American ideals.
From that perspective, one of the most inspiring views of our flag was given in an 1861 address by Henry Ward Beecher, “the most respected and idealized religious figure of the day,” who was considered by some as “America’s leading moral and spiritual teacher.” At a time when many have lost touch with the ideals of America’s experiment in freedom, it merits revisiting:
Our flag…means just what Concord and Lexington meant, what Bunker Hill meant…the rising up of a valiant young people against an old tyranny to establish the most momentous doctrine that the world has ever known—the right of men to their own selves and to their liberties. It means all that the Declaration of Independence meant. It means all that the Constitution of our people, organizing for justice, for liberty, and for happiness, meant.
A thoughtful mind, when it sees a nation’s flag, sees not the flag only, but…the principles, the truths, the history that belongs to the nation that sets it forth….the American flag is the symbol of liberty, and men rejoiced in it. Not another flag has had such an errand, carrying everywhere, the world around, such hope for freedom—such glorious tidings.
Our flag carries American ideas, American history, and American feelings….it has gathered and stored chiefly this supreme idea: Divine Right of Liberty in man. Every color means liberty; every form of star and beam or stripe of light means liberty; not lawlessness, not license, but organized institutional liberty—liberty through law, and law for liberty.
This American Flag was the safeguard of libertyIt was an ordinance of liberty by the people, for the people. That it meant, that it means, and, by the blessing of God, that it shall mean to the end of time!
Henry Ward Beecher’s vision of America, symbolized in our flag, echoed our founders’ ideal “that every man shall have liberty to be what God made him, without hindrance.”
I think it is unfortunate that many do not see that in America’s flag today. And those who have mixed or even hostile feelings toward our flag and the country it represents, because America has fallen short of its ideals, are misplacing their idealism and efforts. If they recognized, with Beecher, that “The history of this banner is one of Liberty,” and put their energy into reclaiming our founding vision of providing the broadest possible canvas for human freedom, they could reshape the world for the better instead of endlessly creating and repeating grievances. The harms we have suffered because America has too often abandoned its founding principle of liberty do not mean we should reject liberty; the decline in our liberty reveals just how essential it is.
June 30 is Frederic Bastiat’s birthday. That is noteworthy, as his contributions on behalf of liberty were not only massively important, but have stood the test of time.
As Julian Adorney and Matt Palumbo wrote for the Mises Institute, he used "taut logic and compelling prose to bring the dry field of economics to hundreds of thousands of laymen."
Murray Rothbard wrote that he was "a lucid and superb writer, whose brilliant and witty essays and fables to this day are remarkable and devastating demolitions of protectionism and of all forms of government subsidy and control. He was a truly scintillating advocate of an unrestricted free market."
The introduction to The Bastiat Collection, which incorporates his greatest works, summarizes his importance by saying that "If we were to take the greatest economists from all ages and judge them on the basis of their theoretical rigor, their influence on economic education, and their impact in support of the free-market economy, then Frédéric Bastiat would be at the top of the list."
For all the praise Bastiat has deservedly received, however, his greatest works don’t exhaust his wisdom, and people are far less aware of some of those other words of wisdom. In particular, in Frederic Bastiat: The Man and the Statesman, Liberty Fund has published a collection of 207 letters he wrote (including many to Richard Cobden, "the father of free trade"), but they have not gotten the same attention as his major works.
That is why it is worth celebrating Bastiat’s 1801 birth by looking to his letters for added words of wisdom, following his recognition that "Truth has power only when it is defused." Here are some that I found particularly striking:
"As long as our deputies want to further their own business and not that of the general public, the public will remain just the tail end of the people in power.""Although there are a few souls who instinctively would like freedom to a certain extent, there are none who understand it in principle.""Let us raise the flag of absolute freedom and absolute principle, and let us wait for those with the same faith to join us.""We would not even be able to mention the word justice if we accepted the shadow of protection.""The liberation of trade will lead to political liberation…invasive politics will have ceased to exist.""I want not so much free trade itself as the spirit of free trade for my country. Free trade means a little more wealth; the spirit of free trade is a reform of the mind itself…the source of all reform.""The cause we serve is not bounded by the borders of a nation. It is universal and will find its solution only in its acceptance by all peoples.""[Many] have the same goal, tyranny. They differ only on the question of…in whose hands the despotism will be placed. This is why the thing they fear most is a spirit of true freedom.""The plentiful bounty of the state…the whole mechanism consists in taking away ten to give it back eight, not to mention the true freedom that will be destroyed in the operation!""Anything that can, directly or indirectly, damage property, undermine confidence, or weaken security is an obstacle to the accumulation of capital and has an unfavorable effect on the working classes. This is also true for all taxes and irritating governmental interference.""How can industry revive when it is accepted in principle that the scope for regulation is unlimited? When every minute a decree on earnings, working hours, the cost of things, etc., can upset all economic decision making?""The dominant notion…that has permeated every class of society, is that the state is responsible for providing a living for everyone….The real cause of the evil is certainly the false ideas of socialism.""The state has been required to provide for the welfare of its citizens directly. But….This means that the state or the public treasury has been plundered.""Every class has demanded from the state the means of subsistence, as of right. The efforts made by the state to provide this have led only to taxes and restrictions and an increase in deprivation, with the result that the demands of the people have become more pressing….[All] have called upon the law to intervene to increase their share of wealth. The law has been able to satisfy them only by creating distress in the other classes, especially the working classes. These therefore raised a clamor, and instead of demanding that this plundering should cease, they demanded that the law should allow them to take part in the plundering as well. It has become general and universal.""Each person should call upon his own forces to provide his means of existence and expect the state to provide only justice and security.""You need to be uncommonly absurd and foolish to believe that it is an act of courage to vote in favor of might…the majority, the passions of the moment, and the government.""Protectionism [is] the negation of the right of property.""Protectionism is a plague.""As long as the state is regarded…as a source of favors, our history will be seen as having only two phases, the periods of conflict as to who will take control of the state and the periods of truce, which will be the transitory reign of a triumphant oppression, the harbinger of a fresh conflict.""The legitimate functions of the government…once these functions have been understood and these limits set, the people governed will no longer expect prosperity, well-being, and absolute good fortune but equal justice for all from their governments….governments will have their ordinary action circumscribed, will no longer repress individual energy, will no longer dissipate public assets…and will themselves be freed from the illusionary hopes pinned on them by their peoples.""[Even] the best assembly is good only for preventing evil.""What I ask of the law is that it should be neutral between us and that it should guarantee my property in the same way as that of the blacksmith.""The government should guarantee security to each person and…should not concern itself with anything else." "A keen wit and a clear pithy writing style," as Adorney and Palumbo described it, is clearly on display in Bastiat’s letters as well as his other, better-known writing. That is why his letters are worth our consideration as well. They even provide us with a toast worthy of emulating:
Allow me, in closing…this toast: To free trade among peoples! To the free circulation of men, things, and ideas! To universal free trade and all its economic, political, and moral consequences!
Americans, as a rule, are poorly informed about the vast insights into liberty that some their countrymen have offered them. But moving beyond our borders and language, many know next to nothing. That is why it is valuable to find, in Star Trek lingo, that “undiscovered country” of understanding.
One of the most valuable foreign sources of libertarian thought comes from Wilhelm von Humboldt. Born June 22, 1767, in Prussia, his book, translated from German into English, titledThe Sphere and Duties of Government (or The Limits of State Action in another translation) was a major work in liberty.
Humboldt’s own description of the heart of his book was that “The grand, leading principle, towards which every argument…directly converges, is the absolute and essential importance of human development in its richest diversity.”
J.W. Burrow wrote that “Humboldt explores the role that liberty plays in individual development, discusses criteria for permitting the state to limit individual actions, and suggests ways of confining the state to its proper bounds. In so doing, he uniquely combines the ancient concern for human excellence and the modern concern for what has come to be known as negative liberty.” And The Sphere also inspired John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty (though Barrow noted that “many commentators even believe that Humboldt’s discussion of issues of freedom and individual responsibility possesses greater clarity and directness than Mill’s”). In fact, Mill wrote in his Autobiography that “the only author who had preceded me…of whom I thought it appropriate to say anything, was Humboldt.”
George Smith wrote that The Sphere was “one of the best defenses of limited-government libertarianism ever written.” It led Friedrich Hayek to call him “Germany’s greatest philosopher of freedom.” Ralph Raico wrote that Humboldt came to “passionately defend personal liberty,” which led him to ask, “To what end ought the whole apparatus of the state to aim, and what limits ought to be set to its activity?” What was his answer? “The one good which society cannot provide for itself is security against those who aggress against the person and property of others.” As a result, “the provision of security, against both external enemies and internal dissensions must constitute the purpose of the state, and occupy the circle of its activity.” But “for the [other] services which it is commonly held must fall within the scope of government action…Humboldt believes that they need not be provided by political institutions, but can safely be entrusted to social ones” (a theme strongly echoed by Albert Jay Nock). Humboldt’s approach also infused Leonard Read’s work at the Foundation for Economic Education, with its central focus on enabling individual growth or “blooming.”
Even though The Sphere was first published in its entirety in 1850, and first translated into English in 1854, long after Humboldt’s death, few American writers can claim a closer connection to America’s revolutionary era. Humboldt was born in 1767, just ten days before the British passed the Townsend Acts, a major impetus toward our revolution. He completed the book in 1792, when George Washington won a second term. Much of his adult life overlapped that of James Madison (Humboldt died one year before him), whose efforts dealt with related themes. Further, few works have better caught the spirit of liberty that infused our revolution.
Consider a selection of Humboldt’s insights below as food for thought.
“Inquiry into the proper aims and limits of State agency [is]…more vitally momentous than any other political question.”“The due limits of State agency must conduct us to an ampler range of freedom.”“The freedom of private life always increases in exact proportion as public freedom declines.”“The highest ideal…consist[s] in a union in which each strives to develop himself from his own inmost nature, and for his own sake.”“Reason cannot desire for man any other condition than that in which each individual…enjoys the most absolute freedom of developing himself by his own energies, in his perfect individuality…restricted only by the limits of his powers and his rights.”“State measures…accustom men to look for instruction, guidance, and assistance from without, rather than to rely upon their own expedients.”“In proportion as each individual relies upon…the State, he learns to abandon to its responsibility the fate and wellbeing of his fellow-citizens.”“Men are not to unite themselves together in order to forego any portion of their individuality.”“The State, in its positive solicitude for the external and physical well-being of the citizen, cannot avoid creating hindrances to the development of individuality….[S]uch a solicitude should not be conceded to it.”“The whole argument conducts us [to] the necessity of securing the consent of every individual.”“The more a man acts for himself, the more does he develop himself.”“Now, without security, it is impossible for man either to develop his powers, or to enjoy the fruits of his exertion; for, without security, there can be no freedom.”“The State…is not to meddle in anything which does not refer exclusively to security.”“The State may not attempt to act upon the citizen’s peculiar condition with any reference to positive ends.”“The citizens of a State [are] secure, when, living together in the full enjoyment of their due rights of person and property, they are out of the reach of any external disturbance from the encroachments of others.”“The State…is not to withhold a man from the free exercise of his chosen pursuit because he has not submitted himself to its tests of capability.”“The less a man is induced to act otherwise than his wish suggests or his powers permit, the more favorable does his position as a member of a civil community become.”“The manifold and ever-varying plans and wishes of individual men are to be preferred to the uniform and unchangeable will of the State.”“Secure a due regard to the rights of others.”“The nation can accomplish [many important objects] as effectually and without incurring the evils which flow from State interference.”“Fatal consequences…flow for human enjoyment, power, and character, from confounding the free activity of the nation with that which is enforced upon its members.”“The government whose activity we have so narrowly circumscribed does not stand in need of such abundant sources of revenue.”“The grand point to be kept in view by the State is the development of the powers of all its single citizens in their perfect individuality.” As Ralph Raico summarized The Sphere and Duties of Government, “Humboldt shows himself to be a thoughtful but passionate believer in the efficacy of truly social forces, in the possibility of great social ends being achieved without any necessity for direction on the part of the state.”
That is something our current age, in which the presumed sphere of government extends to virtually everything, would profit from remembering. And for those interested in reading further, more of his insightful words can be found here and here.
In recent weeks, we've been keeping an eye on weekly total deaths as they are reported by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Weekly deaths—as opposed to COVID-19 death totals—provide some needed context. This is important, since we now know that doctors and health administrators are encouraged to be—in the words of Deborah Birx—"liberal" with counting COVID-19 deaths.
This week I'm looking at week 16 (the week ending April 18). The CDC says that week 17 data is "100% complete" but experience suggests that it will still be a week or two before we have 90 percent or so of the total.
Even week 16 will continue to adjust upward, but further large adjustments are unlikely at this point. These numbers are CDC estimates.
Looking at the data we do have, there were 67,059 total deaths in the US during the week ending April 18 (week 16). That's up 24 percent (or 13,206 deaths) over the week 16 average (53,852) for 2017–19. Using the average for 2017–19 as the baseline, "excess deaths" number about 13,000 or 0.004 percent of the US population. Interestingly, so far this year, only week 15 (the week ending April 11) has exceeded the total mortality for week 2 of 2018, which was 67,295. The 2017–18 season was a very bad flu year according to the CDC (week 1 is on the left in blue and week 16 is on the right in yellow for each year):
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A large portion of this continues to come from New York State. In New York, the week 16 total was 4,056 deaths, which was 2,083 above the 2017–19 average of 1,972. So, about one-sixth of all excess death in week 16 came from New York. Deaths were up 105 percent over the average for week 16, with excess deaths at more than 2,000 for week 16:
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Week 15 (the week ending April 11) may have been the peak week, if we assume COVID-19 was the driving factor in total deaths that week. Worldometer data suggests that COVID-19 deaths peaked the week ending April 11 and have fallen since then.
To offer an example of another large state, we can also look at Florida. Florida has not seen nearly the surge in total deaths that we've seen in New York or nationwide.
For week 16, total deaths in Florida were only up 8.4 percent (or 331 deaths) over the 2017–19 average for the week.
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Murray Rothbard once stunned me by saying that he thought the greatest economist in history was Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk. The reason he gave, to the best of my recollection, was: “Böhm-Bawerk created a mighty system of economic theory and then successfully defended it against all comers.” Noticing that I was startled, he asked who I thought was the greatest economist. I replied, “Ludwig von Mises,” Rothbard’s revered mentor, whom I thought would have been his choice. Rothbard acknowledged that an excellent case could also be made for Mises.
It was only many years later that I came to understand why Rothbard gave Böhm-Bawerk an edge over Mises. Böhm-Bawerk’s magnum opus, The Positive Theory of Capital, published in 1889, almost immediately began to elicit comments and critiques from the greatest economists of his age throughout Europe and the United States. The stream of commentary on his work continued unabated for twenty-five years until his death in 1914. During this controversy, Böhm-Bawerk defended and further developed his theoretical system with acute insight and superb dialectical and expositional skills that far outclassed those of all but a few of his critics. In contrast, Mises was never able to engage the greatest economic minds of his age. His brilliant magnum opus, Human Action, published in 1949, barely caused a ripple of acknowledgement in the increasingly positivistic postwar economics profession, which was rushing headlong into macroeconomics, econometrics, and mathematical economics.
Whether or not one agrees with Rothbard about the ranking of Mises and his mentor, Böhm-Bawerk certainly merits a place in the pantheon of the greatest economic theorists.
In recent weeks, we've been keeping an eye on weekly total deaths as they are reported by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Weekly deaths—as opposed to COVID-19 death totals—provide some needed context. This is important, since we now know doctors and health administrators are encouraged to be—in the words of Deborah Birx—"liberal" with counting COVID-19 deaths.
This week I'm looking at week 14 (the week ending April 4) deaths for a second time as we wait for some more complete counting for week 15.
The week 14 data, which is now three weeks old, shows that nationwide total deaths were up by 4,512 over the 2017–19 average for week 14. In other words, "excess deaths" in week 14 now total about 0.0013 percent of the US population.
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We also know that most of this is coming from the state of New York. New York now reports 3,373 total deaths for week 14. This means that for the week the death total was up by 1,385 over the 2017–19 average of 1,987.
This isn't surprising, since, as we see here, COVID-19 deaths in New York are many times larger per capita than is the case in the rest of the nation. Indeed, New York and New Jersey combined account for more COVID-19 deaths than all other US states combined.
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From California to New Jersey, Americans are protesting in the streets. They are demanding an end to house arrest orders given by government officials over a virus outbreak that even according to the latest US government numbers will claim fewer lives than the seasonal flu outbreak of 2017–18.
Across the US, millions of businesses have been shut down by “executive order” and the unemployment rate has skyrocketed to levels not seen since the Great Depression. Americans, who have seen their real wages decline thanks to Federal Reserve monetary malpractice, are finding themselves thrust into poverty and standing in breadlines. It is like a horror movie, but it’s real.
Last week the UN secretary general warned that a global recession resulting from the worldwide coronavirus lockdown could cause “hundreds of thousands of additional child deaths per year.” As of this writing, less than 170,000 have been reported to have died from the coronavirus worldwide.
Many Americans have also died this past month, because they were not able to get the medical care they needed. Cancer treatments have been indefinitely postponed. Life-saving surgeries have been put off to make room for coronavirus cases. Meanwhile hospitals are laying off thousands, because the expected coronavirus cases have not come and the hospitals are partially empty.
What if the “cure” is worse than the disease?
Countries like Sweden that did not lock down their economy and place the population under house arrest are faring no worse than countries that did. Sweden’s deaths per million from coronavirus is lower than that of many lockdown countries.
Likewise, US states that did not arrest citizens for merely walking on the beach are not doing worse than those that did. South Dakota governor Kristi Noem said last week, “we've been able to keep our businesses open and allow people to take on some personal responsibility." South Dakota has recorded a total of seven coronavirus deaths.
Kentucky, a strict lockdown state, is five times more populated than South Dakota, yet it has some twenty times more coronavirus deaths. If lockdown and house arrest are the answer, shouldn’t those numbers be reversed, with South Dakota seeing mass death while Kentucky dodges the coronavirus bullet?
When Anthony Fauci first warned that 2 million would die, there was a race among federal, state, and local officials to see who could rip up the Constitution fastest. Then Fauci told us if we did what he said only a quarter of a million would die. They locked America down even harder. Then, with little more than a shrug of the shoulders, they announced that a maximum of sixty thousand would die, but maybe less. That is certainly terrible, but it’s just a high-average flu season.
Imagine if we had used even a fraction of the resources spent to lock down the entire population and focused on providing assistance and protection to the most vulnerable—the elderly and those with serious medical conditions. We could have protected these people and still had an economy to go back to when the virus had run its course. And it wouldn’t have cost us $6 trillion dollars either.
Governments have no right or authority to tell us what business or other activity is “essential.” Only in totalitarian states does the government claim this authority. We should encourage all those who are standing up peacefully and demanding an accounting from their elected leaders. They should not be able to get away with this.
Information on total deaths through March 28 shows no indication of a general surge in deaths in the United States. It's quite possible we'll see April's total mortality begin to show levels well above normal, but the weekly data we have so far show no indication of this.
We now have data up through week 13 (the week ending March 28) for this year, as can be found here. As of April 15, the week 13 data is not yet quite complete, although the CDC lists that data as 93 percent complete.
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The missing data may yet slightly push up these totals, but given that data from hard-hit New York, New Jersey, and Michigan is already accessible for week 13, big increases from the current total are unlikely. After all, week 13's total would need to increase by 27 percent just to match 2019's week 13, as can be seen here (week 1 is the column on the left for each year. Week 13 is the column on the right):
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The average for the first thirteen weeks of the year during 2020 is 53,529. That's below 2019's average of 57,928, and well below 2018's average of 60,115. This is not surprising, since the 2017–18 flu season was especially deadly.
For additional context, I have broken out New York State. Here we do finally see a surge in total deaths during week 13.
New York was at clearly elevated levels at the end of March, although total deaths remained below what was reported during week 2 of 2018. But even with this late-month surge, total average deaths for the first thirteen weeks of the year were down in New York when compared to 2017, 2018, and 2019. If we assume New York's week 13 total points toward its high reported COVID-19 numbers, we will likely see a surge in weeks 14 and 15.
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On the other hand, Colorado, an alleged "emerging area of concern" shows no signs of a surge in total deaths. In fact, week 13 in Colorado was near a multiyear low for total deaths. For the first thirteen weeks of the year, the 2020 average (815 deaths per week) was higher than the 2019 average of 795 per week, and higher than 2018's average of 801 per week.
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Unless COVID-19 was present in Colorado long before many experts insist is possible, the higher death totals have mostly occurred before COVID-19 had time to spread. The first four weeks of 2020, for example, were already at elevated levels, and the very high total of 865 people recorded during week 8 occurred in late February.
Of course, it is entirely possible that total deaths are pushed down by social distancing practices. With fewer vehicles on the road, there are fewer auto accidents. Diseases other than COVID-19 might be spread less often as well. On the other hand, economic collapse exacerbated by social distancing may be leading to more suicide and stress-related health problems. The extent to which these various factors contribute to overall mortality is unknown, and may never be known. Moreover, the total number of deaths due to COVID-19 is unreliable since deaths are increasingly attributed to COVID-19 even when no test is performed and when other serious medical problems are present. But what does appear evident is that deaths due to COVID-19, at least so far, have not been sufficient to increase total mortality to a level that significantly exceeds what has been seen in the past decade.
It was autumn 1989. Momentous things were taking place in the world.
The Berlin Wall had fallen. The people of the Eastern Bloc had succeeded at getting to the West through Hungary. The firm line between east and west was wavering. The situation was moving away from the course that Warsaw Pact communist governments had charted: that their populations must remain captive within the borders of the Communist Bloc.
It was unclear whether this social contagion for freedom would spread into Czechoslovakia.
But then November 17, 1989, arrived, a day etched in history. This was Students Day, a legal holiday. Everything had to close under government fiat. People were off school and off work. But some folks were agitated about prior government actions which many saw as abuses.
When the government gave the people of Czechoslovakia that day off, it was like a match to tinder. The small flame grew into a big one.
It was a revolution noted for its bloodlessness. The Velvet Revolution, we call it today, leaning on what the Czechs called it. People, for as far as the eye could see, gathered in a giant square in Prague and called for the ouster of their government.
In the face of the idea that saying the wrong words politically could be toxic to one’s health, much like in America today, some did not resort to speaking words against their government. They merely pulled their keys out of their pockets and jingled them.
The message was clear.
Imagine tens of thousands of people jingling their keys at once.
Imagine the horror that would fill you, as a member of the communist government, looking out the window at a crowd, visible as far as the eye could see, and knowing that this delicate sound being made by each individual, growing into a horrifying sound in unison, called for your ouster.
What could a government minister, sitting at their desk, overlooking the square, even have imagined that sound to have been the first time it arose?
How ominous. How threatening. How deeply horrifying it must have been to peer out that window. The day of reckoning had finally arrived.
At that moment, a question was answered for them: what is the last thought that goes through a tyrant’s head? That is the thought that flashed through theirs as they realized what that sound was: reckoning. It had finally arrived. Were the government ministers thinking those thoughts as the keys jingled below them?
The people of Czechoslovakia remained largely peaceful.
By the end of the year, Czech dissident Vaclav Havel, who had been in prison earlier that year, would be installed in Prague Castle. The beloved Alexander Dubcek, the Slovak hero of the 1968 Prague Spring, would be his right-hand man.
The present-day American state's response, in ways, goes beyond the communism of even the USSR. The Soviets actually wanted their economy to work. They wanted to beat the West. Churches remained open and remained an important part of society, both for political use, and because the people wouldn’t have it any other way.
But just as the communists of Eastern Europe didn't back down until they were forced to, the lockdowns of today won’t stop unless government officials fear resistance.
There is a chance right now, with many unhappy Americans and many idle hands, much like Students Day, November 17, 1989, to tell the government “no more.”
Will they be pushed out of office? Will it be peaceful? I don’t know. Time will tell.
But it is time for this to stop. And daily, more people grow angry at being lied to as they witness the mass destruction of their country and culture in the spring of 2020.
It wasn’t the jingling of keys that escorted the evil communists from power in 1989. It was the threat of what all those people jingling keys could do if those in power did not step aside.
Retaining political influence depends dearly on timing. Some of those communists who knew when to step aside, who knew how to apologize, had prosperous careers long after the revolution, some to this very day.
In sharp contrast, the far more stubborn Nicolae Ceausescu of regional neighbor Romania was put to death by a firing squad on December 25, 1989.
We have reached a point where government officials have yet to admit that there is a real cost in terms of life and health that comes with bringing the economy to a standstill. And these same politicians and experts have yet to show that the benefits of their lockdowns are greater than the costs imposed. The models have been shown to be wrong.
Everyone is entitled to a mistake. But to continue making the same mistake repeatedly, destroying lives, amounts to malice.
In my daily life, I am increasingly seeing my country turn into a tinderbox that the disconnected leaders, elected and unelected, cannot imagine and must not toy with. To do so is dangerous for us all.
Not next month, not next week, not tomorrow. Today is the day for the government-imposed lockdowns to stop.
To trace the epistemological basis of praxeology, it is necessary to understand that Ludwig von Mises, "takes from Kant his central conceptual and terminological distinctions, as well as some fundamental Kantian ideas about the nature of human knowledge" (Hoppe, Economic Science and the Austrian Method (2007), p. 17). It is therefore obligatory to review the Kantian postulates.
According to Kant, although experience induces thought, and as such is located previous to all knowledge in time, this does not mean that all knowledge comes from experience. This is because the truth of knowledge (the existence of experience) is not determined by experience. Consequently, knowledge that is dependent on experience is different from that which is not. The first is called a posteriori knowledge, the second a priori knowledge.Kant, Crítica de la rázon pura (The Critique of Pure Reason), vol. 1 (Barcelona: Ediciones Folio, 2002). "Propositions are a posteriori when observations are needed to establish their truth, or at least to confirm them. If no observations are needed then the propositions are a priori." See Hans-Hermann Hoppe, Economic Science and the Austrian Method (Auburn, AL: Ludwig von Mises Institute, 2007), p. 16.
A priori knowledge necessarily comes from the understandingAccording to Kant (2002) understanding refers to the capacity of man to conceive and form concepts. See Crítica de la rázon pura, vol. 1. and therefore enjoys a strict universality, its validity determined by the principle of noncontradiction. This is unlike the a posteriori knowledge, which, coming from sensations, only offers "a merely assumed and comparative universality (through induction), so that, properly speaking it must be formulated: so far as we have observed until now, no exception has been found to this or that rule" (Kant, Crítica de la rázon pura (The Critique of Pure Reason) (2002), p. 99). That is, experience shows us something as it is but does not indicate that it cannot be otherwise.
Likewise, Kant offers a second classification, this time by the relationship between the subject and the predicate in a trial (i.e., statement or proposition). Judgments in which the predicate is contained in the subject are called analytical or explanatory, since the predicate is a part of the subject concept. Likewise, judgments in which the predicate is not contained in the subject are called synthetic or extensive, because the predicate cannot be extracted from a decomposition of the subject concept.
By virtue of the classifications set out above, Kant proposes the main characteristic of his philosophy: a priori synthetic judgments. In these judgments, the subject and predicate, as well as their linkage, derive from a proposition that is conceived as valid in itself. For the human mind, the denial of these judgments results in “nonsense.” The human being (understood as a being that thinks—and acts) conceives them as inherent to himself. As such, these judgments constitute the pure representation of an object (that which is external to the human being) and establish the constant relations between objects.It should be noted that for synthetic judgments, it is extremely important to have the concepts of their parts well defined, something that only analytical judgments allow; since the validity of the judgment also depends on these.
But Kant, according to Hoppe (2007), although he gave indications, did not give an answer on how the synthetic judgments a priori are adjusted to the environment.As M. Heidegger notes, "the question about the reality of the outside world is the problem of epistemology." La idea de la filosofía y el problema de la concepción del mundo (The idea of philosophy and the problem of the conception of the world) (Barcelona: Herder, 2005), p. 95. But Ludwig von Mises, as an exceptional Kantian, resolves this question by recognizing that “both human thought and action depend on the same root: they are products of the human mind” (Mises, "Ciencia social y ciencia natural" ("Social Science and Natural Science") (2006), p. 278). As Hoppe explains:
We must recognize that such necessary truths are not simply categories of our mind, but that our mind is one of people who act. Our mental categories have to be understood as ultimately based on categories of action….As categories of action, they have to be mental things as well as characteristics of reality. Because it is through action that mind and reality come into contact. (Hoppe 2007, p. 20)
And:
The epistemology that proposes the existence of a priori true synthetic propositions becomes a realistic epistemology. Since it is understood as ultimately based on categories of action, the abyss between the mental and the real, external and physical world is overcome….With his recognition of action as the bridge between mind and external reality, he has found a solution to the Kantian problem of how a priori true synthetic propositions can be possible. (Hoppe 2007, p. 20)
Here are the origins of Mises’s praxeology,It should be noted that what Mises intended by using the term praxeology (logic of action), according to Hoppe, was to emphasize the fact that praxeology, as a science, had more in common with the pure sciences than with the empirical natural sciences. See Hoppe, Economic Science and the Austrian Method. a theoretical and systematic science of a priori that aspires to formulate theorems of a purely formal and general nature about human action through logical deductionAbout this, we can mention Rothbard:In praxeology, in the analysis of human action, the axioms themselves are known to be true and significant. Therefore, each verbal deduction step by step is also true and significant, since the great quality of verbal propositions is that each one is significant, while mathematical symbols are not significant by themselves.See Murray Rothbard, “Praxeología: La metodología de la economía austriaca,” ("Praxeology: The Methodology of Austrian Economics") Centro Mises (website), Aug. 15, 2012, http://www.mises.org.es/2012/08/praxeologia-la-metodologia-de-la-economia-austriaca/#. from the axiom of action—“man acts”—a proposition evident in itself (Mises, Los fundamentos últimos de la ciencia económica (2012), p. 29). In that order of ideas, having already determined the main categories of human action, the praxeological work extends to make imaginary constructions in order to determine the special forms that action can take.On this, Mises argues that:In order to achieve praxeological knowledge, the fundamental thing is to analyze and deduce these concepts and theorems; to extract the corresponding conclusions and to determine the universal characteristics of acting as such. Once the typical requirements of all action are known, it is convenient to take a further step in the sense of determining—of course, in a purely categorical and formal way—the more specific requirements of special ways of acting. This second task could be approached by formulating all imaginable situations, and then drawing the appropriate logical conclusions.See Mises, La acción humana (Human Action) (Madrid: Unión Editorial, 2011), p. 211. To carry out this work, experience is a very useful tool, serving as a guide for the curiosity of the praxeologist.As described by Huerta de Soto: "The experience, only and exclusively, is used to direct the curiosity of the researcher towards certain problems. It tells us what we should investigate; it does not tell us the methodological way in which we should proceed to seek our knowledge." Estudios de Economía Política (Studies in political economy) (Madrid: Unión Editorial, 2004), p. 70.
John Calhoun, among the most influential of America’s nineteenth-century statesmen, was born on March 18. As someone who served as a congressman, senator, secretary of war, secretary of state, and vice-president to two presidents with whom he strongly disagreed (and with whom he sometimes fought as president of the senate), he deserves attention. But tarred by his defense of slavery, any attention Calhoun now gets seems to be negative (e.g., Yale changed the name of Calhoun College to distance itself from his position on slavery).
However, Calhoun was also described by John F. Kennedy as “a masterful defender of the rights of a political minority against the dangers of an unchecked majority,” and he still provides one of the best explanations of Americans’ current extreme political disunity. His 1850 Disquisition on Government laid out why the battle for political dominance and its spoils, as real today as when Calhoun was an important participant, guaranteed bitter divisiveness rather than unity:
"Government, although intended to protect and preserve society, has…a strong tendency to disorder and abuse of its powers, as all experience and almost every page of history testify.""Suffrage…only changes the seat of authority, without counteracting, in the least, the tendency of the government to oppression and abuse of its powers.""Obtain[ing] the majority—and, thereby, the control of the government and the advantages it confers…[means] aggrandizing and building up one portion of the community at the expense of the other.""It would be indispensable to success to avoid division and keep united…lead[ing] to the conversion of the honors and emoluments of the government into means of rewarding partisan services…to secure the fidelity and increase the zeal of the members of the party.""Principles and policy…lose all influence in the elections; and cunning, falsehood, deception, slander, fraud, and gross appeals to the appetites of the lowest…take the place of sound reason and wise debate.""[This] will divide the community…into two great parties…engaged in perpetual struggles to obtain the control of the government…[which] must necessarily form…attachments on the part of the members of each to their respective parties…and antipathies to the opposite party, as presenting the only obstacle to success.""Their mutual antipathies [will be] carried to such an excess as to destroy, almost entirely, all sympathy between them, and to substitute in its place the strongest aversion….devotion to party becomes stronger than devotion to country—the promotion of the interests of party more important than the promotion of the common good of the whole, and its triumph and ascendancy objects of far greater solicitude than the safety and prosperity of the community.""[This will] overpower all regard for truth, justice, sincerity, and moral obligations…falsehood, injustice, fraud, artifice, slander, and breach of faith, are freely resorted to, as legitimate weapons—followed by all their corrupting and debasing influences."The struggle to obtain the control of the government elevates to power the designing, the artful, and unscrupulous, who…aim exclusively at securing the ascendancy of party…at the expense of the good of the whole. Every election year, Americans hear candidates deride our disunity and claim to be unifiers. But more attention than ever is actually focused on wedging us further apart, rather than returning to the core principles and inalienable rights against government abuse that can alone possibly unite us. But John C. Calhoun recognized 170 years ago just how much of politics consists of tooth-and-nail battles to impose partial slavery on electoral losers to benefit electoral winners, which only gets worse as the prize of controlling government becomes more valuable. Despite his support of slavery, it would be unwise to let Calhoun's failings blind us to his insights, so sorely needed now. As he wrote:
The possession of [government’s] control, as the means of directing its action and dispensing its honors and emoluments, will be an object of desire….Party conflicts…in such governments, can hardly ever terminate in compromise—The object of the opposing minority is to expel the majority from power; and of the majority to maintain their hold upon it. It is, on both sides, a struggle…that must determine which shall be the governing, and which the subject party.
With many of our readers having more time on their hands while practicing social distancing, the Mises Institute is exploring our online archives and offering topic-specific collections of curated content. This series, we are calling it the "Quarantine Chronicles: A Shelter-at-Home-Series," will highlight essays, articles, and clips that may not be as widely known, but will provide a deep understanding of important concepts and history.
On the topic of the History of the Austrian School of Economics, we recommend some of the following selections:
Long-Form Reading:
"Historical Setting of the Austrian School," by Ludwig von Mises"Why Austrian Economists Tend to be Libertarians," by Ralph Raico"The Rebirth of Austrian Economics—In Light of Austrian Economics," by Joseph Salerno Video:
"Liberty and Economics: The Ludwig von Mises Legacy." Audio:
"Fin de Siècle Economic Science" | Chapter 4 of Mises: The Last Knight of Liberalism"The Birth of a Movement" | Chapter 19 of Mises: The Last Knight of Liberalism"The Revival of the Austrian School: Mises and Rothbard" | Joseph Salerno
Today would have been Murray Rothbard’s ninety-fourth birthday. He was an unforgettable friend, whose immense knowledge of many different fields was unsurpassed in my experience. In a lecture on the Austrian theory of the business cycle, he mentioned the common objection that the expansion of bank credit might have no effect if investors anticipated trouble. After the lecture, I asked whether Mises had answered this point. He said, “See his response to Lachmann in Economica 1943.” I often went to used bookstores with him, in both Palo Alto and Manhattan, and listened to him as he commented on nearly every book on the shelves. When he was a student at Columbia, he admired the philosopher Ernest Nagel, who he said would always encourage students to do new work. Murray was like this himself. He constantly encouraged students to work on Austrian and libertarian topics. His support for me was never failing, and I owe him everything. If only he were still here now, to guide and instruct us!
President Trump's pardon of Michael Milken would have delighted Murray Rothbard. Milken, who was famous for his "junk-bond" takeovers of various companies, served twenty-two months in prison for federal crimes that involved market trading. Murray Rothbard thought that Milken was a hero. As he explained in an article written in 1989:
During the 1960s, the existing corporate power elite, often running their corporations inefficiently—an elite virtually headed by David Rockefeller—saw their positions threatened by takeover bids, in which outside financial interests bid for stockholder support against their own inept managerial elites. The exiting corporate elites turned—as usual—for aid and bailout from the federal government, which obligingly passed the Williams Act [named for the New Jersey Senator who was later sent to jail in the Abscam affair] in 1967. Before the Williams Act, takeover bids could occur quickly and silently, with little hassle. The 1967 Act, however, gravely crippled takeover bids by decreeing that if a financial group amassed more than 5% of the stock of a corporation, it would have to stop, publicly announce its intent to arrange a takeover bid, and then wait for a certain time period before it could proceed on its plans. What Milken did was to resurrect and make flourish the takeover bid concept through the issue of high-yield bonds (the "leveraged buyout").
The new takeover process enraged the Rockefeller-type corporate elite, and enriched both Mr. Milken and his employers, who had the sound business sense to hire Milken on commission, and to keep the commission going despite the wrath of the establishment. In the process Drexel Burnham grew from a small, third-tier investment firm to one of the giants of Wall Street.
The establishment was bitter for many reasons. The big banks who were tied in with the existing, inefficient corporate elites, found that the upstart takeover groups could make an end run around the banks by floating high-yield bonds on the open market. The competition also proved inconvenient for firms who issue and trade in blue-chip, but low-yield, bonds; these firms soon persuaded their allies in the establishment media to sneeringly refer to their high-yield competition as "junk" bonds, which is equivalent to the makers of Porsches persuading the press to refer to Volvos as "junk" cars.
People like Michael Milken perform a vitally important economic function for the economy and for consumers, in addition to profiting themselves. One would think that economists and writers allegedly in favor of the free market would readily grasp this fact. In this case, they aid the process of shifting the ownership and control of capital from inefficient to more efficient and productive hands—a process which is great for everyone, except, of course, for the inefficient Old Guard elites whose proclaimed devotion to the free markets does not stop them from using the coercion of the federal government to try to restrict or crush their efficient competitors.
Thank to Thorvaldur Gylfason for pointing out his 2009 article examining the economic implications of Iceland's small population of only about three hundred thousand people.
Gylfason noted how Icelandic politicians have claimed that the country's small population was "our most serious social evil," and that the critical mass for a well-functioning society must be much larger than was currently available.
But Gylfason notes:
Yet, medieval Florence and Venice flourished with 70,000 and 115,000 inhabitants. They were better situated in Europe and better served by sea lanes than Iceland was and could, therefore, easily make up for their small size through trade. Economic integration is vital to small countries. The population of ancient Athens was 200,000. Too small? Hardly.
Or take modern Barbados (pop. 300,000), independent since 1966, a prosperous and stable democracy where virtually every child completes primary and secondary school and life expectancy matches that of the US. Is Barbados too small? No. Barbados has not even felt it necessary to pool its currency with its eight neighbours comprising the East Caribbean Currency Union (ECCU, pop. 600,000). Since 1975, the exchange rate of the Barbados dollar has been kept fixed vis-à-vis the US dollar at a rate of 2 to 1 (and the ECCU, meanwhile, pegged the East Caribbean dollar to the US dollar at a rate of 3 to 1).
Is there a lower bound on population below which countries cannot stand on their own feet? Yes, but it seems to lie far below 300,000.
The answer lies in free trade. Gylfason writes:
Fuelled by free trade, small nations have increased in number. Without external trade, many small nations would be inefficient on account of their small size and would seem, on economic grounds, to need to merge with larger nations. Foreign trade relieves small nations of this need by enabling them to reap the benefits of scale and scope through trade.
This is how trade has helped increase the number of sovereign states over the years. Without vivacious trade, the costs of small size to many countries would almost surely outweigh the gains. The inability of a small country to benefit from specialisation by exploiting its comparative advantages would by itself be disastrous.
Not that everything is fine when a society is small:
Even if small countries can succeed by being open and peaceful, their small size presents challenges. Strong checks and balances are imperative in small, heavily politicised, clan-based societies to prevent relations between politics, banking, and business from becoming too cosy, not to say incestuous. Here Iceland failed. High-quality recruitment into political service and careful selection of key public officials, from abroad if needed, are also important in a small country with a small pool of appropriate local talent. Here, too, Iceland missed the boat.
But the benefits do outweigh the costs, Gylfason concludes:
Some observers at the time thought Belgium and Portugal were too small to be viable as independent countries. The tables were turned in the twentieth century when centrifugal forces prevailed, facilitated by the worldwide liberalisation of trade after World War II. Iceland attained home rule in 1904 and transformed itself from economic parity with today‘s Ghana in 1900 to parity with Scandinavia in 1980 (Gylfason 2008a). Gradual liberalisation of trade from 1960 onward played an important role in Iceland’s transformation.
One consequence of the social accord that tends to go along with small size may be a shared interest in education, as children in cohesive societies are less likely to be deprived of schooling. Countries with 300,000 or fewer inhabitants keep their young people in school a year longer on average than larger countries, in the sense that the small countries have an average school life expectancy—i.e., the expected number of years of schooling that will be completed as measured by UNESCO—of 13 years compared with 12 years elsewhere.
Another consequence of small country size, especially in a strategic location, may be that neighbours may be willing to share the costs of national defence. France spends 2.4% of its GDP on national defence compared with 1.1% in Belgium and 0.8% in Luxembourg. This tendency may offset some of the higher per capita cost of public services in small countries. Moreover, and this may surprise you, small countries tend to have less corruption than large countries as measured by Transparency International. In 2008, the Corruption Perceptions Index—which ranges from 1.4 in Somalia to 9.4 in Denmark—was 4.6 on average in countries with 300,000 or fewer inhabitants compared with 4.0 in larger countries.
As I noted in this article, both the empirical and theoretical evidence suggests that smallness is no impediment to growth and economic success. Smallness means more openness to trade, less aggressiveness militarily, and studies have shown that small countries have better growth rates in many cases.
In his book Human Scale, Kirkpatrick Sale covers this topic of the "ideal" size for a political entity. Sale suggests that an independent city or city-state probably reaches its ideal size for self-rule around fifty thousand people. He also notes that medieval cities that were larger than this tended to break themselves up into smaller, adjacent independent pieces, with the idea being that large scale breeds alienation, crime, and political dysfunction.
Today would have been the ninety-first birthday of Burt Blumert, one of the greatest personalities of the modern libertarian movement. Burt was the indispensable man behind the scenes and was a key figure in the Mises Institute, the Center for Libertarian Studies, and LewRockwell.com. He was one of Murray Rothbard’s closest friends, and when you met him, it was easy to see why Murray liked him. He was a genial and kind person, and a source of wise counsel to all those fortunate to know him. Burt was the founder of Camino Coins and a principal figure in the hard money community. If you want to get a sense of what Burt was like, you have only to read his collection of humorous essays Bagels, Barry Bonds, and Rotten Politicians (2008). It was a source of great pride and comfort to Burt in his final illness that he was able to see this book in print. Burt helped me with good advice when I most needed it, and I will always be grateful to him for his counsel and friendship
Admirers of the work of Hans-Hermann Hoppe will be pleased by some news from our friend Youssif Almoayyed, an outstanding supporter of the Mises Institute who lives in Bahrain. Youssif informs us that books by Hans have been translated into Arabic and are selling very well. His A Short History of Man was brought out by a small Iraqi publisher from Mutanabbi Street, a historic center in Baghdad for paper making, book binding and bookselling, now known as an intellectual center. The book sold very well in Iraq and has already covered its costs, even though the publisher hasn’t engaged very actively in distributing it. Youssif notes that complete freedom of the press now prevails in Iraq, with no government censorship, although publishers of controversial books risk physical attacks from offended private citizens or groups.
Hans’s more famous book Democracy: The God That Failed sold half its print run within two months and a pirated edition is already available. When the book was released in Bahrain at a book exhibition, the first day of which was marked by a solar eclipse, it was a hit, in part owing to the endorsement of a noted Bahraini intellectual and historian. Some who saw the word “God” in the title feared the book was blasphemous, but readers soon discovered that Hans meant by it only his intention to denounce democracy as idolatrous. The book has no quarrel with Allah, fortunately for its fate in the Arab world.
Arabic readers now have a chance to study the thought of this most provocative and insightful libertarian theorist. It only remains to add, though Youssif is too modest to say so, that he himself has done a great deal to bring the libertarian message of Hans Hoppe, as well as that of Mises and Rothbard, to Bahrain and the wider Arabic world. For that he deserves our profound gratitude.
Yesterday afternoon, Butler Shaffer, one of the great pioneers of the libertarian movement, passed away, two weeks before his eighty-fifth birthday. In a column written in December 2014, he tells us, "My interest in what is now called 'libertarian' thinking was kindled in college in the late 1950s. There was no coherent philosophy by that name in those years, but I found myself attracted to such thinkers as John Locke, John Stuart Mill, the Stoics, and very much annoyed by the likes of Thomas Hobbes, Karl Marx, and my undergrad study of 'economics' taught by a prominent Keynesian. While in law school, I began my study of genuine economics with Prof. Aaron Director, and began my focused and energized inquiry into the kinds of ideas later to be described as 'libertarianism.'"
Butler’s brand of libertarianism was exceptionally pure and consistent. As he explains in his superb monograph A Libertarian Critque of Intellectual Property (free here), he believed that rights stem from "the informal processes by which men and women accord to each other a respect for the inviolability of their lives — along with claims to external resources (e.g., land, food, water, etc.) necessary to sustain their lives." (p. 18) The "informal processes" that Shaffer mentions proceed without coercion. In particular, law and rights do not depend on the dictates of the state, an organization that claims a monopoly over the legitimate use of force in a territory.
In adopting this stance, Shaffer puts himself at odds with much that passes in our day for wisdom among professors of law. "In a world grounded in institutional structuring, it is often difficult to find people willing to consider the possibility that property interests could derive from any source other than an acknowledged legal authority. There is an apparent acceptance of Jeremy Bentham’s dictum that 'property is entirely the creature of law.'" (pp. 18–19) Butler explained his approach in great detail in his Boundaries of Order, a major contribution to libertarian political philosophy.
Butler taught at Southwestern Law School from 1977 to 2014 and influenced generations of students. He was a master of the Socratic method. He would sometimes read to his class a list of "progressive"-sounding measures that would usually command approval. He would then tell the students, "You just voted for Hitler!" His list had been taken from the Nazi Party platform. Butler always looked at things from an original angle, and in my many conversations with him, his ability to subject his own ideas to constant criticism and rethinking impressed me.
Butler continued to share his wisdom with us nearly to the end of his life, and his mordant criticism of the state brings to mind H. L. Mencken, a writer he greatly admired. In a column on LewRockwell.com published last August 13, he said,
Those who seek to control our lives must first gain control of our minds. If one of your neighbors went through the neighborhood with a gun, informing you that he was the sovereign authority therein, and that you were required to obey his orders, how would you respond? When, as a child, I visited my aunt and uncle on their farm, there was a retarded man in the neighborhood who informed us that he was the local sheriff and we had to do as he directed. Since he was completely harmless and pleasant, the neighbors tended to humor him and treat him with respect. But when you listen to the gaggle of Democratic Party presidential candidates with essentially the same baseless claim to run your life with policies that would be far more disruptive of your interests, you become aware that you are not hearing the voices of good-natured chuckleheads; but of men and women who fully intend to make their delusions enforceable through the coercive powers of the state.
Butler was my dear friend for many years, and now that he is gone what comes most to my mind is his sense of humor. He loved words and was a master of puns. Few things in my life brought me as much joy as a conversation with Butler, and now that is gone forever.
Butler is survived by his wonderful wife, Jane, to whom he was married for 63 years, their three daughters, and a number of grandchildren.
As I get older and people close to me pass away, the melancholy words of Ovid come to mind: Omnia perdidimus: tantummodo vita relicta est / praebat ut sensum materiamque mali — I have lost all; life alone remains / to give me the consciousness and the substance of sorrow.
We usually think of Friedrich Hayek as a moderate, as least when compared with Mises and Rothbard, but he had a radical side as well. Hidden away in a note to the third volume of Law, Legislation, and Liberty, he makes a comment that puts him far outside “respectable” public opinion. He says that the inventor of “freedom from want” was “the greatest of modern demagogues.” Hayek’s condemnation of Franklin Roosevelt is as forthright as any radical could wish.
The passage where he says that is this: ”In view of the latest trick of the Left to turn the old liberal tradition of human rights in the sense of limits to the powers both of government and of other persons over the individual into positive claims for particular benefits (like the 'freedom from want' invented by the greatest of modern demagogues) it should be stressed here that in a society of free men the goals of collective action can always only aim to provide opportunities for unknown people, means of which anyone can avail himself for his purposes, but no concrete national goals which anyone is obliged to serve. The aim of policy should be to give all a better chance to find a position which in turn gives each a good chance of achieving his ends than they would otherwise have.” (Law, Legislation, and Liberty, Volume 3, note 42, pp.202-203 in the one-volume edition of the trilogy published by Routledge, 1982)
Today is an interesting milestone for libertarian-minded people, as well as those with a fondness for trivia.
86 years ago today FDR 86’d prohibition.
Drinking became a crime starting on January 17th 1920, and remained a crime until December 5th 1933. Prohibition serves as a leading example of what happens when people in a largely free society lose part of their freedom. Prohibition did not stop Americans from drinking, it just drove an industry underground and into the control of gangs. Consequently, gang violence escalated during the prohibition years.
Prohibition also escalated police raids against harmless commerce. Prohibition fueled speakeasies as dispensers of beer & booze. Speakeasies obviously dealt with violent gangs as suppliers, but speakeasy customers engaged in voluntary transactions for desired goods. Police raids on speakeasies drove willing customers out of these businesses now and then, and these raids prompted both corruption and a minor change in the English language.
One speakeasy was “Chumley’s” located at 86 Bedford Street in Manhattan. Some police acted as informants to the bartenders at Chumley’s: shortly before a raid they would call with the message to “86 the customers”, to stop business and push all customers out the door. Hence the term 86’d began as a term for putting a stop to illicit business in one bar, but developed subsequently into a more general term for getting rid of something or refusing service. Prohibition ended 86 years ago today.
This is perhaps the only day during any year that libertarian-minded person might find it appropriate to raise a toast to FDR.
Cheers to the 32nd President, for just this one occasion.
Can a Roman Catholic be an Austro-Libertarian as well? Christopher Ferrara in a book called The Church and the Libertarian says that one cannot. In Ferrara’s view, Austrian economists deny that the moral law applies to the economy. Instead, Austrians say, strictly scientific laws govern the economy and these limit what the State or the Church can do. Minimum wage laws, for example, tend to cause unemployment, like it or not.
Ferrara challenges this contention. Economic laws are not absolute but must be subordinated to the moral law. For example, a worker must be paid a “living wage” that enables him to raise a family. To deny this, he thinks, is to reject Catholic Social Thought, and to do that is to put oneself outside the Church.
Tony Flood, who is both a believing Catholic and sympathetic to the thought of Murray Rothbard, who was a friend of his, subjects Ferrara’s book to close examination and finds it lacking. In his book, Christ, Capital and Liberty: A Polemic. Flood argues thatAustro-libertarian thought is compatible with the key teaching of the Church, In contending that it is, Flood draws attention to the writings of the great Jesuit Father James Sadowsky, S.J., a distinguished Catholic philosopher and theologian who was also a Rothbardian in his political philosophy.
Flood analyzes in detail the errors in Ferrara’s book. In one case, for example, Ferrara included in a quotation from Murray Rothbard words that were not Rothbard’s but in fact were from a polemical discussion by Kevin Carson, a writer of different views altogether
Flood has ably shown that Ferrara’s assault on Austro-libertarianism is baseless.
Jeff Deist joins the Death to Tyrants podcast to discuss themes in his recent article, "Politics Drops Its Pretenses" and his recent speech on how "meaningless words" create a narrative. Is "democracy" really a good thing? Do those who use it even know what it means? Are we best off when 51% of the voters force their will upon the other 49%? Is it realistic for libertarians to find the right presidential candidate that will win over a majority of voters in hopes to live in a libertarian society? What if secession and decentralization is the best way moving forward? We will hear the establishment tell us that "politics and voting will bring us together" and "democracy in action is a good thing". Why does it seem, then, that the further entrenched government becomes in our lives, the more divisive and at odds the country becomes?
As many of you know, I have been researching and writing about the economics of Irish economist and banker Richard Cantillon for over 20 years. He was the first to write a book about economic theory, circa 1730, coined the modern term entrepreneur, and the first to provide a supply and demand analysis of prices, as well as the basics of Austrian Business Cycle theory, along with many of the fundamental aspects of economic theory and beyond. In 2010, Chantal Saucier and I published a translation of his Essai into modern English.
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I had a DNA done by Ancestry.com last year and it came back exactly as expected with the vast majority being "Irish or Scottish" and tiny amounts of Western Europe and the Iberian Peninsula. Today I received an update from Ancestry.com with a more refined analysis and it turns out that the majority of my DNA comes from the same place where Cantillon was born in the County Kerry area! Ancestry.com describes the area as a "perfect place for rebels and outlaws who sought refuge from British authority"!
Very satisfied with this Ancestry.com thing!
Today would have been Joey Rothbard's 91st birthday. She was Murray Rothbard's "indispensable framework." She was a scholar in her own right, but she devoted her life to helping Murray. She was a wonderful friend, and I miss her very much.
Neil Schulman, who passed away August 10, was best known as a science fiction writer, and his Alongside Night and The Rainbow Cadenza are libertarian classics. He was one of several brilliant writers and thinkers associated with the great Sam Konkin’s “anarcho—village." I met Neil only a few times, but his commanding presence and vigorous defense of his ideas made an indelible impression on me. He used his immense writing talents in defense of liberty and in opposition to war and the state. Only a few days before he died, he posted on Twitter, “When compared with the typical State assault on innocent civilian populations with deaths in the thousands, hundreds of thousands, or millions, the typical private assault doesn't even register.” He admired Ron Paul greatly, and I last heard his booming voice at a conference in Arizona that featured Dr. Paul. His many friends will miss him.
Economists don't appear very interested in economics nowadays.
Indeed, they mostly seem interested in muscling in on other disciplines.
Consider, for example, this profile on Harvard economist Raj Chetty published in May by Vox. The article acts as is Chetty has done something revolutionary in the social sciences by processing large amounts of data to examine human behavior.
For example, the Vox author breathlessly notes that in Chetty's class:
There’s little discussion of supply and demand curves, of producer or consumer surplus, or other elementary concepts introduced in classes like Ec 10. There is no textbook, only a set of empirical papers.
More specifically:
He [Chetty] used huge amounts of IRS tax data to map inequality of opportunity in the US down to the neighborhood, and to show that black boys in particular enjoy less upward mobility than white boys.
But here's the thing: people have been doing this sort of thing for years. They're called sociologists.
Similarly, we're supposed to be impressed that the new "empirical economists" are using data to examine the psychological roots of human behavior. They call it "behavioral economics," but they haven't developed anything new. They're just doing the work of psychologists, and then calling it "economics."
And then there's the field called "developmental economics." which is just trying to recreate the work that's been done for years by political scientists.
I should note that I don't so much have a problem with overlap in these disciplines. In fact, that's a good thing. What is silly is that every time the economists decided to start doing sociology or psychology, they then tell themselves (and others) that they're doing something "revolutionary."
That, of course, is the whole tone of the Vox piece. Isn't it amazing that people are examining data to look at income!"
No, it's really not.
In fact, some of the most heated debates over household income occur among sociologists, not economists.
Take for example, the debate over Juliet Schor's book The Overworked American: The Unexpected Decline of Leisure from 1992. For years, scholars debated whether or not she was right, and whether or not people really are working more than they used to. (She was probably wrong.)
Nonetheless, we can see that the debate over work was largely driven by sociologists in recent decades.
Similarly, for data on trends in family size and living arrangement — something with huge implications for standards of living — we find much of the work being done by Steven Ruggles, a history professor and scholar of "population studies."
And then, of course, there are the criminologists. This topic has important implications for economics, given the supposed connection between crime and income, and the effects crime has on one's standard of living. But the empirical work in this area is rarely done by economists. It's done by political scientists and historians.
This isn't to say that economists are never involved in this sort of thing. Claudia Goldin, for example, has looked at issues surrounding family incomes for decades.
But economic history is all these alleged new "empirical economists" are doing. Looking at the upward mobility of black boys, as Chetty is doing, is just economic history. There's nothing wrong with doing economic history. It's a perfectly legit field. But doing that sort of work doesn't make Chetty special. (And the sheer size of the data-sets doesn't make him special either. All these social science fields have been moving more and more in the direction of large-scale data mining.)
But there's also nothing new about it, and nothing that warrants a gushing piece about the new page economics is supposedly turning by doing what sociologists have already been doing for decades.
In fact, the more economists go all-in on trying to copy the work done by other fields, the more they ignore what's actually important about economics, which is theoretical economics devoted to understanding core issues like business cycles, entrepreneurship, and value. By ignoring these issues, economists only make themselves more irrelevant. Were economists to devote themselves to better understanding and spreading good economic theory, they'd be in a position to interpret and and analyze the empirical work done by others. After all, empirical work is only as good as the theory used to understand it.
But it doesn't look like economists are much interested in that sort of thing. They just want to hop on the empirical bandwagon. Meanwhile, economists seem to think they discovered all this sort of thing the day before yesterday. This is just the sort of obliviousness we should expect from academic departments, and it helps demonstrate much of what's increasingly wrong with economists in the first place.
In an earlier post, I noted Robert Nozick’s criticism of the view that the state may tax us because we are in part 'social products'. Much of Nozick’s Anarchy, State, and Utopia reflects Rothbard’s influence, and this topic is no exception. As so often, Rothbard was there first, and Nozick did no more than restate his insights in more complicated fashion. In Power and Market, a work Nozick studied closely, Rothbard says: “It is precisely the process of the market by which the array of free individuals (constituting ‘society’) portions out income in accordance with productivity. It is double-counting to postulate a real entity ‘society’ outside the array of individuals, and possessing or not possessing ‘its' own deserved share. If by “organized society’ he [ the economist Henry M. Oliver] means the State, then the State’s ‘contributions’ were compulsory and hence hardly ‘deserved’ any pay.”
In 1969 the hottest new libertarian publication was The Libertarian Forum, edited by Murray Rothbard in New York and Karl Hess in Washington. Hess, famously as associate of Barry Goldwater before becoming a deeply disillusioned anarchist, was a man of many talents—welding, motorcycle racing, and no-holds-barred philosophy among them. His street fighter style, combined with Rothbard's acerbic writing and penetrating political eye, made the Forum an outlet for strategy and tactics more than anything. And it had a surprisingly long run, until 1984, in physical print no less.
There is nothing like it today, either in style or content.
As just one example, consider the short essay Rothbard penned for the June 15, 1969, issue. "Confiscation and the Homestead Principle" elaborates on Rothbard's earlier writing in Power and Market concerning homesteading of land. In the latter, he criticized the Georgist notion of "societal" ownership or control of real property in favor of a "first-user, first-owner" principle. In the former, he considered how we might determine proper title to stolen property, i.e. land where current possession is not based on legitimate homesteading or title transfer.
The homesteading principle means that the way that unowned property gets into private ownership is by the principle that this property justly belongs to the person who finds, occupies, and transforms it by his labor. This is clear in the case of the pioneer and virgin land. But what of the case of stolen property?
This is especially tricky when the thief is the state and the victim is not readily identifiable:
Let us now apply our libertarian theory of property to the case of property in the hands of, or derived from, the State apparatus. The libertarian sees the State as a giant gang of organized criminals, who live off the theft called “taxation” and use the proceeds to kill, enslave, and generally push people around. Therefore, any property in the hands of the State is in the hands of thieves, and should be liberated as quickly as possible. Any person or group who liberates such property, who confiscates or appropriates it from the State, is performing a virtuous act and a signal service to the cause of liberty. In the case of the State, furthermore, the victim is not readily identifiable...All taxpayers, all draftees, all victims of the State have been mulcted. How to go about returning all this property to the taxpayers? What proportions should be used in this terrific tangle of robbery and injustice that we have all suffered at the hands of the State?
The answers are thorny. State-owned entities, like universities, are readily identified and seized. But seized by whom, and given to whom? When decades or centuries have passed, how do we determine rightful owners of land? And what about corporations that derive 50% or 75% of their income from taxes, such as defense contractors? Should they be nationalized, liquidated, and the proceeds distributed to taxpayers?For more on the distinction between stolen and unowned land, see Stephan Kinsella's blog on Rothbard's evolution regarding the subject. As Kinsella explains, Rothbard appears to have changed his thinking between 1969 (when "Confiscation and the Homestead Principle" was published); 1974, in an article titled "Justice and Property Rights," and in Chapter 9 of 1982's The Ethics of Liberty. Kinsella suggests Rothbard does not assert that any cloud over a land title's provenance means the land is open to seizure or homesteading. Subsequent or current owners may be completely innocent in any case, and their rights cannot simply be dismissed.
But the most interesting feature of the essay, deals with the idea of land reparations for descendants of American slaves.
This brings us to Karl’s point about slaves. One of the tragic aspects of the emancipation of the serfs in Russia in 1861 was that while the serfs gained their personal freedom, the land – their means of production and of life, their land was retained under the ownership of their feudal masters. The land should have gone to the serfs themselves, for under the homestead principle they had tilled the land and deserved its title. Furthermore, the serfs were entitled to a host of reparations from their masters for the centuries of oppression and exploitation. The fact that the land remained in the hands of the lords paved the way inexorably for the Bolshevik Revolution, since the revolution that had freed the serfs remained unfinished.
The same is true of the abolition of slavery in the United States. The slaves gained their freedom, it is true, but the land, the plantations that they had tilled and therefore deserved to own under the homestead principle, remained in the hands of their former masters. Furthermore, no reparations were granted the slaves for their oppression out of the hides of their masters. Hence the abolition of slavery remained unfinished, and the seeds of a new revolt have remained to intensify to the present day. Hence, the great importance of the shift in Negro demands from greater welfare handouts to “reparations,” reparations for the years of slavery and exploitation and for the failure to grant the Negroes their land, the failure to heed the Radical abolitionist’s call for “40 acres and a mule” to the former slaves. In many cases, moreover, the old plantations and the heirs and descendants of the former slaves can be identified, and the reparations can become highly specific indeed.
Rothbard wrote this a century after the Civil War, and another 50 years have gone by since. Can old plantation land be seized today, given all the subsequent owners and land development? (e.g. parceling into housing owned by innocent good faith buyers). Can we identify slave descendants accurately? And if so, wouldn't such a descendant living in another part of the US likely prefer cash to a land title in a southern state? Some slaves may have hundreds of living descendants, will cash amounts be reduced pro rata?
One thing is certain: if paid, reparations will be financed via deficits and general taxes, not specific payments from person X to person Y. "The government," an amorphous blob, will pay—which means all of us, including black Americans, will foot the bill via taxes and inflation.
In the last decade or so there has been a concerted attempt by some economists associated more or less closely with the Austrian school to deny Rothbard’s central role in the modern revival of Austrian economics and to downplay his status as a leading proponent of the Misesian paradigm. In response, I have provided what I believe to be compelling textual evidence that Mises himself, as well as some of his closest followers, regarded Rothbard as Mises's foremost intellectual heir (here, here, and here). Now from the Rothbard archives comes a small treasure that corroborates the evidence I adduced in my earlier posts. This is in the form of Mises’s charming and pithy inscription in Rothbard’s copy of the third edition of Human Action, which reads:
To Murray N. Rothbard, pioneer of praxeological analysis with all good wishes. March 2nd, 1967.
“Pioneer of praxeological analysis”—given Mises’s well-known restraint in meting out compliments to fellow economists, this is high praise indeed and fits nicely with Mises’s remarks about Rothbard’s work in his letter defending praxeology to the French positivist Louis Rougier, which I cited in an earlier post:
The proof of the cake is in the eating. I can only refer to the systematic exposition of the whole doctrine of praxeology in my book Human Action and nowadays in the brilliant book of a younger man, Murray N. Rothbard, Man, Economy and State. . . .But, please, first of all read the book of Rothbard. It is very interesting also from the epistemological point of view.
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In a series of outstanding posts, the Bionic Mosquito has written on “The Search for Liberty.” In these posts, he presents a penetrating analysis of natural law and metaphysics. I admire these posts and have learned a great deal from them
In his latest post, he argues that Murray Rothbard’s defense of natural law fails. Rothbard thinks that human reason can establish natural law. But, Bionic says, “if each of us are free to make up our own minds – especially regarding ends – how will we come to a natural law that is useful toward liberty and peace? How will justice be determined? Who will arbitrate our ‘differences of opinion’? On what basis?”
Bionic thinks that if you say human reason can establish natural law, then you are holding that “the judged [human beings] can also be the judge.”
This criticism of Rothbard seems to me to be mistaken. Suppose, like Mises and Rothbard, that you claim reasoning can show maximum price laws cause shortages. You are not thereby claiming that it is up to human beings whether this is so. Rather, you are claiming that it is not up to human beings: the effect holds, regardless of what people think about it.
In like fashion, in claiming that human reason can establish natural law, Rothbard is not claiming that the content of natural law is up to human beings. I do not think Thomas Aquinas would have disagreed with this. He offered proofs, based on reason, that God exists. These proofs do not make it up to human beings whether God exists, nor does accepting their validity depend on first accepting Christianity. The principal aim of the first three books on the Summa contra gentiles is to demonstrate the existence of God, and some of God’s attributes, to unbelievers.
Even when I disagree with Bionic, though, I continue to learn from him
In a characteristically excellent post, the Bionic Mosquito calls attention to Murray Rothbard’s ethical “absolutism”. In this view, human beings can grasp what is objectively case in ethics. If, for example, stealing is wrong, its being wrong is not just an expression of individual or group preference. Rothbard held that an adequate defense of libertarianism depends on objective values and that political freedom was not the only such objective value needed for this defense. Moreover, this position does not contradict the subjectivity of preference in Austrian economics.
The US Supreme Court on Thursday ruled that the Trump administration cannot include a question about citizenship in the 2020 census form.
In response to efforts to add a census question asking respondents about citizenship, several large US states sued the administration, claiming the question would lead to under-reporting of the true number of residents in each state.
The court did not rule that the question could not be used under any circumstances, however.
According ot NBC:
The court's majority said the government has the right to ask a citizenship question, but that it needs to properly justify changing the longstanding practice of the Census Department. The Trump administration's justification was "contrived," Roberts wrote, and did not appear to be the genuine reason for the change, possibly implying that the real reason was political.
The case, Department of Commerce et al v. New York et al, was decided by a 5-4 majority, with Chief Justice John Roberts joining the four so-called liberal judges.
The Census Is Too Intrusive The effect of the ruling is a good one: it limits the number of questions on the census form, and thus the amount of personal information collected by census takers. Nevertheless, the ruling offers no real relief from a long-standing tradition of the US government using the decennial census to collect unnecessary data nowhere mandated by the US constitutions census provisions.Not that a constitutional mandate would make additional questions desirable or moral. Government data collection has always been an important tool in augmenting government power. A constitutional provision authorizing data collection does not change this reality.
Designed initially as simply a means of apportioning members of congress and drawing congressional districts, the US census has morphed into a program designed to collect data that can help the US government justify and plan a wide array of government programs and initiatives.
The very earliest census forms don't collect much information beyond the total number of people, whether they are male or female, how old they are, and whether or not they are slaves.
Yet, by the 1870 census, the government was asking questions about birthplace and citizenship. Questions about occupation, literacy, and disability began even before then. In 1860, it was apparently essential for the federal government to know if a person was "deaf and dumb, blind insane, idiotic, pauper, or convict."
The Citizenship Question The fact that citizenship questions began is 1870 is significant. Prior to the 1870s, it was widely believed that the regulation of immigration was not a responsibility of the federal governments. Some state governments — especially New York and Massachusetts — enacted immigration restrictions in the mid nineteenth century. But both Congress and the Supreme court balked at the idea of imposing federal limits on migrants.
[RELATED: " American Immigration Policy 160 Years Ago " by Ryan McMaken]
This changed with sweeping new federal immigration laws passed in 1882.
At roughly the same time, federal policymakers started instructing the census takers to keep track of matters related to birthplace, immigration, and citizenship.
As the role of government expanded even further, more questions were added. These included questions on employment, housing, ethnic group, and more.
In the 1920s, Herbert Hoover, who support expanding the statistical-date role of the census bureau, became head of the U.S. Commerce Department. Hoover used his position to push for more data collection. Not surprisingly, the role of census data expanded even more with the New Deal.
In other words, policymakers needed more and more statistical information to justify a rising tide of new federal programs, and to claim that resources were being distributed equitably and rationally.
Opposition to Census Data Collection Recognizing this close connection between government planning and census data — as well as potential violations of privacy — some political activists and policymakers have encouraged refusing to answer census questions.
For example, at the time of the 2000 census, both Senate Majority leader Trent Lott and presidential candidate George W. Bush advised Americans not to answer questions "they believed invaded their privacy." That may have been good advice, especially since the Census bureau recently admitted it failed to protect the personal data collected on 100 million Americans.
The fact both Lott and Bush were republican policymakers is not a coincidence. At the time, there was a significant — albeit not overwhelming — movement among the conservative grassroots that insisted Americans ought to refuse to answer census questions — whether on the short form or the new ACS long form — which went above and beyond number the population.
The movement now appears to have been turned on its head with Trump supporters now insisting it is entirely appropriate to use census questions for purposes other than counting US residents — and to require honest responses.
Meanwhile, those who sought to keep the citizenship question off the census form were, for the most part, among the people who insist a wide array of census-collected data is necessary to distribute hundreds of billions of dollars of taxpayer-funded handouts to targeted populations.
They're fine with asking lots of questions on the census. They're just opposed to a citizenship question. While these opponents of the citizenship question claim to be motivated by obtaining an accurate count, the true reason is likely political: they don't want citizenship to become a political football in re-districting debates or debates over the size and scope of the non-citizen resident population.
That's an understandable position, but it would be best if opponents of the citizenship question were more honest about their motivations.
As it is, today's SCOTUS ruling has implications for partisan politics. But it does little to rein in the census bureau or return the decennial census to its originally intended purposes.
While many of America’s founders are justifiably famous, others have received too little attention. St. George Tucker is one.
Born in Bermuda on July 10, 1752, Tucker was a militia colonel in the American Revolution, who even wrote Liberty: a Poem, on the Independence of America (my favorite line being “Freedom! thy joys alone are riches to the brave!”), that George Washington said “was equal to a reinforcement of 10,000 disciplined troops.” Afterward, his service included his appointment, with James Madison and Edmund Randolph, to the 1786 Annapolis Convention that led to the Constitutional Convention, and his opposition, with Patrick Henry and George Mason, to adopting the Constitution in the absence of a bill of rights.
Tucker’s greatest service to posterity, however, involved the law. Not only was he a law professor and judge on three different Virginia courts, historian Clyde Wilson noted that,
St. George Tucker’s View of the Constitution of the United States was the first extended, systematic commentary on the Constitution after it had been ratified by the people of the several states and amended by the Bill of Rights. Published in 1803 by a distinguished patriot and jurist, it was for much of the first half of the nineteenth century an important handbook for American law students, lawyers, judges, and statesmen.
David Kopel wrote, “St. George Tucker is perhaps the preeminent source of the original public meaning of the Constitution. His 5-volume American edition of Blackstone’s Commentaries was by far the leading legal treatise in the Early Republic.” Tom DiLorenzo summarized it as laying out “the Jeffersonian interpretation of the Constitution, which was replaced by the centralizing, big government … interpretation after 1865.” The fact that the Supreme Court has cited Tucker 40 times illustrates the importance of his work.
Today, with St. George Tucker’s commitment to limited government, states’ rights, and the judiciary’s role of preventing government oppression a too-dim memory, his insights into liberty and the original understanding of government under our Constitution are worth re-visiting.
In this country … the blessings of liberty have been … dearly purchased.
In a government founded on the basis of equal liberty among all its citizens, to be ignorant of the law and the constitution is to be ignorant of the rights of the citizen.
What can be more absurd than that a person wholly ignorant of the constitution should presume to make laws pursuant thereto?
A distinction … does exist between the indefinite and unlimited power of the people … and the definite powers of the congress and state legislatures, which are severally limited to certain and determinate objects.
All men being by nature equal, in respect to their rights, no man nor set of men, can have any natural, or inherent right, to rule over the rest.
Legitimate government can … be derived only from the voluntary grant of the people, and exercised for their benefit.
Every extension of the administrative authority beyond its just constitutional limits is absolutely an act of usurpation in the government.
Government originally founded upon consent, and compact, may by gradual usurpations on the part of the public functionaries … become a government of force. In this case, the people are as completely enslaved as if the original foundations of the government had been laid by conquest.
No people can ever be free, whose government is founded upon the usurpation of their sovereign rights.
If in a limited government the public functionaries exceed the limits which the constitution prescribes to their powers, every such act is … treason against the sovereignty of the people.
A constitution is a thing antecedent to a government. … Hence every attempt in any government to change the constitution (otherwise than in that mode which the constitution may prescribe) is in fact a subversion of the foundations of its own authority.
A written constitution … [is] a beacon to apprise the people when their rights and liberties are invaded, or in danger.
Abuse of power is despotism … the right of one man is at the mercy of another, and freedom in such a government, has no existence.
It is indispensably necessary … that there be a perfect equality of rights among the citizens. … Equality of rights necessarily produces inequality of possessions; because, by the laws of nature and of equality, every man has a right to use his faculties in an honest way, and the fruits of his labor, thus acquired, are his own.
The rights of property must be sacred.
A thousand … pretexts and arguments … form the ladder by which the agents of the people mount over the heads of their constituents … from whence they behold those who have raised them with contempt.
The American states have reserved to themselves … the administration of justice … in all cases whatsoever, in which they have not specifically consented to the jurisdiction of the United States.
[Federal] jurisdiction extends to certain enumerated objects, only, and leaves to the several states a residuary and inviolable sovereignty over all other objects.
This original compact … is to be construed strictly, in all cases where the antecedent rights of a state may be drawn in question … it ought likewise to receive the same strict construction, wherever the right of personal liberty, of personal security, or of private property may become the subject of dispute.
The authority of the federal government … ought therefore to receive the strictest construction. Otherwise the gradual and sometimes imperceptible usurpations of power, will end in the total disregard of all its intended limitations.
The federal government. … Having no existence but under the constitution, nor any rights, but such as that instrument confers … can possess no legitimate power, but such as is absolutely necessary for the performance of a duty prescribed and enjoined by the constitution.
Until, therefore, the people of the United States … shall think it necessary to alter, or revoke the present constitution of the United States, it must be received, respected, and obeyed among us, as the great and unequivocal declaration of the will of the people, and the supreme law of the land.
The powers delegated to the federal government … have no relation to the domestic economy of the state. The right of property, with all its train of incidents … and the rights of persons appear to be no further subject to the control of the federal government, than may be necessary to support the dignity and faith of the nation in its federal or foreign engagements, and obligations.
Since the citizen is on no other account obliged to pay taxes, or undergo any other public burden, but as they are necessary to defray the expenses of the state, it ought to be the singular care of the government to draw no further supplies than the exigencies of the public require.
The first question is whether the power be expressed in the constitution.
All governments have a natural tendency towards an increase and assumption of power; and the administration of the federal government, has too frequently demonstrated, that the people of America are not exempt from this vice ... parchment chains are not sufficient.
A representative democracy ceases to exist the moment that the public functionaries are by any means absolved from their responsibility to their constituents.
The right of self-defense is the first law of nature.
Every power which concerns the right of the citizen, must be construed strictly, where it may operate to infringe or impair his liberty.
In the United States, the great and essential rights of the people are secured against legislative as well as executive ambition … by constitutions, paramount to all laws: defining and limiting the powers of the legislature itself, and opposing barriers against encroachments.
The congress of the United States possesses no power to regulate, or interfere with the domestic concerns, or police of any state.
Absolute independence of the judiciary … [is] necessary to the liberty and security of the citizen, and his property.
The judiciary … is that department of the government to whom the protection of the rights of the individual is by the constitution especially confided, interposing its shield between him and the sword of usurped authority.
A law limited to such objects as may be authorized by the constitution, would … be the supreme law of the land; but a law not limited to those objects, or not made pursuant to the constitution, would not be the supreme law of the land, but an act of usurpation, and consequently void.
The object of the several states … was not the establishment of a general consolidated government … but a federal government, with powers limited to certain determinate objects.
Acts of congress to be binding, must be made pursuant to the constitution; otherwise they are not laws.
As the subjects upon which congress have the power to legislate are all specially enumerated, so the judicial authority … is limited to the same subjects as congress have power to legislate upon.
People of America have not thought proper to suffer the freedom of speech and of the press to rest upon such an uncertain foundation as the will and pleasure of the government.
Whenever [civil] liberty is, by the laws of the state, further restrained than is necessary … a state of civil slavery commences. ... This species of slavery also exists whenever there is an inequality of rights, or privileges, between the subjects or citizens … for the pre-eminence of one class of men must be founded and erected upon the depression of another; and the measure of exaltation in the former, is that of the slavery of the latter.
St. George Tucker searched for “the criterion that distinguishes laws from dictates, freedom from servitude, rightful government from usurpation.” And Clyde Wilson suggests that his answer is best summarized in his statement that, “It is the due [external] restraint and not the moderation of rulers that constitutes a state of liberty.” Given that today, the federal power to oppress has clearly increased at the expense of Constitutional restraints, we should give Tucker’s understanding as much serious thought now as our forefathers did when our great experiment in liberty began.
On July 4th, Americans celebrate our Declaration of Independence. But we often give little thought to the uniqueness and importance of our country’s founding.
To revisit those issues, we might turn to Calvin Coolidge — the only president born on the 4th of July. He honored the Declaration’s commitment to life and the liberty to pursue one’s happiness, provided others’ equally inalienable rights are not violated, more than any of his successors. He also produced remarkable results without sacrificing our freedoms — substantially cutting tax rates, tax rolls and federal debt, while real economic growth averaged 7%, with 0.4% inflation and 3.3% unemployment, during his presidency.
In particular, Silent Cal’s speech commemorating Independence Day’s 150th anniversary merits reconsideration. Consider this condensed version:
We meet to celebrate the birthday of America … a service so great, which a few inspired men here rendered to humanity … the preeminent support of free government throughout the world.
The Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States … those two great charters of freedom and justice remain firm and unshaken.
A new spirit had arisen on this side of the Atlantic more advanced and more developed in its regard for the rights of the individual.
The American Revolution represented the informed and mature convictions of … independent, liberty-loving, God-fearing people who knew their rights, and possessed the courage to dare to maintain them.
The Declaration of Independence was the result of the seasoned and deliberate thought of the dominant portion of the people of the Colonies … in no sense a radical movement but … resistance to illegal usurpations … to maintain their constitutional rights which from time immemorial had been guaranteed to them under the law of the land.
The Declaration of Independence … had a much broader and deeper significance than a mere secession of territory and the establishment of a new nation … because it was proposed to establish a nation on new principles.
Three very definite propositions were set out in its preamble regarding the nature of mankind and therefore of government. These were the doctrine that all men are created equal, that they are endowed with certain inalienable rights, and that therefore the source of the just powers of government must be derived from the consent of the governed.
That our Declaration of Independence containing these immortal truths was the political action of a duly authorized and constituted representative public body in its sovereign capacity, supported by the force of general opinion … makes it the most important civil document in the world … a new nation was born which was to be founded upon those principles … an incomparable event in the history of government.
All men are created equal … they are endowed with inalienable rights … governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed. … No advance, no progress can be made beyond these propositions.
America … has remained true to the principles which were declared 150 years ago. …The rights of the individual are held sacred and protected by constitutional guaranties, which even the Government itself is bound not to violate.
The fathers made their declaration and adopted their Constitution … to establish a free government, which must not be permitted to degenerate into the unrestrained authority of a mere majority or the unbridled weight of a mere influential few. … These are our guaranties of liberty.
Very little of just criticism can attach to the theories and principles of our institutions. There is far more danger of harm than there is hope of good in any radical changes.
The Declaration of Independence … is the product of the spiritual insight of the people. We live in an age of science and of abounding accumulation of material things…Our Declaration created them. The things of the spirit come first … to maintain the great heritage which has been bequeathed to us. … We must follow the spiritual and moral leadership which they showed.
Calvin Coolidge articulated America’s founding principles, where they came from and the dangers of moving away from them. As we celebrate another Independence Day, that understanding deserves rediscovering, because it is a far cry from the spirit animating many in America today.
If you take an hour drive down the I-65 corridor south from Nashville, Tennessee, you’ll find yourself in Columbia. My hometown isn’t quite as sleepy of a southern town as it used to be, much to my chagrin, but it’s still home nonetheless. The county seat of Maury, Columbia does have a handful of claims to fame to save itself from being a complete afterthought. If claiming a title means you get to keep it for all time, then I suppose it’s proper that Columbia still styles itself as the “Mule Capital of the World.” It’s been a century and change since the mule trade featured prominently in Columbia’s economy, but if a former president is still “Mr. President”, then I suppose Columbia is still “Mule Town”.
Don’t think for a second this isn’t an adequate cause for celebration. They’ll be putting on their 179th Annual Mule Day celebration, which is more appropriately titled Mule Days than Mule Day since it stretches nearly a week long, replete with fried foods, music, and even a parade down Main Street. While he wasn’t born there (Pineville, NC gets that honor), Columbia likes to pride itself as being the home of an American president. The James K Polk Home, the final residence of the nation’s 11th executive, sits a couple blocks down from the courthouse. It’s a museum now, among blocks of buildings that would make one think they had traveled back to the 19 th century were it not for a Dairy Queen.
Another notable Columbian is John Harlan Willis, whose name graces a Columbia bridge that crosses the Duck River. Nearly 40 of the 3,503 individuals who have been awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor are natives of Tennessee, and one of them is John Harlan Willis. Willis was born in Columbia in 1921. He graduated from my high school alma mater, Columbia Central, in 1940, only a short 64 years before myself. I remember walking every day by the display case, which contained his portrait. He was a baby-faced young man with a bit of a mischievous grin wearing his dark blue uniform. John wanted to become a doctor, as he was far more inclined to aid the ailing around him than to bring them to any harm. It was no surprise, then, that when the United States entered World War II, he found himself taking up the role of a Pharmacist’s Mate, First Class, in the U.S. Navy. Willis enlisted in 1940, receiving his naval recruit training at Naval Training Station in Norfolk, Virginia, before moving on to his hospital corpsman training at the Norfolk Naval Hospital in Portsmouth. By the onset of 1944, having spent most of the war learning the healing arts rather than combat, Willis was finally transferred to the 3 rd Battalion, 27th Marine Regiment, 5th Marine Division and sent to the Pacific theater. It was on Iwo Jima where, on the last day of February 1945, he would earn the Medal of Honor.
The official citation that accompanies Willis’s Medal of Honor reads like something straight from a Spielberg film. While in the process of aiding a number of his fallen comrades during the fierce fighting near the Japanese-held Hill 362, Willis was struck by shrapnel from a nearby grenade explosion and was ordered to abandon his charges back to the safety of an aid station. After receiving some bandaging for his wounds, but before being given leave to return to action, Willis made his way back to Hill 362 to resume treating marines who were suffering significant casualties. Then, while administering plasma to the wounded, Japanese forces began to litter his position with hand grenades. He picked up the first to land in close proximity and hurled it back at the foes atop the hill. He then grabbed another, and another, until he had returned eight grenades. It was the ninth grenade to come down upon him that he could not return in time; it exploded in his hand, killing him instantly. Inspired by the scene before them, Willis’s companions rallied from their entrenchment and, despite being outnumbered and charging uphill, they launched the attack that would ultimately repulse the enemy. The citation ends with the statement, “His exceptional fortitude and courage in the performance of duty reflect the highest credit upon Willis and the U.S. Naval Service. He gallantly gave his life for his country.”
While Willis was unquestionably selfless and heroic, I’m not so sure about that last assertion. Did John Harlan Willis really give his life for his country? Did he race back to the front, dodging fire and explosions, in order to please his country with his sacrifice, or rather that he could be the difference in his allies returning home safely? Perhaps we can find some answer in this photograph, which shows his widow Winfrey Willis holding her baby boy in one hand and taking her husband’s posthumous medal in the other from the Secretary of the Navy. Does Mrs. Willis look like a woman content to know her husband’s violent death somehow contributed to protecting America from an enemy it provoked in the first place, or rather a physically and emotionally exhausted single mother who would hand the medal right back if it meant little John could be hoisted in the air by his namesake? I tend to think if John were here today, he would tell you that, if indeed his life were destined to be extinguished on Iwo Jima that day, then he wasn’t giving his life for his country, but rather he was giving it to save his brothers in arms.
John Harlan Willis was laid to rest at Rose Hill Cemetery, just a couple blocks north of the courthouse. He sits today among Civil War soldiers, a handful of congressmen, a senator, and even a NASCAR driver. The hallowed burial ground, the honors, the memorial halls at medical centers, and even the destroyer USS John Willis are a bad trade for a devoted husband and father. He wanted to become a doctor. It might be a stretch to hope that he would have cured cancer had he survived the war, though he would’ve been valued all the same. A man who would brave bullets and shrapnel time and again, practically defenseless, in order to give a wounded man some plasma sounds like someone who would’ve made for an excellent neighbor. But we’ll never know what sort of family the Willis’s could’ve produced, the kind of physician he could’ve become, nor the sort of compassionate presence he could’ve brought to the community. And so the real tragedy of the tragic war hero is not in what they managed to accomplish, but rather in what they were never afforded the chance to.
What, sir, is the use of a militia? It is to prevent the establishment of a standing army, the bane of liberty. …Whenever Governments mean to invade the rights and liberties of the people, they always attempt to destroy the militia, in order to raise an army upon their ruins. —Elbridge Gerry, Fifth Vice President of the United States
All too often, government-produced defense is discussed as an ideal — a force that protects people and their rights. Seldom does reality enter the picture. Standing armies, after all, often do not only practice defense.
Once established, a government’s military, its bureaucrats and leaders, as well as laymen all face a different set of incentives. Those with a job related to the military have an incentive to keep their job. In most cases, they probably also desire to see the scope of their power expanded and their pay increased. The support for war then, is the ideal policy for achieving those goals. These incentives may not transform a champion of peace into a war-loving bureaucrat, but they can have effects on the margins. It’s much easier to rationalize a war if your job depends on it.
Changes on the Ground More interestingly, the average citizen’s incentives change. To see what I mean, let’s take a look at the introduction of the permanent standing army in 19th century America.
Prior to the rise of the U.S. standing army, relations between natives and white settlers were relatively peaceful. It’s not that white settlers always felt warm feelings toward native Americans (or vice versa). Many did not. The reality of fighting one’s own battles, however, entailed significant costs. In an essay entitled " Exchange, Sovereignty, and Indian-Anglo Relations," Jennifer Roback remarks: "Europeans generally acknowledged that the Indians retained possessory rights to their lands. More important, the English recognized the advantage of being on friendly terms with the Indians. Trade with the Indians, especially the fur trade, was profitable. War was costly" “More than is generally appreciated, the contact (between Indians and whites) was even friendly, or at least peaceful.”
Subsidizing War After the US maintained a permanent army, however, things changed. Most of the disincentives for war disappeared. The monetary costs that maintained the army were spread out over the entire populace and those who demanded the army’s services paid no additional price. Nor did they now need to risk their own life. Frontiersmen could now call upon subsidized troops to do their fighting for them. This had the effect of lowering the threshold for when settlers could justify resorting to violence against their Indian neighbors.
"In Raid or Trade? An Economic Model of Indian-White Relations," the authors accounted for a number of possible contributing factors, such as population change and newly settled land, and concluded the establishment of a standing army during the Mexican War had an independent effect of an increase of almost 12 battles a year. They estimated the buildup of the standing army before and during the Civil War caused an increase of around 25 battles a year.
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As the quote at the beginning of this piece indicates, the Founding Fathers feared a standing army, and for good reason. While its ideal purpose is to create peace, we do not live in a world of ideals. The actual effects are to lower the costs of war to those who would have it, and to create a special-interest group of bureaucrats and military personnel who have a vested interest in advancing the war machine. As long as the army stands, peace is unlikely to be achieved or long-lasting.
Republished from Antiwar.com with permission of the author.
Most economists, while recognizing the great 19th-century French liberal Frédéric Bastiat as an outstanding economic journalist and a master polemicist for free trade and other liberal economic policies, have summarily dismissed him as an economic theorist. These include economists from Mises and Hayek to Schumpeter and Marx. Lately some economists have begun taking a second look at Bastiat’s work in economic theory.
Right now there is a stimulating online conversation going on about Bastiat's contributions to economic theory in his treatise Economic Harmonies. The conversation marks the completion of a draft of Liberty Fund's new translation of Economic Harmonies and is led by Dr. David Hart, the Academic Editor of Liberty Fund's Bastiat translation project and the leading authority on Bastiat and his work. It is part of the series “Liberty Matters: A Forum for the Discussion of Matters pertaining to Liberty.” Besides David and me, the participants include two prominent academic experts on Bastiat, Professors Don Boudreaux of George Mason University, and Guido Hülsmann of the University of Angers.
The contributions to the discussion are lively, concise, accessible to Bastiat fans of all ages and backgrounds, and well worth reading.
Herbert Aptheker: Studies in Willful Blindness. By Anthony Flood. Independently published, 2019. I +93 pages.
Anthony Flood tells that in “the early 1970s, I was an acolyte of Herbert Aptheker(1915-2003). Known mainly for his writings on African-American history he was also, during the Cold War and even after, a theoretician of the Communist Party USA (CP).” (p.1) Flood became Aptheker’s research assistant and friend, but he eventually turned in disgust from his mentor, repulsed by Communist tyranny and atrocities.
Flood has documented a striking example of the way Aptheker’s rigid adherence to the Stalinist line corrupted his historical writing. Aptheker is best known as a historian for his American Negro Slave Revolts, his doctoral dissertation, published in 1943. In that book, he never cites the West Indian Marxist C.L.R. James’s Black Jacobins (1938), a study of the San Domingo Revolution of 1791 that overthrew the slave regime and established the Haitian Republic. Aptheker fully recognized the significance of the event; why then does he ignore James’s book? “What scholars virtually never even mention. . .is Aptheker’s life-long practice of rendering James invisible.”(p.15)
The answer, Flood suggests, is that James was a follower of Leon Trotsky. “Aptheker could not have missed the reviews it garnered in scholarly journals and the mainstream press. And yet in the few pages he devoted to that revolt in American Negro Slave Revolts, he neither cited Black Jacobins nor even listed it in his bibliography. For a card-carrying Stalinist like Aptheker, however, there was no lower form of life than a Trotskyist. “(p.80)
By no means did James ignore Aptheker. To the contrary, he attacked Aptheker for downplaying the role of blacks in abolitionist organizations. The Stalinists, James claimed, viewed blacks as subordinate shock troops of a prospective revolution rather than independent actors, and this Stalinist line Aptheker faithfully followed. True to his policy of treating James as an invisible man, Aptheker never responded to James’s criticism.
Flood discusses a number of other examples of the corrupting effects of Aptheker’s Communist bias, such as his tendentious The Truth about Hungary, approving the Soviet suppression of the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, and his claim in a newspaper article written in 1950 that the lack of revolts in North Korea showed that the Communist regime in power had popular approval.
Flood’s book is enlivened by stories of his conversations with Aptheker and Aptheker’s bitter enemy, the philosopher Sidney Hook, who was one of Flood’s professors. His careful account of the “invisible man” in Aptheker’s historiography is a valuable contribution.
In the last decade or so, a handful of Austrian economists have been aggressively promoting a strange story of the postwar development of the Misesian tradition. In their telling, Friedrich Hayek and Israel Kirzner were busily developing Mises’s approach to economic theory and method when Murray Rothbard showed up and shunted the methodological train onto the wrong track. For this reason, Rothbard and his followers—who these storytellers collectively and derisively refer to as “the Rothbardians”—are to be read out of the Austrian movement. In an article published last year, I explained why this story concocted by the “Rothbard deniers” is flat wrong and provided textual evidence that Mises and Hayek themselves, as well as Henry Hazlitt, would have disagreed with it.
Just recently another piece of evidence turned up confirming Mises’s approval of Rothbard’s interpretation of his a priori economic methodology. This is in the form of a letter written by Mises to fellow Mont Pelerin Society member and French positivist philosopher Louis Rougier. Dr. Patrick Newman discovered the letter in the Mises archives at Grove City College and kindly shared a copy with me.
In the letter, dated December 6, 1962, Mises is responding to criticisms of one of his books by Rougier. Given the date of the letter and its focus on epistemology and methodology, the book in question is probably Mises’s last one, The Ultimate Foundation of Economic Science: An Essay on Method, published in 1962. In summing up his position, Mises writes:
The proof of the cake is in the eating. I can only refer to the systematic exposition of the whole doctrine of praxeology in my book Human Action and nowadays in the brilliant book of a younger man, Murray N. Rothbard, Man, Economy and State. . . .
So Mises clearly considered Rothbard’s treatise as an updating and advancement of his own system of economic theory. But this is not all. After a paragraph recommending to Rougier his earlier book on the methodology of economics, Epistemological Problems of Economics, first published in German in 1933, Mises closes the letter with an entreaty to Rougier:
But, please, first of all read the book of Rothbard. It is very interesting also from the epistemological point of view.
Given the evidence, including the words of Mises himself, I think that there remains little doubt that the mainline Misesian tradition in economic theory and method runs through Murray Rothbard.
Foundations of a Free Society: Reflections on Ayn Rand’s Political Philosophy. Gregory Salmieri and Robert Mayhew, Eds. University of Pittsburgh Press. Xi + 460 pages.I am grateful to Mr. Neil Parille for sending me a copy of this book and asking me to review it.
This excellent book mirrors in its choice of contributors the odd relationship between Ayn Rand and libertarianism. On the one hand, her own proposals for the political organization of society are a version of minimal state libertarianism, and her novels and essays have had an enormous impact on many libertarians. On the other hand, she not only denied she was a libertarian but denounced libertarianism in characteristically fierce fashion. The anarchist position of Murray Rothbard especially aroused her opposition.
Many of the contributors to the book are members of the “official” Objectivist organization of philosophers, the Ayn Rand Society, but others, including Matt Zwolinski, Peter Boettke, and Michael Huemer, are not Objectivists. The “official” Objectivists are more inclined than was Rand herself to acknowledge the similarity between her political thought and libertarianism, but, like her, they criticize libertarianism and denounce Rothbard’s anarchism.
In what follows, I shall address the criticisms of Rothbard’s anarchism, as these are likely to be of most interest to readers of mises.org. Before turning to this, though, I should like to examine the more general criticism of libertarianism raised by the Objectivists, as this has considerable philosophical value.
Given the manifest similarity between Rand’s political proposals and minimal state libertarianism, why are Objectivists so critical of libertarianism? One is tempted to ask them, “All right, you don’t like anarchism, but why isn’t support for a minimal state that has no power to tax and for laissez-faire capitalism enough for you? What more do you want?” Their answer is that non-Objectivist libertarianism lacks proper philosophical foundations. In the absence of these foundations, libertarians are unable adequately to support their political conclusions.
As an example, Darryl Wright, a philosophy professor at Harvey Mudd College and a rising star among Objectivist philosophers, criticizes Rothbard for not grounding his non-aggression principle in normative ethics. Although Rothbard accepted an ethics of natural law, he also held that political philosophy was autonomous, and this was his fatal error: “The source of the difficulties with Rothbard’s conception of aggression. . .lies in a particular way of understanding self-ownership, which in turn proceeds from Rothbard’s commitment to what I will call the autonomy of political philosophy. By this I mean the view that political philosophy should be independent of normative ethics---that is, independent of any substantive ethical theory applicable to the whole of one’s life.” (p.107). More generally, Wright says, “Since Rand’s approach to philosophy is holistic, a proper understanding of the[non-initiation of force] principle requires us to see how it grows out of her more fundamental positions in ethics and epistemology. . .” (p.16)
Harry Binswanger, who along with Leonard Peikoff is the most senior philosopher of the Ayn Rand Society, in his response to Michael Huemer also stresses the need for foundations: “Rand repeatedly criticized the libertarians for treating the non-initiation of force principle as if it were an axiom, observing that is a quite derivative principle, requiring a complete philosophic base.” (p.273)
What are the proper ethical foundations? Here the Objectivists begin from an indisputable truth: Human beings need to use reason in order to survive. Animals survive through instinct, but for human beings, as Wright says, “functioning is not determined by our genetics. . .We must create the equivalent state [to that of animals] in ourselves---in our souls---a state that can underwrite the basic kinds of cognitive and existential actions that our lives require over their entire span.” (p.18) (When I say that this truth is indisputable, I do not mean to endorse the use that Objectivists make of it in ethical theory. That is far from indisputable.)
Human beings need reason to survive, but what is reason? Here Rand’s theory of concept formation comes to the fore. We abstract concepts through “measurement omission” from preconceptual perceptual states. From these concepts, further abstractions take place, and this process continues, creating a hierarchy of concepts. However high the hierarchy grows, it is grounded in first-level concepts abstracted from percepts.
I do not propose here to dispute this account of concepts, but two uses of the theory, much emphasized by Objectivists, do not follow from it. Suppose it is right that the mind acquires concepts in just the way that Rand suggests. It is a further step, and one that seems to me unsupported, to say that we ought to bring this process of hierarchical concept formation under our conscious control. That is to say, Objectivists hold that we ought to trace our concepts back to their perceptual foundation and that, at each stage in the hierarchy, we should be able to produce a clear definition of the concept abstracted at that stage.
Perhaps the process of abstraction operates better when it proceeds without conscious direction. What exactly is the argument that it does not? Are those who endeavor to bring concept formation under conscious control better able to survive than those who do not? That seems a matter open to investigation, and I am unaware of any studies that show this to be the case. To sharpen what is at issue, the question I raise is not whether those who are rational are more likely than the irrational to survive. Rather, it is whether rationality requires, or even suggests, that consciously tracing concepts to their grounding in perception is more rational than not doing so. To anticipate an objection, in speaking of the need for investigation I am not assuming the truth of the analytic-synthetic dichotomy, brought into question in a famous essay by Leonard Peikoff. I do not claim that all truths not in a narrow sense “analytic” are contingent; rather, I question whether a particular claim about reason is true, let alone necessarily true. Objectivists have moved uncritically from the obviously true claim that we need reason to survive to the unsupported claim that using our reason in a particular way aids our survival.
There is another claim made by Objectivists that seems to me dubious. They stress a proper hierarchy of knowledge, in which one begins with a theory of concepts, used to ground ethics, which in turn grounds political philosophy. The theory of concepts on this view is at the most fundamental level. It does not follow from this that the hierarchy may be without argument transmuted into a theory of historical causation, according to which beneficial or harmful political doctrines stem ultimately from the theory of concepts held by their advocates. This theory of causation is basic to the account of Nazism in Dr. Peikoff’s well-known book The Ominous Parallels a book that in my opinion does not succeed in making its case. I hope I may be allowed a personal note. My review of the book, written for Inquiry so long ago as 1982, has been the second most criticized of all my reviews. My most criticized review was of a book written by an admirer of a well-known painting by Frans Hals.
Before getting to the criticisms of Rothbard’s anarchism, I should like to make one further point about Rand’s philosophy. Objectivists contend that the concept of value stems from life. Not only is the Objectivist account of value better than rival theories of value, it is the sole basis for the concept of value. As Dr. Binswanger states, “The essential point is this: only life makes possible an objective, nonarbitrary distinction between value and disvalue, or good and bad. . .It is the conditionality of life upon action that creates good-for and bad –for.”(p.265, emphasis in original)
That is a possible story about how the concept of value is acquired, but I cannot see why it is more than that. (Again, in raising this objection, I take as given that we need to use reason in order to survive and I do not challenge Rand’s account of concept acquisition.) What precludes defenders of other theories of value from suggesting their own theories of how the concept of value---of course using another definition of value from that of the Objectivists—is acquired? Life is conditional on action, but how exactly does this generate an account of how the concept of value must be acquired? Why is this particular conception of value the concept of value?
Let us now turn to the criticisms of Rothbard’s anarchism. To a large extent, these criticisms rest on a misapprehension of Rothbard’s position. For example, Dr. Binswanger assumes that on an anarcho-capitalist view, people are free to exercise force at their discretion. He contrasts this with Rand’s position, in which the use of force is based on objectively true standards. “The attempt to invoke individual rights to justify ‘competing’ with the government collapses at the first attempt to concretize what it would mean in reality. Picture a band of strangers marching down Main Street, submachine guns at the ready. When confronted by the police, the leader of the band announces: 'Me and the boys are only here to see that justice is done, so you have no right to interfere with us.’ According to the ‘libertarian anarchists,’ in such confrontation the police are morally bound to withdraw, on pains of betraying the rights of self-defense and free trade.” (p.229)
Against this, Dr. Binswanger says: “In fact, of course, there is no conflict between individual rights and outlawing private force: there is no right to the arbitrary use of force. No political or moral principle could require the police to stand by helplessly while others use force arbitrarily—that is, according to whatever private notions of justice they happen to hold.” (p.229)
This objection has no relevance to Rothbard’s position. He too believed in an objective law code, largely based on the tradition of common law, not on agencies with conflicting views deferring to one another or “fighting it out.” In a review of Bruno Leoni’s Freedom and the Law, he says: “In short, there exists another alternative for law in society, an alternative not only to administrative decree or statutory legislation, but even to judge-made law. That alternative is the libertarian law, based on the criterion that violence may only be used against those who initiate violence, and based therefore on the inviolability of the person and property of every individual from "invasion" by violence. In practice, this means taking the largely libertarian common law, and correcting it by the use of man's reason, before enshrining it as a permanently fixed libertarian code or constitution. And it means the continual interpretation and application of this libertarian law code by experts and judges in privately competitive courts.” law without legislation.
Another objection to anarcho-capitalism also fails. Dr. Binswanger advances a startling claim: “Ultimately, anarchists who oppose monopoly government have to end up as pacifists. This is because all force is monopolistic. . .There is no such thing as force that lets dissenters go their own way. Force does not tolerate ‘to each his own.’ Force is precisely the attempt to subjugate another’s will to one’s own. If force in self-defense is justified, this means that monopolizing an interaction is justified. If I use force to defend myself against an aggressor I am not trying to persuade him---I am attempting to stop him from acting as he chooses. If the government monopolization of force were wrong, so would be the private use of force by individuals. The argument against government’s monopoly on force is thus an argument against self-defense, and it leads to pacifism.” (p.278)
This objection baffles me, because it has nothing to do with the dispute between Rothbard and supporters of Rand’s minimal state. Whether using force against an aggressor is inconsistent with persuasion may well be a significant topic, but the question at issue is whether objective law requires a state. Even if Dr. Binswanger is right about persuasion and the aggressor, so what?
All of the essays in this collection merit careful study. I especially admire Lester Hunt’s outstanding analysis of rights as side constraints in “Ayn Rand and Robert Nozick on Rights”
Ayn Rand was an important thinker, but she was not always right.
Libertarianism. By Eric Mack. Polity Press, 2018. Vi + 167 pages. + online bonus chapter http://politybooks.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/Mack-Libertarian-FINAL-Online-Chapter-pdf.pdf
Eric Mack, for many years a philosophy professor at Tulane University, has a well-deserved reputation as a critic of philosophical arguments, and that talent is on abundant display in Libertarianism. In what follows, I shall comment on only a very few of Mack’s penetrating discussions.
The book is intended as an introductory guide to libertarianism, which Mack characterizes as “advocacy of individual liberty as the fundamental political norm. An individual’s liberty is understood as that individual not being subject to interference by other agents in her doing as she deems fit with her own person and legitimate holdings.” (p.1) The position may be defended with varying degrees of strictness, ranging from hardcore libertarians, who confine coercion to the protection of individual liberty, to soft-core libertarians, who allow coercion for a few additional reasons, such as aid when people are in “dire straits.” As the extent of permissible coercion grows, libertarianism shades into classical liberalism.
What is the justification for libertarianism? Mack distinguishes three principal answers, though noting that libertarianism can be defended in other ways as well. “There is the natural rights theme, according to which certain deep truths about human beings and their prospective interaction allow us to infer that each person has certain basic (‘natural’) moral rights that must be respected by all other persons, groups, and institutions.” (p.40)
Here I wonder whether one should make a distinction. Sometimes people use the term “natural rights” to mean basic rights, but sometimes people have in mind a narrower usage. In this understanding, it follows from human nature that human beings have certain rights. For example, in the Objectivist philosophy, because you need freedom in order to survive as a rational being, you have a right to freedom. There is no “is-ought” gap. Philosophers like Nozick, who accept the is-ought gap, would in this usage count as supporters of basic rights but not of natural rights.
The second justification for libertarianism “is the cooperation to mutual advantage theme, according to which general compliance with certain principles of justice engenders a cooperative social and economic order that is advantageous to all its members.”(pp.4-5) These two justifications vie in popularity among libertarians, but there is a third justification as well, though this has been less influential. “A third possible approach. . .is a form of utilitarianism that maintains that the greatest happiness must be pursued indirectly through steadfast compliance with certain constraining moral norms—as it turns out, pretty much the same constraining norms that are celebrated by the natural rights and mutual advantage approaches.” (p.5)
Mack takes Locke to be an example of the first approach, Hume of the second, and John Stuart Mill and Herbert Spencer of the third. Among twentieth-century figures, he concentrates on Robert Nozick as a representative of the natural rights approach and Friedrich Hayek as a representative of the mutual advantage approach. Mack devotes most of the book to a close analysis of these two great thinkers. He mentions Murray Rothbard, who exerted a profound influence on Nozick, several times, but I wish he had devoted more space to him. Mack in the bonus online chapter subjects to critical scrutiny a number of contemporary libertarians: Hillel Steiner, Doug Rasmussen and Doug Den Uyl, Loren Lomasky, and David Schmidtz.
In what follows, I shall comment on only a few points. These concern Robert Nozick though some of the issues are relevant to others as well. This makes for an idiosyncratic review, but Nozick’s thought has fascinated me since I first encountered it some forty-five years ago, and that is why I have chosen this path. Despite the narrow scope of my review, I hope that readers will gain some idea of Mack’s concerns and his style of argument.
Mack gives an excellent account of the argument, given by both John Rawls and Nozick, that utilitarianism does not take seriously the separateness of persons. The greatest happiness principle may require that you sacrifice yourself for the benefit of society. But, so the objection goes, this wrongly assimilates an individual’s sacrifice of part of himself for his overall good to the sacrifice of a person for the good of society. You may need to have your leg amputated to save your life, but there is no social entity having persons as its parts.
Mack considers a utilitarian response to the point raised by Rawls and Nozick, which does not rely “on the conflation of persons into a social entity.” (p.45) This response is that “what makes it rational for an individual to incur a lesser cost within her own life in order to attain a greater benefit within her own life is simply that the benefit is greater than the cost. The fact that the cost and the benefits are hers---that they both occur with her life---plays no role in making rational the production of the greater benefit at the lesser cost. Therefore, no contentious inference is needed to get from the so-called principle of individual choice to the principle of social choice.” (p.45, emphasis in original)
Mack responds on behalf of Rawls and Nozick to this rejoinder. They might reply that the rationality of prudential sacrifices within the life of one individual is “far less contentious” than the utilitarian’s balancing of costs and benefits across lives. (p.46) Can one show that utilitarian balancing is rational, without assuming the existence of a social entity with persons as parts? It seems doubtful that one can.
Mack’s response is excellent, but another answer is also worth considering. James Buchanan maintains that if one takes adequate account of the subjectivity of costs and benefits, a cost or benefit exists only relative to a single person. Your cost or benefit may be a cost or benefit to me, but only if I view it as one. I do not say that this view is correct, but it is at least worth considering. (Amartya Sen, like Buchanan a Nobel laureate in economics, thought there was a great deal to be said in favor of Buchanan’s view) If it is correct, benefits and costs cannot be added up across persons.
After a careful discussion of Nozick’s condemnation of using others as means, Mack says, “Nozick is concerned that his unqualified condemnation of using others as means will support anti-libertarian prohibitions, , for example, taking pleasure in another person’s appearance or trading with another person to one’s advantage. He then rules out such implications by declaring that, for the purposes of political philosophy, we need only be concerned ‘with certain ways that persons may not use others: primarily, physically aggressing against them. [quoting Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia]However, this restriction is ad hoc because no reason is given for why political philosophy should only be concerned with this subset of usings.” (p.49, emphasis in original)
I do not think this objection altogether fair to Nozick, though it would be no doubt desirable to show how this view of political philosophy can be deduced from moral theory, as Nozick acknowledges. Confining political philosophy to the topic of when force is permissible (or obligatory) is not idiosyncratic to Nozick but a commonly used approach, especially among libertarians. He might respond to Mack, applying a strategy he often used on critics, ---much to their frustration, I might add---- that the problem of why political philosophy is thus confined is no more a problem for him than for anyone else. As such, it should not be taken as a decisive criticism of him.
Mack makes an excellent criticism of Nozick’s argument that if one starts with a network of competing protective agencies, as free market anarchists like Rothbard wish, “one of the protective agencies or the cooperative network as a whole seems to attain a natural ( non-coerced) monopoly in the provision of protective services.” (p.117), Nozick contends that if an agency or group of agencies attracts more clients than its rival agencies, there will be a cascade of new clients to it, because people will find it less costly to settle disputes if they are in the same agency. This will enable the largest agency to become a de facto monopoly. Mack is skeptical: “The fact that it may be less complicated and costly to resolve automobile collision claims when both parties are customers of the same insurance company has not led to one company having a virtual monopoly within the automobile insurance business. In addition, Nozick’s argument seems to overestimate the homogeneity of the services that competing protective agencies would offer.” (p.117)
There is an additional point here that seems worth making. Suppose that the process Nozick describes results in everyone’s joining the same agency. In that case, we would not have a state as Nozick characterizes it, because one of his requirements for a state is that it offers free or low-cost protective services to disadvantaged independents who are not its clients. Thus, Nozick requires for his argument to the minimal state to succeed that the very process by which the derivation starts will come to an end before it completes itself, but he offers no reason for this.
Mack raises against Nozick the specter of public goods. “For our purposes here, we can think of a public good as a good which, if it is produced and enjoyed by some members of a given public, cannot readily be withheld from other members of that public. . .The standard and useful example of a public good is national-scale defense. . . The conventional economic wisdom. . .is that the total value of the orders that the state or firm [ that offers defense services]will receive will be markedly less than it naively expects.”(p.122) People will prefer to free ride, hoping that others will pay for the good; but if everyone reasons this way, the good will not be purchased.
Mack is certainly right that if anarchist protective agencies or a Nozickian minimal state, lacking the power of taxation, proved unable to supply effective defense, that would be a serious objection indeed. But I think his argument has moved too fast. According to the customary neoclassical analysis, public goods will not be supplied efficiently. It does not follow from that, though, that the good will not be supplied at all, or in a quantity insufficient to “do the job.” The extent of the supply is an empirical matter. It is not a requirement for a theory of libertarian rights that it never requires efficiency losses, as neoclassical theory defines these.[1] (The same difficulty also applies to Mack’s argument for a “dire straits fund” on pp.39-40 of the online bonus chapter.)
Suppose, though, that the free market turns out to be unable to supply defense. Would Mack then be correct when he says that a taxation minimal state may be justifiable on Nozickian grounds? He says, “Persons’ rights indicate what must not be done to them---or more specifically, what must not be done to them without their consent. But what about cases in which consent is not feasible?. . .A person’s right over her own body entails that she has a right not to be cut open without her consent even by an expert surgeon seeking to save her life. However, what if the person who needs that surgery to save her life is already unconscious and, hence, unable to give consent? If it is permissible for the surgeon to proceed with the needed surgery on the already unconscious individual, this seems to be true because the requirement that the subject consent to the physical intervention is really a requirement that she consent if and only if consent is feasible.” (pp.123-124)
If this is right, then, “the libertarian advocate of the TMS may argue that, precisely because of the non-feasibility of attaining consent from individuals to make payments in exchange for the public good of rights-protection, it is permissible to impose those payments without actual consent.” (p.124, emphasis in original)
I do not think this argument succeeds. In the first case, it is permissible to proceed with the life-saving operation because there is reason to believe that is what the patient would want. Most people would. Had she given instructions beforehand not to operate, then the operation would not be permissible. In the taxation case, the reason consent is not feasible is that people refuse to consent. It is hardly plausible to say that I may force you to pay me for my services, because, owing to your refusal of my services, getting your consent is not feasible.
Mack himself raises an important problem for the argument for the taxation minimal state. ”Recall. . . . .that this defense of the TMS turns on a striking assumption about information. It assumes that the state’s tax assessors would know, for each assessed party, what magnitude of taxation would leave that party net better off in light of the value for that party of her receipt of the tax-funded public good of protective services.” (p.124)
In Libertarianism, Mack does not, for the most part, discuss his own views but confines himself to the exposition and criticism of others. An exception is his brilliant presentation of Mises’s calculation argument against socialism (pp.58 ff.), one of the best known to me, where it is clear that he endorses the argument. Readers should be aware though, that Mack has written a large number of papers setting forward his own views in great depth and detail. Readers of Mack’s work will encounter a very fine philosophical intelligence. Few can approach his power of critical analysis. Libertarianism is must reading for anyone interested in libertarian theory.
[1] For challenges to the neoclassical analysis of public goods, see Ludwig von Mises, Human Action, Chapter 23, pp.650 ff; and Anthony de Jasay, Social Contract, Free Ride. See also the discussion in David Schmidtz, The Limits of Government.
The Notre Dame cathedral in Paris isn't the first historically significant church to go up in smoke. The Basilica of Saint Paul's Outside-the-Walls — after standing for more than 1,400 years — was almost totally destroyed by fire in 1823. It housed the tomb of the Apostle Paul, and was a major basilica, second only to St Peter's as a pilgrimage site. Thanks to a construction worker, the church was accidently set on fire.
Its destruction was a great disaster at the time, and an international appeal went out for assistance in its reconstruction. The world responded and the church was rebuilt to the original design. Today, it is a beautiful church, and it remains the site of the Apostle's tomb. It also still contains many works of art preserved from the Middle Ages and other elements from the original church.
Today, few pilgrims to Saint Paul's are much perturbed by the fact it is not entirely the original fourth-century structure. Most ancient churches are really a mixture of (relatively) new and much older elements. Old Saint Peter's Basilica, built by Emperor Constantine, stood for 1,200 years before being shamefully neglected and knocked down by the popes. It was replaced by the new basilica now known as (new) St Peter's. Although I personally wish the old basilica had been rebuilt — and the new basilica never constructed — few people nowadays complain about the new St Peter's value as a work of art. It has itself now become "ancient." When it comes to important churches, renovations and changes take place. It's not the end of the world.
But maybe the destruction of Notre Dame is different. Those who built the new Saint Peter's figured they were perfectly capable of building something even better than what came before. They had Michelangelo.
But what about today? Perhaps many observers of Notre Dame's destruction suspect modern artists and architects aren't up to the task of recreating or surpassing the artisans of the thirteenth century. That would be a grim realization, indeed.
What strikes me as especially significant about Notre Dame is that its reconstruction will have to take place in a world colored by a worldview that is far, far removed from the one that produced the original. Notre Dame was built in the High Middle Ages — an era when Europe invented the University. It was the time of Aquinas, and of Francis of Assisi. It was a time of immense interest in new technologies and new types of learning. Much of which made Notre Dame possible. It was also, of course, a time of widespread Christianity.
Europe today, however, has largely rejected Christianity and mocks it regularly in Europe's artwork, politics, and scholarship. Thus, the worldview that created Notre Dame is anathema to the modern European mind. Europeans may value the physical building that is known as Notre Dame, but Europeans have been happily burning down Notre Dame in spirit for centuries.
Given the widespread disdain for the medievals who built it, why do we hear so much about what a wonderful thing Notre Dame is today?
The answer lies in the fact that modern Europeans have redefined the building as a safe, watered-down version of what it was meant to be.
We're told Notre Dame is just a symbol of France, and of Europe. We're told it's a work of art, and that it's a great place for people watching. It gives us "a sense of community." And perhaps most importantly, it's a world famous tourist attraction.
Some who have pledged to rebuild the structure have been explicit in this. One wealthy donor announced today: "Notre Dame is an extraordinary landmark and an immeasurable symbol of Paris. It represents love and unity, bringing people together from all over the world no matter who they are and where they come from."
Nevertheless, for all the attempts to redefine Notre Dame today as something of non-religious importance, the fact remains the building was constructed as a church. It was made as a place to say Mass, to pray to what Christians regard as the eternal God, and to confect the Eucharist. That is, the building was created primarily to provide a holy place for the priests to participate in the process of making Christ physically present in flesh and blood on the altar. The artwork, structure, and design were all made to focus the senses and attention of visitors on this reality.
Yes, Notre Dame was also built to showcase and advertise the wealth and power of those who built it. But this wealth and power could have been equally well advertised through the construction of palaces, and military outposts, and other civil buildings.
The fact that so many resources and so much artistic fervor were put into the construction of a church, however, reminds us that European civilization — many within it, at any rate — took their religion seriously, even if their devotion was hampered by vices such as the usual human desires for prestige and bragging rights.
But those who will rebuild the church are likely to regard New Notre Dame as something far different from a monument to an ancient deity. In reading the words above about the rituals Notre Dame was designed for, most modern day Europeans and Americans will scoff at the very idea that anyone believed in all that superstitious "god stuff." Words like "Eucharist" and "Mass" are quaint relics from absurd notions passed down by semi-barbarian medievals. (Ironically, moderns will mock medieval Europeans for their alleged ugly backwardness, even while praising their beautiful churches in the next breath.)
The contempt for the idea of Notre Dame as a place good for anything loftier than civic pride and tourism has been recently illustrated in the fact the mass media and the global pundits assign virtually no value at all to other French churches. For example, most media outlets have largely ignored the fact that French churches are increasingly targeted by vandals. According to the International Business Times:
A total of 875 of France's 42,258 churches were vandalized in 2018, with a small fire set to the Saint-Sulpice church in Paris in March, according to French police.
In the same week that the fire broke out at the Saint-Sulpice church, another 11 churches were vandalized. According to the Ministry of the Interior, a total of 1,063 anti-Christian acts were recorded in 2018 alone.
We only hear about Notre Dame because it's famous. Its status as a church is of little importance.
And this, ultimately, is what sets the reconstruction of Notre Dame apart from the reconstruction of St. Paul's or St. Peters. It will be rebuilt and placed in a culture that regards it primarily as a museum or a community center. Notre Dame has been domesticated. It's been made ideologically safe.
The way Notre Dame is treated today is not unlike what many political theorists do when they regard religion as superstitious nonsense, but nonetheless tolerate it for its supposed societal benefits. Religion, they cynically claim, can have its advantages. It keeps the rubes in line by imposing on them a moral code. It distracts the mob from their troubles. It's all fine so long as it doesn't challenge the status quo.
And who can be surprised that a French church is popularly regarded in such a way? Only 51 percent of the French population claim to be Catholic at all. Among those, only five percent attend Mass regularly. In other words, virtually no one in France is much interested in Notre Dame beyond it's mundane perks.
None of this is to say I oppose the reconstruction of the church. It's a good thing if the Church is rebuilt. It is good to have a beautiful church in the center of Paris. It's good that many people value the church on some level, even if they mock what it was intended to be.
But as I'm lectured by pundits and columnists about the need to value Notre Dame as a symbol, I can't help but think of the Catholic novelist Flannery O'Connor who took exception to the idea that the Eucharist was a mere symbol, and not the flesh and blood of the Christian God:
Well, toward morning the conversation turned on the Eucharist, which I, being the Catholic, was obviously supposed to defend. Mrs. Broadwater said when she was a child and received the Host, she thought of it as the Holy Ghost, He being the ‘most portable’ person of the Trinity; now she thought of it as a symbol and implied that it was a pretty good one. I then said, in a very shaky voice, ‘Well, if it’s a symbol, to hell with it.’ That was all the defense I was capable of but I realize now that this is all I will ever be able to say about it, outside of a story, except that it is the center of existence for me; all the rest of life is expendable.” This sort of radical devotion on the part of O'Connor will strike most modern Westerners as unpleasantly radical. Perhaps even extreme. Or worse yet: intransigent. We're not supposed to have convictions like this anymore, or take religious propositions seriously. That's all for a past "dogmatic" age we're now supposed to condemn. And it is condemned, by exactly the sorts of people now singing the praises of Notre Dame. They tell us the most important thing about Notre Dame is that it's a symbol. Flannery O'Connor might have disagreed.
Yesterday's terrible fire at the Notre-Dame Cathedral reminds us how quickly centuries of accumulated "cultural capital" can be destroyed. Oak timbers dating from the 1200s in the roof and spire were lost forever; some priceless stained glass windows appear to have suffered damage. As the saying goes, France is the heart of the West, Paris is the heart of France, and Notre Dame is the heart of Paris—and as such the sight of the iconic church ablaze makes an uneasy if simplistic metaphor for the decline of the West.
"Cultural capital" here of course means something far broader than economic definitions of capital as financial wealth or factors of production. Even the broader Austrian view of capital as heterogeneous production goods, what Rothbard termed an "intricate, delicate, interweaving structure of capital goods," can't capture the sum of wealth in a society. Capital ultimately is measurable, reducible to units, while the value of Notre Dame to Catholics around the world cannot be measured. We cannot quantify the cost of its damage or destruction in purely economic terms. But we can recognize a loss. Hundreds of years of wealth bound up in the beauty of Notre Dame's roof and spire are now lost to us forever.
The blogger Bionic Mosquito reminds us that civilizational wealth compounds over time, and thus wealth can be material, cultural, spiritual, even civilizational:
...Think of wealth not just on a balance sheet, but wealth in terms of culture, accumulated wisdom and knowledge, the captured savings of time.
Accumulation and time are key. Healthy societies build and preserve wealth, which is to say they are made up of individuals who strive to create more than they consume. The people who built Notre Dame over two centuries, using rudimentary pulleys and scaffolding, certainly did not expect to see the end results of their work. In fact no single Pope, architect, financier, mason, artist, laborer, or French monarch saw the project through from start to completion. But they built something lasting, something of incalculable benefit to future generations. They created wealth lasting far beyond their lifetimes.
All healthy societies do this. The notion of being concerned with things beyond one’s lifetime is innately human. Humans are hardwired to build societies, and the most ambitious humans have always sought to build lasting monuments and modes of living. That’s not possible unless people work toward a future they will not enjoy themselves.
This was especially true for our ancient primitive ancestors, who lived very short and difficult lives. We can imagine how much they wanted to have lasting forms of sustenance: food, water, clothing, shelter — instead of having to produce that sustenance day after day.
In fact, this trait perhaps more than any other is the hallmark of civilization. We can call it many things, but we might just say healthy societies create capital. They consume less than they produce. This capital accumulation creates an upward spiral that increases investment and productivity, making the future richer and brighter. Capital accumulation made it possible for human populations to develop beyond subsistence misery. It made the agricultural, industrial, and digital revolutions possible.
Technical know-how, artistry, and craftsmanship also represent forms of wealth which can be lost over time, and apparently have been. This article questions whether Notre Dame really can be rebuilt in quite the same way:
While architects have enough detailed information about the cathedral to pull off a technically very precise reconstruction, the craftsmanship is unlikely to be the same. Today, the stone that makes up the cathedral would be cut using machinery, not by hand by small armies of stonemasons as in the 12th century. "Nineteenth-century and 20th-century Gothic buildings always look a little dead, because the stone doesn't bear the same marks of the mason's hand," Murray told Ars Technica.
Civilization is far more than just economics, but it needs economics. Mises cautions us that it "will and must perish if the nations continue to pursue the course which they entered upon under the spell of doctrines rejecting economic thinking." So when we consider the sad spectacle of Notre Dame burning, we should ask ourselves whether the politics and economics of our age encourage or discourage building wealth for future generations. Even if one reduces the inheritance of western countries today to material well-being, the threat of losing what makes us rich certainly concerns us all. Short-term political thinking, coupled with demand-driven mania in fiscal and monetary policy, can consume our future just as fire consumed the roof of Notre Dame.
March 3 marked the bicentennial of Belgian-born philosopher/economist Gustave de Molinari’s birth. Based on self-ownership and the private property derived from it, he forcefully defended every form of liberty. No wonder Frederic Bastiat named Molinari his successor.
Remembering Molinari’s across-the-board defense of liberty is particularly necessary at a time Americans pay lip service to it, but constantly say “there ought to be a law” that restricts it.
His recognition that individual sovereignty is a far superior replacement for government sovereignty from the perspective of justice, respect for natural rights, and of effective social cooperation is worth revisiting on 200 years after his birthday.
Read the full article at The Orange County Register
The Free Society. By Laurence M. Vance. Vance Publications, 2018. Xii + 468 pages.
Laurence Vance is best known for his work as a specialist on the King James translation of the Bible, but he is also an outstanding writer on libertarian issues. In The Free Society, he has collected a large number of his articles for the period 2005-2017, almost all of which first appeared first in LewRockwell.com or the Future of Freedom Foundation. The articles are well worth reading, as they display the author’s sharp mind and consistent outlook.
Vance, who is a conservative Christian, maintains that the Bible supports a libertarian viewpoint. That opinion puts him at odds with those religious believers who wish to use government to enforce personal morals, but Vance is undaunted: “So why do I think that religion---in this case the Christian religion—is compatible with libertarianism? Let me give you two verses of Scripture, one from the Old Testament and one from the New, since Christians accept the authority of both: Proverbs 3:30--- ‘Strive not with a man without cause, if hath done thee no harm.’ 1 Peter 4:15----But let none of you suffer as a murderer, or as a thief, or as an evildoer, or as a busybody in other men’s matters.’ These verses, my friends, embody the essence of libertarianism. Don’t kill anyone, don’t take what’s not yours, don’t do anything wrong, don’t stick your nose into someone else’s business, and don’t bother anyone if he hasn’t bothered you.” (p.20)
Libertarianism, Vance, explains, should be taken in a strict way. The welfare state should be rejected, for example, not mainly because it is economically inefficient but because to take from some to give to others violates people’s rights. “Of course, I oppose welfare payments! It is immoral to take from those who work and give it to those who don’t---even when the government does it. All charity should be private and voluntary.” (p.39)
One final illustration of Vance’s uncompromising adherence libertarian principle: “Since no parent in the United States is forced to send his child to a government school, it is a myth that we need ‘school choice’(meaning vouchers) so that children can get out of an unsafe, failing government school.” (p.85)
Vance is a consistently illuminating writer, and I highly recommend his work.
On February 19, 1942, President Franklin Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066 authorizing military personnel to lock Americans of Japanese descent in concentration camps that are often euphemistically called “internment camps.”
To this day, some apologists for the internment camps — and the harsh measures carried out by the Roosevelt administration — contend that the term "concentration camp" is needlessly provocative and makes the Japanese confinement took worse than it was.
Yet, the term "concentration camp" is not a pejorative term. Using the term to describe the camps for Japanese-Americans is both appropriate and properly descriptive.
Nowadays, many people rightly are repulsed by the idea of concentration camps because they have become closely associated with the Nazi concentration camps which were often also extermination camps. Historically speaking, however, the term has not implied that the purpose of the camps in question are necessarily to carry out purposes of mass murder.
This is no doubt partly why Chief Justice John Roberts officially referred to the Japanese camps as concentration camps last year when Roberts wrote: "The forcible relocation of U. S. citizens to concentration camps, solely and explicitly on the basis of race, is objectively unlawful and outside the scope of Presidential authority."
Roberts is surely aware that the camps for Japanese-Americans were dissimilar to Nazi camps in a variety of ways. Yet, he still employed the term "concentration camp."
After all, the term — and the concept — both predate World War II by decades. The term was first used to describe camps used by the Spanish government against dissidents in the late nineteenth century. The term was then later used to describe camps used by the British Empire during the Boer War.
In both cases, these camps were unsanitary places where food was scarce. Disease spread easily. But, in both cases, it does not appear those who created camps intended to murder large numbers of women and children — as was the case with the Nazi camps. In the case of the German camps, for example, many witnesses reported seeing large numbers of potential camp residents executed on arrival. This alone would distinguish them from other types of deadly camps where death was usually the result of disease and malnourishment.
Moreover, in the Spanish and British cases, it appears the deadly conditions were often due primarily to a lack of funding and a lack of effort on the part of officials to keep the camp residents well supplied. Extermination need not have been a true motivation.
In the case of the Japanese camps in the United States, the residents benefited from a general and relative abundance of food which the United States in general enjoyed during the Second World War. Moreover, after 1941, at no time was the US losing the war in any meaningful sense. The US always enjoyed an advantage in terms of industrial capacity, and the physical security of the continental United States. This reduced the incentive to carry out reprisals against the camp's residents.
It's not a coincidence, for example, than many of the worst excesses against dissidents and "enemies of the state" in Nazi Germany took place after the devastating losses for the German regime at Stalingrad. As the war turned against the Germans, paranoia and internal revanchism increased, leading to an escalation of reprisals against all perceived domestic enemies.
The US did not experience a comparable situation.
So, while the American camps were relatively safe and healthy, it would be unwise to attribute to assumed American generosity. The fact is the US regime could afford to feed the residents while the general population more less forgot about them. Had the US experienced something like Stalingrad, the Roosevelt Administration — which was not above prosecuting peaceful Americans under the Espionage Act — may have turned to harsher measures against interned populations.
As it turned out, the American camps were decided non-deadly by historical standards up to that time. This, of course, did not protect the residents from the effects of confinement. Most residents lost their businesses and property since they were unable to pay rent or make mortgage payments during internment.
Mr. Mark Lautman has given me permission to share the following letter:
When I started reading Rothbard’s book, I gave the three-line summary to my wife. “It’s a book written by Murray Rothbard in the 1950s about libertarian economics. It’s published by the Mises Institute. Rothbard was a disciple of an Austrian economist Mises.”
“Mises?” she asked. “Ludwig von Mises?”
“Yes. Do you know about him?”
“Do you know who Ludwig von Mises was? He was my grandfather’s cousin!”
Sure enough, Paul Lourie, my wife’s grandfather, mentions Ludwig von Mises in his memoirs!
Left-progressives are incensed over the plight of Nathan Phillips, the American Indian from the Omaha tribe involved in an altercation with Catholic high school boys over the weekend. In general, the American left views itself as the champion of indigenous people, insisting that bowdlerized American history fails to fully account for genocide and theft of land. But as usual the progressive answer—welfare, dependency, government programs, and government agencies— doesn't actually help Indians. Our own Jeff Deist offered up a more ambitious progressive plan via Twitter:
This month’s Liberty Matters forum is a discussion of the American economist Frank Fetter. Though he is neglected today, Fetter made vital contributions to Austrian economics and was a major force in spreading the ideas of the early Austrians in the United States (see here and here). In my contributions to the discussion, I explain why Fetter’ work is important and how it can continue to provide fresh insights to contemporary economists. So far, the focus of the essays has been on key elements of economics, especially foundational concepts like price, market, equilibrium, capital, and rent. I’m joined in the conversation by Joseph Salerno, Peter Lewin, and Geoffrey Hodgson.
The first essays and responses in the discussion have now been published, and the forum will remain open for the rest of the month for short rejoinders by all the participants. I hope you’ll take a few minutes to read through some of the contributions. Here is the abstract for the discussion:
Matthew McCaffrey, assistant professor of enterprise at the University of Manchester, explores the economic and political work of the “forgotten giant” of economics, the Indiana-born Frank Fetter. At the height of his career in the early 20th century, Fetter was one of the most respected, cited, and debated economists in the United States. He taught for over 40 years at prestigious universities, including Stanford, Cornell, and Princeton, and his research appeared in practically every major publication in economics and political science. Yet today he is virtually forgotten outside a small group of Austrian economists. In his opening essay, McCaffrey explores two aspects of his thought in particular: his contributions to theoretical economics and their relationship to Austrian ideas, and his political views as they relate to the philosophy of classical liberalism. He is joined in the discussion by Geoffrey M. Hodgson, Research Professor of Business Studies in the University of Hertfordshire, Peter Lewin is Clinical Professor in the Jindal School of Management, University of Texas, Dallas, and Joseph T. Salerno, professor of economics in the Finance and Graduate Economics Department in the Lubin School of Business of Pace University in New York.
This week is the 100th anniversary of President Woodrow Wilson’s speech to Congress seeking a declaration of war against Germany. Many people celebrate this centenary of America’s emergence as a world power. But, when the Trump administration is bombing or rattling sabers at half a dozen nations while many Democrats clamor to fight Russia, it is worth reviewing World War One’s high hopes and dire results.
Wilson was narrowly re-elected in 1916 based on a campaign slogan, "He kept us out of war." But Wilson had massively violated neutrality by providing armaments and money to the Allied powers that had been fighting Germany since 1914. In his war speech to Congress, Wilson hailed the U.S. government as "one of the champions of the rights of mankind" and proclaimed that "the world must be made safe for democracy."
American soldiers fought bravely and helped turn the tide on the Western Front in late 1918. But the cost was far higher than Americans anticipated. More than a hundred thousand American soldiers died in the third bloodiest war in U.S. history. Another half million Americans perished from the Spanish flu epidemic spurred and spread by the war.
In his speech to Congress, Wilson declared, "We have no quarrel with the German people" and feel "sympathy and friendship" towards them. But his administration speedily commenced demonizing the "Huns." One Army recruiting poster portrayed German troops as an ape ravaging a half-naked damsel beneath an appeal to "Destroy this mad brute."
Read the full article at USA Today.
I've been following Lew Rockwell's work pretty closely for more than 15 years, but there's a lot of good stuff I haven't heard before in this new interview between Tom Woods and Lew. He goes a little more deeply into some of his work with Ron Paul in Congress, and Lew apparently has a new book coming out soon, called Against the Left.
The federal government is running a massive deficit right now. American wages are stagnant. The US is involved in multiple costly wars with no apparent objective. And the president raises taxes on Americans at will through his tariff policy.
But fortunately the Congress is getting down to what is really important. Federalizing laws banning the sale of cat and dog meat.
The silliness of Congress's involvement in the matter is so obvious that even CBS news begins its article on the topic with a snide comment:
The government shuts down at the end of the month, and Democrats and Republicans seem unable to make a deal to keep it open. They are, however, united in trying to stop people from eating pets.
But the new bill does provide a chance for politicians to crow about "accomplishing" something in Congress. Bill sponsor and Florida Democrat Alice Hastings released a glowing statement:
"The House of Representatives has voted to unify animal cruelty laws across the country, which would prohibit the slaughter of dogs and cats for human consumption," Hastings said. "I am proud to have championed this effort in Congress to explicitly ban the killing and consumption dogs and cats across the United States, and am greatly appreciative of my friend and colleague Congressman Buchanan for taking the 'Dog and Cat Meat Trade Prohibition Act' across the finish line today."
Boy, without the federal government, who could possibly regulate such things? I mean, other than the county commissioners who could just as easily pass an ordinance on the matter? The sale and handling of dog meat is already illegal nearly everywhere in the US. The new federal law is being passed because it gives politicians a shiny object to distract the voters with on the campaign trail this fall.
Keep in mind also that if the feds plan to enforce the new regulations, it will require work from federal employees who will need to surveil, investigate, and prosecute any suspected lawbreakers. The people who do it will collect a federal salary and, eventually, a federal pension.
Needless to say, there's no section of the Federal Constitution that expresses the necessity of federal involvement in regulating cat meat. But such trifles don't concern Congress when there is good politicking to be had. After all, from the politician's standpoint, only a few odd eccentrics like yours truly are going to bother condemning the bill. Meanwhile, the bill's supporters will be able to make stump speeches to suburban moms and college activists about how "I am fighting for you" in Congress by making dog-meat boutiques illegal under federal law.
This leads us to ask the question of how widespread this black-market industry even is. If is is not widespread then why the need for federal legislation? And if consumption of dog meat is widespread, then this tells us that somewhere in America private citizens — presumably taxpayers — like to eat dog meat. So, the federal legislation is either pointless, or it's trampling on the property rights of someone somewhere.
In either case, the question must be answered: are we to believe that dog-meat lovers have no rights just because lots of people think dogs are cute? Yes, I get it, I have a dog too and she's swell. Barring a Venezuela-style apocalypse, I'm totally not going to eat her.
On the other hand, if some people somewhere like eating dog, why is it my place to sign off on threatening those people with fines imposed by federal agents for doing something I find distasteful.
At this point in the debate, of course, the opponents of dog meat will start repeating totally arbitrary reasons for why eating dog ought to be verboten. "They' cute, they're intelligent, they make good companions." And so on.
But as anyone who has worked with pigs knows, those animals are very intelligent, too. Some are even cute. Some people keep pigs as pets. And yet, many of the same people who sob over dog meat have few scruples about ordering a sausage pizza.
Hardliner animal rights people are, at least, consistent in this. They are against all animal slaughter. And that's a respectable position — although not one I agree with.Unfortunately, with many hardcore animal rights activists, this admirable consistency often fails to extend to opposing the killing of human life pre-birth.
Dog Meat vs. Horse Meat Unfortunately, we've already been over this, and the federal government has already been blazing the trail for regulating meat slaughter and sales for quite some time. In fact, it was just late last year that the Congress was debating ending an existing federal ban on the processing of horse meat. And although I've been a personal fan of many horses I have met, I also came out against that federal ban.
[RELATED: "Do We Really Need a Federal Ban on Horse Meat?" by Ryan McMaken]
In that case, though, opponents of horse-meat bans had something more in their favor: Americans were still eating horse meat in the mid twentieth century. Even more recently, Americans were feeding horse meat — ironically, given the current debate — to their cats and dogs. Moreover, as I pointed out in the article, Western society has a long history of eating horse meat, although it was never especially popular in the United States. But in the case of horse meat, why ought the "rights" of horses trump those of private taxpaying citizens who happen to make their living from selling horse meat? Or who enjoy eating it?
With cats and dogs, of course, there is very little history of them being eaten in the US or in Europe.
Eating dogs, however, is apparently common in China, Indonesia, and Korea. Some immigrants from those places still eat dogs.
But, there aren't enough people in the US who like dog meat to make the pro-dog-meat lobby in the US politically significant. Congress simply doesn't have to worry about any of those people when campaigning for re-election this November. Those horrible foreigners and new arrivals who like dog meat? To hell with them. And if they get caught eating a dog or cat? Well then its a $5,000 fine. Xenophobia continues to be great politics, just not in the way you think. It's not the Trump voters in this case who are wanting to stick it to foreigners and immigrants. This time, banning dog meat is all about pandering to soccer moms and well-to-do twenty-somethings who refer to their dogs as their children. It's probably a winning strategy.
In the final chapters of his masterful history of the American Revolution, Conceived in Liberty, Murray Rothbard takes to examining the political and social repercussions of the American Revolution's success. He notes the revolution accelerated the elimination of old feudal laws, the disestablishment of churches, and the confiscation of lands from the old Tory ruling classes. Confiscated lands were sold by state governments to "patriots." In other words, the "land redistribution" programs we so often hear about taking place during other revolutions, were not alien to the American one.
The war changed race relations in many areas as well. In 1776, Congress authorized the enlistment of blacks in military units, and some especially anti-British masters began to offer freedom to slaves that enlisted. Meanwhile, the "American navy — Continental, state, and privateer — welcomes Negro sailors from the very beginning of the conflict." Among the colonies, only South Carolina and Georgia refused to participate in this new option for blacks in the war. Indeed, so strong was the devotion to slavery among South Carolina and Georgia officials, Rothbard concluded, "they preferred defeat in the war to allowing that sort of subversive license." Not surprisingly, these new legal and social realities accelerated the abolition of slavery in many states, although total abolition crashed upon the rocks of the slave economy in the Deep South.
There is no denying, then, that the American Revolution was very much a revolution, as Rothbard wrote in Chapter 80:
Especially since the early 1950s, America has been concerned with opposing revolutions throughout the world; in the process, it has generated a historiography that denies its own revolutionary past. This neoconservative view of the American Revolution, echoing the reactionary writer in the pay of the Austrian and English governments of the early nineteenth century, Friedrich von Gentz, tries to isolate the American Revolution from all the revolutions in the western world that preceded it and followed it. The American Revolution, this view holds, was unique; it alone of all modern revolutions was not really revolutionary; instead, it was moderate, conservative, dedicated only to preserving existing institutions from British aggrandizement. Furthermore, like all else in America, it was marvelously harmonious and consensual. Unlike the wicked French and other revolutions in Europe, the American Revolution, then, did not upset or change anything. It was therefore not really a revolution at all; certainly, it was not radical.
This view, Rothbard writes "displays an extreme naiveté on the nature of revolution." The American revolution was radical, indeed, and
It was inextricably linked both to the radical revolutions that went before and to the ones, particularly the French, that succeeded it. From the researches of Caroline Robbins and Bernard Bailyn, we have come to see the indispensable linkage of radical ideology in a straight line from the English republican revolutionaries of the seventeenth century through the commonwealth men of the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, to the French and to the American revolutionaries.
In spite of all of this, the mainstream continues to devalue the Revolution and its revolutionary nature. On the left, pundits claim that the war was a reactionary attempt to preserve slavery, or that it was fought to advance the views of authoritarian retrograde religious zealots. The truly revolutionary nature of the conflict — because it was radically laissez-faire — is ignored altogether. On the right, we are told to conveniently ignore all the revolutionary aspects of the war beyond the a vague opposition to taxes. Sedition and secession in 1776? That was OK. The same thing today? That's not OK. "Follow the law!" seems to be a frequent mantra of modern "patriots."
We are fortunate, though, that this new radicalism was not guided by ideologies such as socialism, nationalism, or any sort of totalitarianism. It was instead — as we see in the thinking of the Anti-Federalists — guided by radical decentralist views, by radical suspicion of the state, by radical opposition to commercial controls, and by a radical opposition to a national military establishment.
Although now greatly reduced, bastardized, and diluted, these revolutionary views, to a limited extent, continue to allow for a relatively robust amount of freedom in private and commercial life. How much of that freedom will be preserved a generation from now remains to be seen.
While the coverage of today's 5-4 Supreme Court ruling upholding President Trump's travel ban will understandably focus on how it is a "win" for the current administration, perhaps the most positive revelation from the decision is that it offered a major defeat for President Franklin Roosevelt.
This year marked the 76th anniversary of Executive Order 9066, the executive decree that authorized the US military to detain Japanese Americans and place them in "internment camps." As Ryan McMaken noted this February, the precedent established was still valid:
The U.S. Government has never repudiated the legal principle behind concentration camps, and maintains the legal right to use them again. Often, when libertarians or others point out that the United States is not a free country, the defenders of the status quo point to the fact that people can vote. This magical talisman held out by government apologists, known as “the vote” doesn’t seem to have worked out very well for the Japanese Americans during World War II, who also had “the vote.”
Interestingly, tucked into today's court decision is a full condemnation by the Court of the 1944 case Korematsu v. United States which defending the legality of FDR's policy. As Justice John Roberts wrote:
Finally, the dissent invokes Korematsu v. United States, 323 U. S. 214 (1944). Whatever rhetorical advantage the dissent may see in doing so, Korematsu has nothing to do with this case. The forcible relocation of U. S. citizens to concentration camps, solely and explicitly on the basis of race, is objectively unlawful and outside the scope of Presidential authority. But it is wholly inapt to liken that morally repugnant order to a facially neutral policy denying certain foreign nationals the privilege of admission.. The entry suspension is an act that is well within executive authority and could have been taken by any other President—the only question is evaluating the actions of this particular President in promulgating an otherwise valid Proclamation.
The dissent’s reference to Korematsu, however, affords this Court the opportunity to make express what is already obvious: Korematsu was gravely wrong the day it was decided, has been overruled in the court of history, and—to be clear—“has no place in law under the Constitution.”
Now will today's decision actually prevent a future government from acting in a similar way to FDR? Of course not. It has been proven time and time again that a government, in a time of crisis, will happily dismiss any claim to rights a citizen has- an inherent weakness of constitutionalism. Still, it is good to see the Court acknowledge this past evil, even going so far as to use the words "concentration camps" to describe the Federal government's actions.
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Charles Dickens A Tale of Two Cities came to mind this morning as I drove to work listening to the unemployment report on the radio. The report indicates that the official unemployment rate dropped to the lowest level in almost 50 years. Reporters have been quick to move from this "good news" to the fact that President Trump "leaked" the information via Twitter an hour before the report was released in violation of federal rules. My own thoughts turned to the fact that when the actual unemployment rate is below the "natural rate" that it is a signal of recession or economic crisis right around the corner. This is shown in the graph where unemployment bottoms out just before the onset of the next recession (in gray). Dickens published A Tale in 1859 just before the American Civil War and it was about the coming of the French Revolution....
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way – in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only. (Wikipedia)
Economics professor Bernard Malamud made the local paper today as he is retiring after teaching at UNLV for 50 years. I had Professor Malamud for a class, but darn if I can remember what the class was.
Malamad showed up in 1968 when UNLV was but a dream. “The campus was a desert; there was nothing here,” he told the R-J “There were rabbits running around and coyotes running around, and what Tom [White] described was a big-city university. That’s what we’ve become.”
The article mentions several predictions he flubbed. He had projected the Las Vegas population to top out at 750,000 or a million. The real estate boom and subsequent 2008 crash, “As far as the spurt in property values here, I thought, hey, we’re just catching up to where we ought to be catching up, to big cities like Phoenix and even Los Angeles,” he said. “The bust and the severity of the bust did surprise me.”
What surprised me is he has been teaching History of Economic Thought. He told the paper, that it’s his favorite class. “It’s covering the whole spectrum of economics,” he said. “I get to reminisce about each of the themes of the economics discipline.” I would guess he would leave out the Austrian school despite having officed down the hall from the modern dean of the Austrian school, Murray Rothbard, along with the current dean of the school, Hans Hoppe.
Until January of 1995, Murray Rothbard taught the History of Thought class. I’ve written before about the experience. I had no idea who Rothbard was and a fellow student told me to avoid Murray, calling him a kook. Professor Malamud, an avid Keynesian, likely didn’t recommend Rothbard either.
The first night of class, Murray hit the door and started talking immediately, something about dumb politicians threatening the evil oil companies that were raising gas prices. From that thought, he just continued right into his History of Economic Thought lecture. He didn’t take roll, or hand out a syllabus. Murray didn’t have time for that; he had centuries of history to cover.
So the 8 or 10 of us in the class furiously took notes trying to keep up. I didn’t know it at the time, but only half of us were taking the class for credit, the other half were just auditing the course, having taken it previously for credit. Murray changed his History of Thought lectures each semester, so students took it as often as it was offered. In the fall of 1990, the course had a financial history emphasis.
Professor Malamud is a nice guy. He attended my thesis defense, but, as I remember, had to leave beofre I finished to teach a class. It’s unlikely he will be honored at an event such as the Mises Institute’’s 35th anniversary which was completely dedicated to Rothbard and where a group off Murray’s former students had a panel reminiscing about him and the effect he had on our lives (unfortunately the audio/video has not been posted by the Institute as of this writing).
Imagine how different the History of Thought class was with Rothbard (his 2 volume “An Austrian Perspective on the History of Economic Thought” was essentially his lectures) as opposed to Malamud’s version.
Natalie Bruzda writes some of the names Malamud was lecturing about when she visited.
Sir William Petty, an English economist who died in 1687, was on one end of the spectrum. John B. Taylor, an economist and professor at Stanford University, was on the other end. His favorite economist, John Maynard Keynes, also appeared on the whiteboard.
Murray never got to Keynes, who he referred to in class as “Maynard” followed by his signature cackle. My guess is Dr. Malamud didn’t spend any time on the Scholastics or the School of Salamanca.
In New York, our panel of Murray’s students remembered Murray’s lecture style. As I told the LMR report, “If students took everything down, lecture notes might start with Aristotle, then veer off to Hillary Clinton, then maybe to the New York City Mayoral race and back to Aristotle.”
I hope Dr, Malamud has a long and healthy retirement. He is 76. No doubt, another Keynesian has been hired to replace him.
Murray left us far too early, but his work lives on, as do our memories.
Not a day goes by when the liberal media don’t telegraph to the world that a “Trumpocracy” is destroying American democracy. Conspicuous by its absence is a pesky fact: Ours was never a country conceived as a democracy.
To arrive at a democracy, we Americans destroyed a republic.
One of the ways in which the republic was destroyed was through the slow sundering of the 10th Amendment to the Constitution. The 10th was meant to guarantee constitutional devolution of power.
“The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.”
The de facto demise of the 10th has resulted in "constitutional" consolidation.
Fair enough, but is that enough? A perceptive Townhall.com reader was having none of it.
In response to “Whodunit? Who ‘Meddled’ With Our American Democracy” (Part 1), the reader upbraided this writer:
“Anyone who quotes the 10th Amendment, but not the 14th Amendment that supplanted it cannot be taken seriously.”
In other words, to advance the erosion of the 10th in explaining who did our republic in, without mentioning the 14th: this was an omission on the writer’s part.
The reader is admirably correct about Incorporation-Doctrine centralization.
Not even conservative constitutional originalists are willing to concede that the 14th Amendment and the attendant Incorporation Doctrine have obliterated the Constitution's federal scheme, as expressed in the once-impregnable 10th Amendment.
What does this mean?
You know the drill but are always surprised anew by it. Voters pass a law under which a plurality wishes to live in a locality. Along comes a U.S. district judge and voids the law, citing a violation of the 14th's Equal Protection Clause.
For example: Voters elect to prohibit local government from sanctioning gay marriage. A U.S. district judge voids voter-approved law for violating the 14th's Equal Protection Clause.
These periodical contretemps around gay marriage, or the legal duty of private property owners to cater these events, are perfectly proper judicial activism. It flows from the 14th Amendment.
If the Bill of Rights was intended to place strict limits on federal power and protect individual and locality from the national government—the 14th Amendment effectively defeated that purpose by placing the power to enforce the Bill of Rights in federal hands, where it was never intended to be.
Put differently, matters previously subject to state jurisdiction have been pulled into the orbit of a judiciary. Yet not even conservative constitutional originalists are willing to cop to this constitutional fait accompli.
The gist of it: Jeffersonian constitutional thought is no longer in the Constitution; its revival unlikely.
A Court System Centralized For another example of the endemic usurpation of The People, rendering the original Constitutional scheme obsolete, take the work of the generic jury. With his description of the relationship between jury and people, American scholar of liberty Lysander Spooner conjures evocative imagery.
A jury is akin to the "body of the people." Trial by jury is the closest thing to a trial by the whole country. Yet courts in the nation’s centralized court system, the Supreme Court included, are in the business of harmonizing law across the nation, rather than allowing communities to live under laws they author, as guaranteed by the 10th Amendment to the Constitution.
States’ Rights All But Obliterated Like juries, states had been entrusted with the power to beat back the federal government and void unconstitutional federal laws.
States' rights are "an essential Americanism,” wrote Old Rightist Frank Chodorov. The Founding Fathers as well as the opponents of the Constitution, the Anti-Federalists, agreed on the principle of divided authority as a safeguard to the rights of the individual.
Duly, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison perfected a certain doctrine in the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions of 1798. "The Virginia Resolutions,” explains historian Thomas E. Woods, Jr., “spoke of the states' rights to 'interpose' between the federal government and the people of the states; the Kentucky Resolutions used the term nullification—the states, they said, could nullify federal laws that they believed to be unconstitutional."
“Jefferson," emphasized Woods, "considered states' rights a much more important and effective safeguard of people's liberties than the 'checks and balances' among the three branches of the federal government."
And for good reason. While judicial review was intended to curb Congress and restrain the Executive, in reality, the judicial, legislative and executive unholy federal trinity has simply colluded, over time, in an alliance that has helped abolish the 10th Amendment.
Founding Faith Expunged And how well has First Amendment jurisprudence served constitutionalists?
Establishment-clause cases are a confusing and capricious legal penumbra. Sometimes displays of the Hebraic Decalogue or manger scene are taken to constitute the establishment of a state religion. Other times not.
This body of law forever teeters on conflating the injunction against the establishment of a state religion with an injunction against the expression of faith—especially discriminating against the founding faith in taxpayer-supported spaces.
The end result has been the expulsion of religion from the public square and the suppression therein of freedom of religion.
On the topic of religious freedom, Jefferson was prolific, too. The Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom was a crowning achievement for which he wished to be remembered, along with the Declaration of Independence and the founding of the University of Virginia.
Jefferson interpreted "Congress shall make no law respecting the establishment of religion, or prohibiting the exercise thereof"—as confirms by David N. Meyer, author of Jefferson's Constitutional Thought—to guarantee both "an absolute free exercise of religion and an absolute prohibition of an establishment of religion."
Yet somehow, the kind of constitutional thought that carries legal sway today prohibits expressions of faith or displays of a civilizing moral code in government-controlled spheres. Given my libertarian view of government’s immoral modus operandi, I find this amusingly apropos. Still, this is not what Jefferson had in mind for early Americans.
Indeed, why would anyone, bar Nancy Pelosi and her party, object to "thou shall not kill" or "thou shall not commit adultery, steal or covet?" The Ten Commandments can hardly be perceived as an instrument for state proselytization.
Nevertheless, the law often takes displays of the Decalogue or the nativity scene on tax-payer funded property as an establishment of a state religion.
"I consider the government of the U.S. as interdicted by the Constitution from intermeddling with religious institutions, their doctrines, discipline, or exercise," Jefferson expatiated.
He then gets to the soul of the subject: "This results not only from the provision that no law shall be made respecting the establishment, or free exercise of religion but also from the Tenth Amendment, which reserves to the states [or to the people] the powers not delegated to the U.S."
So, dear reader, if there’s one thing we know for sure, it’s that the Russians didn’t deep-six our republic of private property rights and radical decentralization—we did.
(The photo below) Friedrich A. Hayek arriving for one of the morning sessions at the second Austrian Economics conference at the University of Hartford in June 1975. The conference was sponsored by the Institute for Humane Studies, with Don Armentano as the conference director.
Toward the end of the week, Hayek was called away for a phone call during one of the sessions. When he returned and the session ended, Hayek said that the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) had tracked him down at the conference, and told him he would not be allowed to leave the country later in the summer before he documented all income he earned while in the United States and had paid all required taxes owed! Friedrich Hayek potential prisoner of the Tax State.
(Originally shared on Facebook.)
Patrick Newman joined the Tom Woods Show yesterday to talk about the Murray Rothbard book he edited on the Progressive Era.
Check out the episode here.
This is a simple video, cheap to produce, and free to post. It is about the fact of its own existence. The talking head is the remarkable investigator James Corbett.
We are witnessing an incomparable transformation of world civilization, and we barely recognize it. We are too busy to recognize it. We are hard-pressed to think through the implications of it for our own lives, let alone the lives of seven and a half-billion other people. But the transformation is taking place. We have gone through it, almost oblivious to the fact that we have been going through it. We almost take it for granted. That was Corbett's point.
I want to make another point. The most important unanswered question that any historian can ask is this one: what made possible, beginning around 1800, compound economic growth per capita of about 2% per annum? Historians rarely ask this question. None of the ones who have attempted to answer it have come up with a plausible answer. Yet that phenomenon has led to the creation of the world that would be completely unrecognizable to anybody born in 1800. This has taken place within the lifetime of three generations. I have come back to this point repeatedly. John Tyler was born in 1790, and he became President in 1841. I have interviewed his grandson, Lyon Tyler. Both Lyon and his brother Harrison are still alive. This is inconceivable.
The 2% per annum per capita real economic growth that has taken place over the last two centuries was imperceptible to the people living through the transformation. Year-by-year, the world got richer, and the only exception was the decade of the 1930's. Yet people did not perceive the transformation. Gadget by gadget, the world was completely changed, but people only noticed the gadgets that applied to their lives. There is more to life than the compounding of gadgets, yet the compounding of gadgets ultimately transformed the world.
Corbett's point applies to the last two decades. Here, breakthroughs were made, based on Moore's law, which have changed our lives. Moore's Law accelerates a lot more than 2% per annum. It accelerates at something close to 50% per annum. Despite this, we have lived through the repercussions since 1965 in the field of silicon technology, and we have adjusted without any problem. We barely notice what is taking place around us. We take it for granted. That's why I thought Corbett's video was impressive. Using digital technology, he made his point in such a way that we understand it. He did it simply by using a piece of digital music. At first, it was not clear what he was getting at. But, by the end of the presentation, it was clear what he was getting at.
To his sense of wonder, I add a sense of gratitude. I am a writer. Writers want to find readers. In the history of mankind, up to 1996, writers had to find either a publisher that would print and distribute their materials, or else they had to become direct response marketers who could seek out an audience through the use of mailing lists. I tried the first approach, and I failed. I tried the second approach, and I succeeded.
Today, as the extraordinary experience of Jordan Peterson indicates, all you have to be is good. Never before in the history of man has the principle outlined in Albert J. Nock's 1936 essay, "Isaiah's Job," been truer: the Remnant will seek you out. To use the words of the voice that spoke to Kevin Costner, if you build it, they will come. Warning: if it's not any good, they won't stay long unless they are crackpots. Of course, there is always a large number of crackpots. You may get an audience, but they won't be worth recruiting.
We now are being pressured to restructure our lives. We do it voluntarily. People who use Facebook and social media, which I do not, have had to re-budget time in their lives. The way we communicate has changed. We are told that the way people get elected has changed. There is nothing that the critics can do about it. That really is the bottom line. All the handwringing about the supposed Russian involvement in American politics is essentially irrelevant. The two main candidates used the system to the hilt. Trump used it cheaper. He won. The candidates will always use the best tools available.
There is nothing anybody can do about it that is significant. The establishment doesn't like it. The people who were the pioneers of the transformation want to be in the establishment. More or less, they have been adopted by the establishment. But our lives are changing in a completely un-predictable way. The geniuses who created Facebook, Amazon, and all the other digit-based institutions have been financially successful, and they have solved little problems to make their empires grow. But they have no control over the direction in which history is moving, because, visibly, there are so many new directions in which it may be moving. So many different groups use Facebook that there is no way of knowing which group is going to be successful. Everybody has some eschatology. Everybody has some theory of the future. But, with respect to specific predictions about how old movements are going to use specific new technologies, nobody has a clue.
Let me give a recent example. Google, renamed Alphabet, has a subsidiary: Waymo. Waymo has developed the new technology of self-driving cars. I have thought myself radical in saying that I think self-driving cars are going to be widespread in 2025. Little did I know. Waymo has just ordered 20,000 self-driving Jaguars, which will be delivered between now and the end of 2020.
My wife understands their strategy. She says they're going to appeal to rich people whose time is valuable. Waymo thinks that their cars will be driving a million trips a day in 2020. If this turns out to be true, there will be tremendous pressure on everybody else whose time is valuable to either use Waymo or else buy self-driving cars of their own. Other companies, such as Uber and Lyft, are going to have to compete by using self-driving cars.
Let's talk politics. If the rich people find that self-driving cars save them money, then they are going to make certain that politicians vote for policies that will enable the spread of self-driving cars. That's another reason why Waymo is buying Jaguars. Anyway, that's my theory.
For articles on this, go here, here, and especially here.
New York City cabbies are going to be out of business in 48 months. They see what is coming. They are desperate for politicians to save them. It will not work. Some have begun committing suicide.
This protest is futile. Moore's law is relentless. Self-driving cabs are coming. We must adjust. Despair is futile. Politics is futile. An unplanned, widespread, international process of innovation is irreversible, short of a total breakdown of world civilization. This is unlikely.
Hayek called this the spontaneous order. The free market is replacing politics in the realm of economic planning. The state is on the defensive.
The central planners are holding up signs: "Stop!" The process will not stop. They will be run over.
It is a time for gratitude, not just wonder.
It's amazing what you can find in the Mises digital archives.
Here is a lecture by Ludwig von Mises on Socialism that he gave at the University of Houston. In the audience was a doctor from Lake Jackson, TX. After listening to this talk, he decided to run for Congress.
This was the only time Ron Paul met Mises, as he notes in his book Mises and Austrian Economics: A Personal View.
Because of my interest in individual liberty and the free market, I became closely associated over the years with friends and students of Mises, those who knew the greatness of Mises from a long-term personal friendship with him. My contact, however, was always through his writings, except on one occasion. In 1971, during a busy day in my medical office, I took a long lunch to drive 60 miles to the University of Houston to hear one of the last formal lectures Mises gave—this one on socialism. Although 90 at the time, he was most impressive, and his presentation inspired me to more study of Austrian economics.
Between Mises's Austrian accent and the recording quality of the 70s, it's not the easiest to understand. But still, a very neat piece of history.
Today, Chris Calton kicked-off the third season of his Historical Controversies podcast, which will recount the controversial history of the American Civil War.
The complete series (including Seasons 1 and 2) is available on iTunes, YouTube, Soundcloud, Google Play, Stitcher, Mises.org, and via RSS feed.
If you enjoy the podcast, please leave a positive rating and review.
In every field, there are many unexplored or partially explored issues that may turn out to be important. But, in all likelihood, they are dead ends.
I compare this pursuit to an inventor who has an idea that a particular line of inquiry will lead to a major discovery. He may be correct, but he probably is incorrect. Most inventors are part-time inventors. They don't do it for a living. They may do it for the sheer joy of the pursuit. They may hope to make a lot of money. They may hope to change people's lives. There are many motivations. But the reality is this: most people who begin the pursuit of some great breakthrough fail. We read about the ones who did not fail, but there are plenty of stories of people who made the breakthrough, and who never made any money off of it. The man who got to the patent office two hours after Alexander Graham Bell did is long forgotten. He did not make any money.
I think it is generally futile to become a full-time historian. There are too few jobs. You have to spend your life teaching not very bright students. They take the course probably because you have a reputation of giving easy grades. I was recently told this about Ralph Raico, who was an extraordinary historian, but who, unfortunately (for me, anyway), wrote very little. He described his career as follows: "I would begin teaching a group of students who could not find Portugal on a map. At the end of my course, they had never heard of Portugal."
I encourage people to become part-time historians. There are tens of thousands of Americans who are part-time historians of the Civil War. They are remarkably well-informed. Unfortunately, they rarely write. But, with free website software, there is now no legitimate reason why they should not publish book reviews, reviews of articles, and specialize in some area of the Civil War. This is equally true of regional or local historical investigations. There is lots of work to be done.
PETROGLYPHS
In the field of historical studies, part-time explorers and translators of petroglyphs often find very useful items. These items point to the fact that conventional historiography of pre-Columbus America is incorrect. But these studies virtually never get accepted by academic historians. What they find is never reported in any textbook. One such organization is the Epigraphic Society. It publishes a regular journal. The journal is never quoted in academic circles. These people have been doing this for decades.
Are these amateur explorers wasting their lives? I don't think so. They are making legitimate discoveries. But as far as influencing the academic guild, their efforts really are wasted. They have to decide whether it is worth it to them personally to make a unique discovery, even though the discovery will never be incorporated into the narrative of pre-Columbus America.
Yes, there's always the possibility that there will be a breakthrough that somehow does get picked up by academic historians, but the odds against this are astronomical.
I would tell somebody who is interested in petroglyphs that it's a good hobby, but it is only a hobby. To have any hope beyond this is psychologically self-defeating. The person is going to be disappointed, and this may lead to the person abandoning his hobby. But his hobby is good for him, and it is good for a handful of people who want to make sense of pre-Columbus America.
Here's an example of what I'm talking about. It's a lesson I produced for the Ron Paul Curriculum.
CONSPIRACY HISTORY
Then there are the conspiracy historians. Here, there are real psychological pitfalls. Conspiracy historians really do think that there's a possibility that they will be able to penetrate the thinking of the masses of Americans. They think they're going to do an end-run around the academic guild. They also imagine that the masses of Americans are interested in history, which except for Civil War history and perhaps some other military histories, is a delusion. There is always room for another book on Lincoln, as long as the book is not critical of Lincoln. Of the thousands of books on Lincoln, only a handful are critical, and their arguments rarely make it into the textbooks. When an idea does make it into a textbook, such as Lincoln's obvious infringements on due process of law regarding the publication of antiwar opinions, the historians shrug it off or apologize for it.
The same is true for Woodrow Wilson in his efforts to get the nation into World War I, and Franklin Roosevelt's similar machinations to get the nation into World War II. Initially, all such arguments regarding Roosevelt were dismissed as being Republican crackpot theories. Then, in the 1970's, a handful of historians began to conclude that the original critics of Roosevelt were correct. But then the authors said that Roosevelt was justified. The obvious example here is Robert Stinnett, who has written the most effective book on Pearl Harbor, Day of Deceit (2000), who apologizes for Roosevelt's deliberate deceptions at the beginning of the book. On the first page of the Preface, he speaks sympathetically. "I understood the agonizing dilemma faced by President Roosevelt. He was forced to find circuitous means to persuade an isolationist America to join in the fight for freedom. He knew this would cost lives. How many, he could not have known." This apology did Stinnett no good in academia. The academic guild dismissed his book as one more apology for isolationism, circa 1941. The book gained no traction. Its thesis is presented in no college or high school textbook on American history.
Then there are the part-time conspiracy historians. These people will read one or two books on conspiratorial movements in American history. They may read a few books on conspiracies in Europe, beginning with the French Revolution. Such conspiracies existed. The great book on this is James Billington's magnificent Fire in the Minds of Men: Origins of the Revolutionary Faith. You cannot understand European history of the 19th century if you are not familiar with the book, and more than familiar: you have read it two or three times, and you remember many of the details. The book is literally indispensable. It was published in 1981. That was the last we heard from Billington. He took Reagan's offer to appoint him the Librarian of Congress in 1987, and he kept the job for the next 28 years. He never wrote another book. He got sidetracked. We are worse off for it.
Read the full article.
We've known for a while now that Donald Trump is not a fan of Jeff Bezos or Amazon. Tweets from the President confirmed prior reports that he takes particular exception to the rates the US Post Office charges Amazon for their delivery services, as well as voicing your standard protectionist concerns about how delivery services threaten brick and mortar businesses.
Of course some speculate that Trump's particular fixation with Amazon may have something to do with another branch of the Bezopus - the Washington Post.
The Post has gained the reputation as one of the Trump Administration's most frequent critics, and added “Democracy Dies in Darkness" underneath its masthead in response to the President's attacks on the media. New York Magazine has helpfully compiled a list of some of Trump's attacks the paper, including a few barbed tweets.
While the idea of public policy being waged as a form of revenge is rightfully terrifying, it's certainly not new.
At last weekend's Austrian Economics Research Conference, Dr. Patrick Newman presented a paper on the origins of the Sherman Antitrust Act contending that the origins and lobbying for the legislation in part stemmed from a personal grudge between Ohio Sen John Sherman and Michigan Governor Russell Alger. Sherman believed Alger was to blame for him failing to become the Republican nominee in 1888, and was determined to make sure Alger paid the price for it. The paper was inspired by Newman's work as the editor of the recently published Rothbard book on the Progressive Era.
He recently joined the Tom Woods Show to talk about the paper. It's a fascinating conversation, and a worthwhile anecdote the next time a friend complains about how bad modern politics is these days (in reality, it was never really good to begin with.)
An audio version of this article is available here.
The spectacle of anti-gun marches this past weekend, at times both sinister and maudlin, provides yet another example that “democracy” does not yield some kind of livable compromise on any given issue. Instead it creates division and distrust, fed by a media environment that encourages using children as props, promotes emotion over reason, and confuses motion with action.
What democracy does yield beyond a doubt is the incremental but relentless expansion of state power in society, as seen throughout the 20th century in America. Incrementalism, an inescapable feature of statism, is scarcely acknowledged by gun control advocates and gun rights advocates alike. But it forms the backdrop for everything political in our unfortunately hyper-politicized society.
Surely we understand the entire 20th century in America as a triumph of sweeping progressive incrementalism. Central banking, taxes on income, retirement insurance schemes, public schools, welfare programs, housing programs, food stamps—all of these were once radically progressive ideas that over time became fully integrated into the American landscape, accepted by even the most reactionary conservatives.
Take the constitutionally-suspect income tax, made possible by ratification of the 16th Amendment in 1913. It was first sold to the public as a scheme to soak the rich, and indeed for the first few decades only about 5% of the population was even required to file an income tax return. The tax rate on incomes up to $20,000 (several hundred thousand of today’s dollars) was only 1%, and was only 7% on vast incomes above $500,000 (many millions today).
Fast forward to today, and even the lowliest minimum wage earner files a basic 1040 form. The highest marginal income tax rates approach 40%, and have been far higher in previous decades. More importantly, the Internal Revenue rules contain thousands of pages of minute regulations, creating a compliance and privacy nightmare for decidedly non-rich average Americans.
So a century after the radical new idea of taxing income became accepted, individual income taxes now account for a majority of federal revenue. April 15th is now a permanent part of the American landscape, something unimaginable in 1913. That’s how incrementalism works.
A similar story can be told about the Social Security system. Old age pensions were needed to keep elderly widows from being thrown into the street, or so Americans were told in 1935. The Great Depression had put millions out of work, average life expectancy was less than 65, and there were dozens of workers paying into the system for every beneficiary. And until 1950, the (employee portion) Social Security withholding tax rate was only 1%.
Who could object to such a humane and viable system? A lousy 1% of one’s paycheck to prevent the specter of elderly people living in the streets?
Today, Social Security and its Medicare cousin—another incremental advance— consume 15% of employee paychecks, average life expectancy in America is 78, fewer than three workers fund each recipient, and the unfunded future shortfall in entitlements may reach $200 trillion.
This is incrementalism writ large.
As a bonus, your Social Security number is now a unique identifier that helps the IRS and other government agencies, insurance companies, landlords, bank and credit providers, rating agencies, a host of websites and social media platforms, and happy identity thieves track your every move. So much for FDR’s promise that only you and the Social Security Administration would ever know your private number.
Even social and cultural issues, which ought to evolve completely outside of politics, become matters of incremental statism. Thus the Stonewall era, marked by justified concerns over police beatings of gay men and violent enforcement of unjust sodomy laws, morphed into something quite different. Today the LGBT movement pushes America inexorably toward legal and legislative battles concerning a host of issues, from hiring laws to required gender pronouns to religious exemptions to hate speech to what marriage ceremonies clergy must perform. In other words, issues currently being fought over in Europe, the UK, and Canada soon will be fought over in the US. And they won’t be fought on cultural fronts, by well-intentioned people seeking compromise and understanding, but in the statist arenas of legislatures and courts.
Democracy is nothing more than the process of politically vanquishing minority viewpoints. We can sugarcoat it, but our American version of winner-take-all, top-down, federalize-everything governance is not somehow ennobled by voting or debate. It manifests itself in state power, not some mythical version of halfway compromises whereby neither side (or sides) gets everything it wants. And where that power cannot be wielded abruptly, for practical, political, or ideological reasons, it is wielded incrementally.
Thus every call for gun registries, background checks, mental health screening, prohibitions on certain weapons, magazines, or ammunition, etc. must be viewed through this incremental lens. The question is not whether such proposals represent today’s common sense, or whether anyone “needs” an AR-15. The question is what the laws we enact today might lead to tomorrow.
Because our well-intentioned great-grandparents didn’t mean to saddle anyone with trillions of dollars in unfunded liabilities when they let Congress pass the Social Security Act of 1935, but that’s exactly what they did.
So when gun control advocates insist they simply want commonsense measures imposed, or that “nobody wants to take your guns,” the answer for many Americans is clear: we don’t believe you.
George Orwell's wonderful essay Politics and the English Language reads as true today as it must have in 1946, just a few years before smoking and tuberculosis would cut short his life.
His exhortations against "meaningless words," in particular, sound fresh today:
Many political words are similarly abused. The word fascism now no meaning except in so far as it signifies ‘something not desirable’. The words democracy, socialism, freedom, patriotic, realistic, justice have each of them several different meanings which cannot be reconciled with one another. In the case of a word like democracy, not only is there no agreed definition, but the attempt to make one is resisted from all sides. It is almost universally felt that when we call a country democratic we are praising it: consequently the defenders of every kind of regime claim that it is a democracy, and fear that they might have to stop using that word if it were tied down to any one meaning. Words of this kind are often used in a consciously dishonest way. That is, the person who uses them has his own private definition, but allows his hearer to think he means something quite different.
Words like social justice, bigot, xenophobe, racist, fascist, misogynist, socialist, Dreamer, snowflake, liberal, conservative, and democracy are the meaningless words of our day. Nobody knows what they mean anymore. They are used as bullets in a form of verbal warfare, not as honest descriptions. In fact they are used quite dishonestly, with the “intent to deceive” as Orwell put it. In other words, they are used to serve the speaker’s or writer’s agenda rather than to create understanding. Political jargon is abused until it loses all value, either to describe, praise, or insult.
It's ironic that the great anti-authoritarian Orwell remained an ardent socialist, even after witnessing what Stalin brought to the former USSR. And of course 1984 is thought to be Orwell's metaphor for life under Stalin. But at least one biographer contends that Orwell didn’t see the USSR as truly socialist despite its name, and maybe that’s fair enough: consider that nobody considers the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea to be democratic. But one wonders how he missed the association between collectivism and murder, between central planning and the authoritarian hellscape it produced following the Russian revolution.
In Orwell's words, "a real Socialist is one who wishes – not merely conceives it as desirable, but actively wishes – to see tyranny overthrown." He recognized Stalin as a tyrant, but failed to draw the connection between the system and its inevitable rulers.
Today on The Tom Woods Show, Chris Calton joined Tom to discuss one of the most fascinating characters in American history, Lysander Spooner.
Chris and Tom look at how Spooner evolved as a thinker, and in particular his view on the Constitution. They also talk about the podcast Historical Controversies and the war on drugs.
Joe Salerno joined The Tom Woods Show this week to discuss the works of F.A. Hayek and why he has been a source of controversy within some libertarian circles.
One of the topics discussed is the debate over dehomogenizing the work of Hayek and his mentor Ludwig von Mises on the impracticality of socialism. Since this is the 30th anniversary of this debate, we will have a panel dedicated to it at this year's AERC.
In 2015, the federal government (namely, the FCC) implemented new monopolistic regulations which it called "net neutrality." In 2017, the FCC then repealed some of these regulations. In the weeks and months preceding the repeal, various billionaires and other leftists hysterically predicted that the end of net neutrality would usher in a dystopia in which only the super rich could access the internet.
What they were really opposing, of course, was a return to the internet's status quo of 2015. And we all know what a living nighmare that was!
In reality, of course, internet access has grown continually over the past two decades in the absence of net neutrality, and has now become commonplace. Like most technologies, public access to this "luxury" has only grown over time.
This is how markets work, as Ludwig von Mises pointed out:
Thirty-five years ago there were no automobiles; twenty years ago the possession of such a vehicle was the sign of a particularly luxurious mode of living; today in the United States even the worker has his Ford. This is the course of economic history. The luxury of today is the necessity of tomorrow. Every advance first comes into being as the luxury of a few rich people, only to become, after a time, the indispensable necessity taken for granted by everyone. Luxury consumption provides industry with the stimulus to discover and introduce new, things. It is one of the dynamic factors in our economy. To it we owe the progressive innovations by which the standard of living of all strata of the population has been gradually raised.
In a recent column for Forbes, John Tamny takes note of this reality, examining how the left's alarmism over net neutrality has no basis in the actual experience of the marketplace:
In 2006 Ford Motor Company discontinued its Ford Taurus. At the time Saturday Night Live’s comedy writers described the Taurus (this is a slight paraphrase) as “the car for people who’ve given up." Eventually Ford brought back the automobile associated with average. Interesting there is that a $31,000 2018 Taurus has 4-wheel ABS, dual front side mounted airbags, front and rear head airbags, dusk-sensing headlights, a blind spot warning accident avoidance system, rear parking sensors and a rear-backup camera (to avoid dings), and a heated steering wheel. Electric seats are a given.
Back in 2006, only the higher-end suites at the Four Seasons in Austin, TX (the city's most luxurious hotel) had flat-screen televisions. The regular rooms still had the box-shaped version. But by 2015 flat-screen tvs were standard not just in rooms at the Four Seasons, but also in most any Motel 6.
Air travel? Those rich enough to fly used to travel with flip flops, but only in their bags. They dressed up for what was a rare luxury. Nowadays people walk on to planes in flip flops, shorts, tank tops, and other garments associated with highly casual dress. Flying is what we all do now.
All of this is a reminder of what readers of this column know well: “luxury” is an ephemeral concept. Today’s obscure bauble of the superrich is tomorrow’s common good. In a growing economy prices are falling all the time. They are because investment is the driver of growth, and investment is all about producing more for less.
What's also crucial when it comes to falling prices is the “venture buyer.” And while the truth about “venture buyers” may cause the heads of the overly sensitive to explode, venture buyers are rich. Often wildly rich. So rich that they can spend enormous sums on goods and services that aren’t broadly used, or understood. These buyers are crucial to progress because they can uniquely test the products put on the market by entrepreneurs and businesses. If they prove useful, great. If they’re duds, the rich are out substantial sums. That’s ok. Figure that they’re superrich.
Still, the goods and services deemed worthy by venture buyers act as a signal to the entrepreneurs and businesses, and the signal is clear: the innovators capable of mass-producing what superrich venture buyers uniquely enjoy will similarly become superrich themselves. There. It’s been said. Great wealth, the kind of wealth that causes inequality to soar, is frequently a function of entrepreneurs democratizing access to the goods and services formerly enjoyed by the rich alone.
There is no reason whatsoever to believe that access to the internet is going to diminish in the absence of a 2-year-old regulation that has been recently repealed. Experience suggests exactly the opposite.
Inspired by the recent interest in the film Darkest Hour and Netflix's The Crown, our friend C Jay Engel at Austrolibertarian was inspired to share the late great Ralph Raico's thoughts on Winston Churchill.
From his essay Rethinking Churchill:
When, in a very few years, the pundits start to pontificate on the great question: “Who was the Man of the Century?” there is little doubt that they will reach virtually instant consensus. Inevitably, the answer will be: Winston Churchill. Indeed, Professor Harry Jaffa has already informed us that Churchill was not only the Man of the Twentieth Century, but the Man of Many Centuries.
In a way, Churchill as Man of the Century will be appropriate. This has been the century of the State — of the rise and hypertrophic growth of the welfare-warfare state — and Churchill was from first to last a Man of the State, of the welfare state and of the warfare state. War, of course, was his lifelong passion; and, as an admiring historian has written: “Among his other claims to fame, Winston Churchill ranks as one of the founders of the welfare state.” Thus, while Churchill never had a principle he did not in the end betray, this does not mean that there was no slant to his actions, no systematic bias. There was, and that bias was towards lowering the barriers to state power.
[…]
Yet, in truth, Churchill never cared a great deal about domestic affairs, even welfarism, except as a means of attaining and keeping office. What he loved was power, and the opportunities power provided to live a life of drama and struggle and endless war.
There is a way of looking at Winston Churchill that is very tempting: that he was a deeply flawed creature, who was summoned at a critical moment to do battle with a uniquely appalling evil, and whose very flaws contributed to a glorious victory — in a way, like Merlin, in C.S. Lewis’s great Christian novel, That Hideous Strength. Such a judgment would, I believe, be superficial. A candid examination of his career, I suggest, yields a different conclusion: that, when all is said and done, Winston Churchill was a Man of Blood and a politico without principle, whose apotheosis serves to corrupt every standard of honesty and morality in politics and history.
To understand the modern state, you must understand the Progressive Era. Thanks to the generosity of Mr. Tyler Folger, Murray Rothbard's definitive book on the Progressives is now available as a free audiobook.
The audio files are currently available on iTunes, Google Play, Soundcloud, and Mises.org.
The Bill of Rights was finally ratified on December 15, 1791. Most of the new Constitution of 1787 was devoted to raising taxes, centralizing government, and destroying self-rule in the independent states.
The Bill of Rights, however, was a bright spot in an otherwise unhelpful and unnecessary document.
From 2015's article "The Bill of Rights: The Only Good Part of the Constitution":
Patrick Henry and the Anti-Federalists pointed out — correctly — that the US already had proven it had sufficient means to deal with European powers, and that in the bloody history of states, the true threat to freedom lay not in there being too much freedom, as the Federalists claimed, but in the overweening power of centralized states.Virtually no one believed that a new constitution was necessary to secure what they had earlier called their "English Liberties," including freedom of speech, a right to due process, jury trials, and more. Those freedoms were already assumed to be assured to all non-slaves. Those freedoms had been won in the Revolution. The people didn't need a more powerful Congress to protect them. If their freedoms were threatened, the people could rely on highly-democratic (for the time) state legislatures and a decentralized militia system.But, in the end, the Federalists won out after they promised to adopt a Bill of Rights to limit the power of Congress. As we know, though, the Bill of Rights began to break down immediately, and it was only a matter of time until the Alien and Sedition Acts, Jefferson's embargo, and other even worse crimes perpetrated on the states and the people.It was the Constitution of 1787, after all, that strengthened the institution of slavery, set the stage for the fugitive slave acts, and made provision for the criminal prosecution of those who attempted to help set escaped slaves free.That's what sort of "pro-freedom" document the Constitution was and is.What the Constitutions Should Have Said The Bill of Rights would never have been necessary, however, if so much power had not been granted to the central government by the constitution of 1787 in the first placeIndeed, the earlier constitution of 1777 (the so-called Articles of Confederation) had itself been too detailed and powerful.After all, the whole idea of a national constitution had always been sold on really just two premises: 1) It would assist in national defense and 2) it would facilitate trade among the member states.In other words, it should never have been anything more than a customs union and a mutual defense agreement.So, in the service of sound political science, I have composed a new constitution for us:
Article 1. The United States shall meet every two years in Congress assembled to negotiate terms for the maintenance of a union of independent states. There shall be no duties or taxes imposed on trade among the states or the people therein. The states, in Congress assembled shall set the standards for membership in the United States and provide provision for member withdrawal and the conditions for receiving the benefits of mutual defense as a member of the Union.The End. Nothing more is necessary or prudent. Independent states enter into mutual defense agreements quite frequently, without surrendering their independence, and trade agreements are a quite mundane affair in the history of states.Any appeal to "patriotism" or lofty ideas of "America" or the fanciful notion that people in Arizona are the countrymen of people in New York has no backing in the day to day realities of living. Never in history was there a group of 320 million people spread across four million square miles who were part of the same community and who shared the same experiences, interests, or even the same economic ties.In reality, the people of Colorado, for example, have more in common with the people of Saskatchewan — in terms of economic interests, culture, and history — than with the people of Georgia or Delaware of Pennsylvania. People only believe the residents of the US states make up "one people" because they were told as much by their third grade teachers. Actual experience tells us otherwise.Those who demanded the Bill of Rights had attempted to preserve this idea of government on a human scale: government that reflects the realities of daily life, human relationships, and the necessity of free commerce — rather than the ideological fantasies of nation builders. Even to this day, the idea that the minutiae of life and commerce should be governed by a group of millionaires sitting in luxury 2,000 miles away is repugnant to the the reasonable mind. In preventing this, the Bill of Rights has largely failed, although things most certainly could have been worse.
The Summer 2017 issue of the QJAE is now online. (Here are the full archives.)
Volume 20, no. 2 (Summer 2017)
Articles:
Deflation and Economic Growth: The Great Depression as the Great Outlier by Pavel Ryska
The Non-Price Effects of Monetary Inflation by Arkadiusz Sieroń
Interest and the Length of Production: A Reply by Mateusz Machaj
Value Investing's Compatibility with Austrian Economics — Truth or Myth?: A Rejoinder by Chris Leithner
Reviews:
Justice in the Marketplace in Early Modern Spain: Saravia, Villalón, and the Religious Origins of Economic Analysisby Michael Thomas D’Emic. Reviewed by Eric Clifford Graf
The Man Who Knew: The Life and Times of Alan Greenspan by Sebastian Mallaby. Reviewed by David Gordon
The International Monetary System and the Theory of Monetary Systems by Pascal Salin. Reviewed by Carmen Elena Dorobăț
Anyone who claims there's too much democracy in the United States needs to keep in mind that American law and policy is ultimately decided by five millionaires at the Supreme Court.
This week, we're being reminded that the Supreme Court of the United States is hearing arguments in the case of a small-time baker who refused to bake a cake for a gay wedding. This, apparently, is a matter of such importance that it requires the intervention of the federal government and its court system to decide for whom a tiny small business shall be forced to bake desserts. In other words, the court's majority of five people will decide for 320 million people what is mandatory for anyone who wants to open a small business in the United States.
The fact that Americans regard this sort of thing as perfectly natural and legitimate illustrates just how thoroughly Americans have abandoned all notions of self government and any opposition to rule from distant, powerful elites.
Opponents of Donald Trump may be wringing their hands about the rise of populism, but the public's continued deference to the Supreme Court illustrates quite well that populism in the United States, far from growing out of control, is quite timid and of no threat to anyone currently in power.
In the discussion of the Court's decision to hear the case, we're reminded of two important issues:
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The Supreme Court's ability to decide the Constitutionality of every law in the United States — from local ordinances to federal statutes — is based on a fanciful myth.
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The American legal concept of "public accommodation" essentially abolishes property rights. The proper remedy is to restore property rights — and to steer clear of endless and pointless debates about religious freedom or freedom of speech.
On the first point, see:
"The Mythology of the Supreme Court" by Ryan McMaken - A discussion of how the Supreme Court jealously protects its political power and encourages an aura of manufactured majesty with measures such as prohibiting television cameras in its chambers.
"Abolish the Supreme Court" by Ryan McMaken — in the wake of the death of Justice Scalia, we examined how appointments to the court have always been political appointments, and often have been done for purposes of political payback and pandering to certain special interests. Judges are not, and never have been, lofty legal scholars who steer clear of partisan politics.
"Scalia's Fate" by Jeff Deist: Deist reminds of of several important points about the Court:
Culture wars should not be legal wars. As Ron Paul explained time and again during his years in Congress, the public remains deeply misinformed about several key points:
The concept of judicial review is a fabrication by the Court, with no basis in Article III. Constitutional jurisprudence is not constitutional law.The Supreme Court is supreme only over lower federal courts: it is not supreme over other branches of government.Congress plainly has constitutional authority to define and restrict the jurisdiction of federal courts.And on the matter of public accommodation, we've taken a look at the several ways that micromanaging the actions — and even the imagined intent — of small business owners has long been an especially pointed assault on private property orchestrated by the Courts and Congress.
"The Trouble with Public Accommodation" by Ryan McMaken - if we're worried about the availability of resources for disfavored minority groups, the answer lies in more freedom, not less.
"'Discrimination' Isn't About Religion, It's About Private Property" by Ryan McMaken - framing a baker's of photographers as a matter of "religious freedom" ignores the fact the issue is really just about property rights.
As we've noted at mises.org many times, the amount of land owned by the federal government in Western states is enormous. Today, the feds control 640 million acres (not counting the far larger federally-owned areas of coastal sea floor). And in most Western states, the Federal government owns more than a third of all the land. In the case of Utah, the federal government owns 65 percent.
And, the Federal government is likely to continue owning at least 65 percent of the land in Utah, in spite of a recent decision by the Trump administration to shrink two National Monuments created by the Obama administration in its final months.
In an article titled "Ruled by DC: Get the Feds Out of Western Lands," I looked at the two new monuments:
In the final days of his administration, President Obama has decided that with the stroke of pen, he shall further consolidate direct federal control over lands within Western states. Specifically, Obama created the Bear Ears National Monument and the Gold Butte National Monument in Utah and Nevada, respectively. The Obama Administration claims that Obama's unilateral edict was necessary because Congress had not passed any legislation on the matter.
Indeed, the Obama-appointed Interior Secretary stated that "protecting the area using legislation would have been preferable" but that in the absence of legislation, it was necessary to simply declare the lands to be National Monuments.
Today, the Trump administration announced that it will take a different approach:
President Donald Trump said Monday that he’ll shrink two national monuments in Utah that contain stunning red-sandstone vistas, historic relics and energy resources, arguing his predecessor overstepped in protecting the land...
“Some people think that the natural resources of Utah should be controlled by a small handful of very distant bureaucrats located in Washington,” Trump said. “They’re wrong. The families and communities of Utah know and love this land the best, and you know the best how to take care of your land.”
If one takes a look at the media reports on this matter, one might be left with the impression that the land is ceasing to be federal land — which is not happening.
There is no indication that the land is being "privatized" in any way. Instead, it appears much of the land would simply revert to its old status, which was as federal land administered by by Bureau of Land Management or the Forest Service.
Indeed, this article by Jason Chaffetz confirms this:
In the case of Bears Ears National Monument, all of that land was already federal land mostly managed for conservation use. With President Obama’s monument designation, the maintenance fell to the already-strapped National Park Service. Many of these lands were once managed successfully by other agencies – like the Bureau of Land Management and U.S. Forest Service – and can be again.
In spite of the fact that these "public" (i.e., government-owned) lands look to continue to be public lands, one observer claimed the move is: "the largest attack on parks and public lands in our nation’s history."
Now, it may be that local politicians want to privatize the land. For that to happen, two things would need to happen first:
The land would need to be handed over the state or local governments.The state and local governments would then have to privatize the lands — often over the objections of local voters. OR, the Federal government could sell off land directly (The Trump order doesn't do this.)But let's say the first condition actually happens, and millions of acres of federal lands are handed over to the Utah government. Well, that's obviously not privatization.
But even if the State of Utah controlled the land, it would still have to deal with what would be predictable opposition from local residents. This would include sportsmen and local merchants — people who are hardly lefty tree-huggers.
Chaffetz himself got a taste of this when he pushed legislation de-federalizing 3 million acres (out of 640 million acres) of federal land. It didn't go over well with hunters, to say the least. But local also know that local wilderness lands can be a cash cow for the local tourist industry.
In other words, de-federalization of land is a long way from privatization of land.
But, for everyone outside of Utah, this should be none of our business. If federal lands become Utah lands — as should be the case for all federal lands inside the boundaries of any US state — then it becomes a local matter for people in Utah.
And out West, most voters love their public lands.
There's one caveat: we've heard a lot about how various groups from Indian tribes have supported the designation of the two monuments because they are an important "cultural landscape."
But here's the thing: either these lands are Indian lands or they are not. If they are Indian lands, then the proper thing to do is make them tribal lands, and not federal lands. (Tribal lands are important, and there should be more of them.)
But, if they are not really tribal lands, then their administration needs to be state or local or private. After all, ownership of large tracts of land is just another "power" the US government invented for itself.
For more, see:
Why Indian-Tribe Sovereignty Is ImportantHow The Feds Got All That Western Land (and Why It's a Problem)Oregon and the Problem of Federal LandsCan the States Seize Control of Federal Lands?
The writer known as Bionic Mosquito has helpfully brought to our attention some of the good stuff offered by Murray Rothbard in his articles for Libertarian Forum. Specifically, Mosquito points to Rothbard's 1969 article promoting the mayoral candidacy of Norman Mailer. Rothbard writes:
The Mailer platform stems from one brilliantly penetrating overriding plank: the absolute decentralization of the swollen New York City bureaucracy into dozens of constituent neighborhood villages.
Mosquito notes that Rothbard would be unloved among some modern libertarians who strongly oppose secession by bits and pieces — especially by individual secession. You see, these libertarians claim that secession is illegitimate if a group of people decide to do it by referendum. Presumably, if a single person opposes the proposed secession by referendum, then it becomes a crime against humanity. Oh sure, these libertarians claim they like secession in the form of "individual secession." This option, of course, exists totally outside reality, as Mosquito notes:
So…since libertarians cannot support secession by referendum, we are left with convincing seven billion people of the value of political, individual anarchy. They will all just opt out at the same moment – no pushback from the state or even their neighbors. All of them, simultaneously, having this “aha” moment.
Sounds like a great strategy.
This, of course, is why Rothbard supported all sorts of localized secession movements. Mosquito continues with his look at Rothbard's article on Mailer:
Rothbard is not waiting for the big bang – seven billion people simultaneously seeing the light:
Each neighborhood will then be running its own affairs, on all matters, taxation, education, police, welfare, etc.
As opposed to the idea that there is something un-libertarian about people living next to each other and sharing some desires in common for the neighborhood. In any case, the smaller and more local the political unit, the more control each constituent has and the more that those in government will be known individually – in person, face-to-face.
Rothbard recognizes that neighborhoods will separate into common groupings; he is not shy about discussing black and white. He recognizes that the idea of “diversity” is an idea formed to bring conflict; instead, he offers:
…in the Mailer plan, black and white could at long last live peacefully side-by-side, with each group and each self-constituted neighborhood running its own affairs.
Whites and blacks would be independent equals “rather than as rulers of one over the other….”
One of Mailer’s key proposals is that New York City secede from New York State and form a separate 51st State….
That the seceding New York City would likely be far more socialist than the rest of the state didn’t bother Rothbard one bit, it seems – decentralization was the key, the non-aggression principle put into practice. Also, keep in mind: Mailer ran as a democrat. Imagine that: a democrat for secession and political segregation.
Rothbard goes on to support his effort at New York secession by noting that the city has more then enough wealth to support itself as an independent entity. In the past I've claimed that large cities ought to become their own states, and noted the states have more than enough population and wealth to do so.
Moreover, Rothbard in the article makes the excellent point that if the federal government weren't siphoning off so much of New York City's wealth, the taxpayers there would have immense resources to address all the city's needs:
Another superb part of Mailer's libertarian vision is his reply about where the New York City government would raise funds; he points out that citizens of New York City pay approximately $22 billion in income taxes to the federal government, and that New Yorkers only receive back about $6 billion from federal coffers. Hence, if New Yorkers kept that $22 billion in their own hands . . . That way lies secession indeed!'
Those are 1969 numbers, but as I've noted in a similar context — in my "Decentralize the Welfare State" article — states like New York ought to be allowed to decentralize tax collections. That is, if we can't eliminate taxation, at least the wealth produced by New Yorkers — or whatever state you like — ought to at least stay in New York where the people who paid the tax bills actually live.
All of these changes are baby steps toward real decentralization that provides small amounts of greater choice to taxpayers, and more control over their lives by localizing political power.
As always, we're hear about how we should really be supporting secession for "7 billion people." That's fine. But as Mosquito notes:
My responses to a couple of the anti-secessionist libertarians can be found here and here. The very short version: we will never get from something like 200 political jurisdictions to 2,000 or 2 billion or 7 billion until we get to 201 first. Support secession, then the next one and then the next one. Do this a few dozen times and we might be getting somewhere.
Thanks in part to Trump's bombastic and unpredictable style — but more likely due to his lack of friends in Washington — members of Congress have suddenly realized that maybe, just maybe, it's a bad thing that the President of the United States can unilaterally blow up the world.
And when I say "President of the United States" I don't mean that as a metonym for the US government as in the phrase "Washington today is considering a pact with Mexico."
No, a single specific individual really does have the ability to make that decision and give that order — unimpeded in any way.
This fact — which should daily be regarded by all Americans as an excellent illustration of what a farce "constitutional government" is — is now a topic of debate in Washington. It is now being suggested that some of those alleged "checks and balances" we're always being told about might be applied to the most destructive and apocalyptic power enjoyed by a US government agent.
CNN reports:
Congressional lawmakers raised concerns about President Donald Trump's ability to use nuclear weapons during a hearing Capitol Hill Tuesday amid bipartisan anxiety over launch process procedures and indications that the administration has considered the option of a first strike on North Korea.
Members of the Senate foreign affairs committee called into question a decades-old presidential authority to deploy nuclear weapons in what was the first congressional hearing on nuclear authorization in decades.
You read that right. This is the first time Congress has considered the question of a president's nuclear-warmaking prerogatives in decades. Congress, on the other hand, has been quite busy during that time holding hearings about steroid use in sports, and violence on television.
As it stands right now, the president can start a nuclear war all by himself. We're talking about first strike capability here, and not about merely a response to military action by another state.
The LATimes tells us how easy it is:
All he has to do is call in the military officer who carries the “football,” the bulky briefcase containing the nuclear codes, and work through a brief procedure to transmit launch orders to U.S. Strategic Command...There are really no checks and balances,” said Bruce G. Blair, a former nuclear launch control officer who is now a researcher at Princeton University. “The presidency has become a nuclear monarchy.”"Nuclear dictatorship" probably better captures the reality of the situation.
Thus, all the president has to do is decide — perhaps based on whatever unreliable information the CIA is feeding him — that now is the time to unleash a nuclear holocaust on, say, North Korea. Once the bombers are flying, or once the missiles are launched, of course, we'll then have to hope that none of them are interpreted as threats to major nuclear powers like China and Russia, both of which are right next door.
Indeed, it's this unpredictability of how a nuclear strike might get out of hand has long been a limiting factor on the use of the weapons. During the Vietnam War, for example, using nuclear weapons were discussed as a possible alternative to the failed bombing strategy at the time. The problem strategists encountered was the sheer volume of unpredictable consequences that could result from usage.
The downsides of starting a nuclear conflict are immense, both in terms of global diplomacy, and in terms of actual risk to the American population.
But even with this reality staring us in the face, Washington is so obsessed with maintaining an aggressive military stance, that it's unwilling to seriously consider any limitation on the President.
This why we should expect no real changes out of these Congressional hearings. Not surprisingly, Congress has already taken any meaningful change off the table:
Ultimately, the panel warned against legislative changes to rein in the President's authority to exercise nuclear authority.
"I think hard cases make bad law, and I think if we were to change the decision-making process in some way because of a distrust of this President, I think that would be an unfortunate precedent," said Brian Mckeon, who previously served as Principal Deputy Under Secretary of Defense for Policy during the Obama administration.This pretty much sums up how Washington's foreign policy works. Limiting the power of the President in any way, we're told "would be an unfortunate precedent." After all, this Trump guy may be a jerk, but all the other Presidents are totally wonderful human beings. We wouldn't want to limit their power to blow up the planet.
"Mark Thornton returns to the Scott Horton show to discuss his latest articles for the Mises Institute “The Real Cause of America’s Opioid Epidemic” and “Big Pharma Makes Drugs that Please Regulators, Not Customers.” Thornton makes the case for why legalizing heroin—and all drugs—would be a major step towards solving the opioid crisis. Instead, because of FDA regulations, doctors and pharmaceutical companies are not held liable for the awful consequences of their use. According to Thornton, and counter to popular opinion, lack of government regulations is what will actually regulate the quality of the product on the market."
Last week, Chris Calton completed his first season of Historical Controversies podcast, which covered the History of the War on Drugs. The complete, twelve-episode series is available on iTunes, YouTube, Soundcloud, Google Play, Stitcher, Mises.org, or via RSS feed.
And, if you enjoy it, please leave a positive rating and review.
For further reading, Chris has written a helpful Bibliographical Essay, which is available in PDF.
Season 2—covering the Antebellum Period—begins tomorrow.
In a recent social media discussion someone raised the issue of Murray Rothbard's relationship with Milton Friedman. I reported that Rothbard had a good relationship with Friedman and other academic libertarians in the 1950s and early 1960s, with Friedman even recommending Rothbard for a post at Chicago. Thanks to the Mises Insittute's archivist Barbara Pickard I have the details handy. In early 1956 Friedman discussed with Richard Cornuelle, then running the Volker Fund, the possibility of getting Rothbard to Chicago for a postdoctoral fellowship. Friedman wrote that he and his colleagues "would be delighted to have Rothbard apply for one of these" and that "I am sure he will be considered very favorably" though he could not guarantee acceptance. Ultimately, Rothbard decided not to apply, presumably because of his strong preference to remain in New York. It's interesting to wonder how the academic libertarian movement might have developed if Rothbard had gone to Chicago.
More generally, Rothbard and Friedman reportedly had a cordial relationship until the early 1960s. According to Rothbard: "There was another group coming up in the sixties, students of Robert LeFevre’s Freedom School and later Rampart College. At one meeting, Friedman and Tullock were brought in for a week. I had planned to have them lecture on occupational licensing and on ocean privatization, respectively. Unfortunately, they spoke on these subjects for thirty minutes and then rode their hobby horses, monetary theory and public choice, the rest of the time. Friedman immediately clashed with the Rothbardians. He had read my America’s Great Depression and was furious that he was suddenly meeting all these Rothbardians. He didn’t know such things existed."
By 1971 Rothbard's view of Friedman became highly critical, as described in his essay "Milton Friedman Unraveled," in which he described Friedman as "the Establishment's Court Libertarian."