The normative principle I am suggesting for the law is simply this: No action should be considered illicit or illegal unless it invades, or aggresses against, the person or just property of another. Only invasive actions should be declared illegal, and combated with the full power of the law. The invasion must be concrete and physical. There are degrees of seriousness of such invasion, and hence, different proper degrees of restitution or punishment. “Burglary,” simple invasion of property for purposes of theft, is less serious than “robbery,” where armed force is likely to be used against the victim. Here, however, we are not concerned with the questions of degrees of invasion or punishment, but simply with invasion per se.

If no man may invade another person’s “just” property, what is our criterion of justice to be? There is no space here to elaborate on a theory of justice in property titles. Suffice it to say that the basic axiom of libertarian political theory holds that every man is a selfowner, having absolute jurisdiction over his own body. In effect, this means that no one else may justly invade, or aggress against, another’s person. It follows then that each person justly owns whatever previously unowned resources he appropriates or “mixes his labor with.” From these twin axioms — self-ownership and “homesteading” — stem the justification for the entire system of property rights titles in a free-market society. This system establishes the right of every man to his own person, the right of donation, of bequest (and, concomitantly, the right to receive the bequest or inheritance), and the right of contractual exchange of property titles.

Legal and political theory have committed much mischief by failing to pinpoint physical invasion as the only human action that should be illegal and that justifies the use of physical violence to combat it. The vague concept of “harm” is substituted for the precise one of physical violence. Consider the following two examples. Jim is courting Susan and is just about to win her hand in marriage, when suddenly Bob appears on the scene and wins her away. Surely Bob has done great “harm” to Jim. Once a nonphysical-invasion sense of harm is adopted, almost any outlaw act might be justified. Should Jim be able to “enjoin” Bob’s very existence?

Similarly, A is a successful seller of razor blades. But then B comes along and sells a better blade, teflon-coated to prevent shaving cuts. The value of A’s property is greatly affected. Should he be able to collect damages from B, or, better yet, to enjoin B’s sale of a better blade? The correct answer is not that consumers would be hurt if they were forced to buy the inferior blade, although that is surely the case. Rather, no one has the right to legally prevent or retaliate against “harms” to his property unless it is an act of physical invasion. Everyone has the right to have the physical integrity of his property inviolate; no one has the right to protect the value of his property, for that value is purely the reflection of what people are willing to pay for it. That willingness solely depends on how they decide to use their money. No one can have a right to someone else’s money, unless that other person had previously contracted to transfer it to him.

Legal and political theory have committed much mischief by failing to pinpoint physical invasion as the only human action that should be illegal and that justifies the use of physical violence to combat it.

In the law of torts, “harm” is generally treated as physical invasion of person or property. The outlawing of defamation (libel and slander) has always been a glaring anomaly in tort law. Words and opinions are not physical invasions. Analogous to the loss of property value from a better product or a shift in consumer demand, no one has a property right in his “reputation.” Reputation is strictly a function of the subjective opinions of other minds, and they have the absolute right to their own opinions whatever they may be. Hence, outlawing defamation is itself a gross invasion of the defamer’s right of freedom of speech, which is a subset of his property right in his own person.

An even broader assault on freedom of speech is the modern Warren-Brandeis-inspired tort of invasion of the alleged right of “privacy,” which outlaws free speech and acts using one’s own property that are not even false or “malicious.”

In the law of torts, “harm” is generally treated as physical invasion of person or property and usually requires payment of damages for “emotional” harm if and only if that harm is a consequence of physical invasion. Thus, within the standard law of trespass — an invasion of person or property — “battery” is the actual invasion of someone else’s body, while “assault” is the creation by one person in another of a fear, or apprehension, of battery.

To be a tortious assault and therefore subject to legal action, tort law wisely requires the threat to be near and imminent. Mere insults and violent words, vague future threats, or simple possession of a weapon cannot constitute an assault18; there must be accompanying overt action to give rise to the apprehension of an imminent physical battery. Or, to put it another way, there must be a concrete threat of an imminent battery before the prospective victim may legitimately use force and violence to defend himself.

Physical invasion or molestation need not be actually “harmful” or inflict severe damage in order to constitute a tort. The courts properly have held that such acts as spitting in someone’s face or ripping off someone’s hat are batteries. Chief Justice Holt’s words in 1704 still seem to apply: “The least touching of another in anger is a battery.” While the actual damage may not be substantial, in a profound sense we may conclude that the victim’s person was molested, was interfered with, by the physical aggression against him, and that hence these seemingly minor actions have become legal wrongs.

For the history you didn’t learn in school, check out Liberty Classroom:

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By Murray N. Rothbard

What I call the Old Right is suddenly back! The terms “old” and “new” inevitably get confusing, with a new “new” every few years, so let’s call it the “Original” Right, the right wing as it existed from 1933 to approximately 1955. This Old Right was formed in reaction against the New Deal, and against the Great Leap Forward into the leviathan state that was the essence of that New Deal.

This anti–New Deal movement was a coalition of three groups:

1. the “extremists” — the individualists and libertarians, like H.L. Mencken, Albert Jay Nock, Rose Wilder Lane, and Garet Garrett;
2. right-wing Democrats, harking back to the laissez-faire views of the 19th-century Democratic party, men such as Governor Albert Ritchie of Maryland or Senator James A. Reed of Missouri;
3. moderate New Dealers, who thought that the Roosevelt New Deal went too far, for example Herbert Hoover.

Interestingly, even though the libertarian intellectuals were in the minority, they necessarily set the terms and the rhetoric of the debate, since theirs was the only thought-out, contrasting ideology to the New Deal.

The most radical view of the New Deal was that of libertarian essayist and novelist Garet Garrett, an editor of the Saturday Evening Post. His brilliant little pamphlet “The Revolution Was,” published in 1938, began with these penetrating words — words that would never be fully absorbed by the Right:

There are those who still think they are holding a pass against a revolution that may be coming up the road. But they are gazing in the wrong direction. The revolution is behind them. It went by in the night of depression, singing songs to freedom.

The revolution was, said Garrett, and therefore nothing less than a counterrevolution is needed to take the country back. Behold then, not a “conservative,” but a radical Right.

In the late 1930s, there was added to this reaction against the domestic New Deal a reaction against the foreign policy of the New Deal: the insistent drive toward war in Europe and Asia. Hence, the right wing added a reaction against big government abroad to the attack on big government at home. The one fed on the other.

The right wing called for nonintervention in foreign as well as domestic affairs, and denounced FDR’s adoption of Woodrow Wilson’s global crusading, which had proved so disastrous in World War I. To Wilson-Roosevelt globalism, the Old Right countered with a policy of “America First.” American foreign policy must neither be based on the interests of a foreign power — such as Great Britain — nor be in the service of such abstract ideals as “making the world safe for democracy,” or waging a “war to end all wars,” both of which would amount, in the prophetic words of Charles A. Beard, to waging “perpetual war for perpetual peace.”

And so the Original Right was completed, combating the leviathan state in domestic affairs. It said “no!” to the welfare-warfare state. The result of adding foreign affairs to the list was some reshuffling of members: former rightists such as Lewis W. Douglas — who had opposed the domestic New Deal — now rejoined it as internationalists, while veteran isolationists, such as Senators Borah and Nye, or intellectuals such as Beard, Harry Elmer Barnes, or John T. Flynn, gradually but surely became domestic right-wingers in the course of their determined opposition to the foreign New Deal.

If we know what the Old Right was against, what were they for? In general terms, they were for a restoration of the liberty of the old republic, of a government strictly limited to the defense of the rights of private property. In the concrete, as in the case of any broad coalition, there were differences of opinion within this overall framework. But we can boil down those differences to this question: How much of existing government would you repeal? How far would you roll government back?

The minimum demand that almost all Old Rightists agreed on, which virtually defined the Old Right, was total abolition of the New Deal, the whole kit and caboodle of the welfare state, the Wagner Act, the Social Security Act, going off gold in 1933, and all the rest. Beyond that, there were charming disagreements. Some would stop at repealing the New Deal. Others would press on, to abolition of Woodrow Wilson’s New Freedom, including the Federal Reserve System and especially that mighty instrument of tyranny, the income tax and the Internal Revenue Service. Still others, extremists such as myself, would not stop until we repealed the Federal Judiciary Act of 1789, and maybe even think the unthinkable and restore the good old Articles of Confederation.

Here I should stop and say that, contrary to accepted myth, the Original Right did not disappear with, and was not discredited by, our entry into World War II. On the contrary, the congressional elections of 1942 — elections neglected by scholars — were a significant victory not only for conservative Republicans, but for isolationist Republicans as well. Even though intellectual rightist opinion, in books and especially in the journals, was virtually blotted out during World War II, the Right was still healthy in politics and in the press, such as the Hearst press, the New York Daily News, and especially the Chicago Tribune. After World War II, there was an intellectual revival of the Right, and the Old Right stayed healthy until the mid-1950s.

Within the overall consensus, then, on the Old Right, there were many differences within the framework, but differences that remained remarkably friendly and harmonious. Oddly enough, these are precisely the friendly differences within the current paleo movement: free trade or protective tariff; immigration policy; and within the policy of “isolationism,” whether it should be “doctrinaire” isolationism, such as my own, or whether the United States should regularly intervene in the Western Hemisphere or in neighboring countries of Latin America, or whether this nationalist policy should be flexible among these various alternatives.

Other differences, which also still exist, are more philosophical: should we be Lockians, Hobbesians, or Burkeans: natural rightsers, or traditionalists, or utilitarians? On political frameworks, should we be monarchists, check-and-balance federalists, or radical decentralists? Hamiltonians or Jeffersonians?

One difference, which agitated the right wing before the Buckleyite monolith managed to stifle all debate, is particularly relevant to right-wing strategy. The Marxists, who have spent a great deal of time thinking about strategy for their movement, always pose the question: Who is the agency of social change? Which group may be expected to bring about the desired change in society? Classical Marxism found the answer easy: the proletariat. Then things got a lot more complicated: the peasantry, oppressed womanhood, minorities, etc.

The relevant question for the right wing is the other side of the coin: who can we expect to be the bad guys? Who are the agents of negative social change? Or, which groups in society pose the greatest threats to liberty? Basically, there have been two answers on the Right: (1) the unwashed masses; and (2) the power elites. I will return to this question in a minute.

In the differences of opinion, of the question of diversity in the Old Right, I was struck by a remark that Tom Fleming of Chronicles made. Tom noted that he was struck, in reading about that period, that there was no party line, that there was no person or magazine excommunicating heretics, that there was admirable diversity and freedom of discussion on the Old Right. Amen! In other words, there was no National Review.

What was the Old Right’s position on culture? There was no particular position, because everyone was imbued with, and loved, the old culture. Culture was not an object of debate, either on the Old Right or, for that matter, anywhere else. Of course, they would have been horrified and incredulous at the accredited victimology that has rapidly taken over our culture. Anyone who would have suggested to an Old Rightist of 1950, for example, that in 40 years, the federal courts would be redrawing election districts all over the country so that Hispanics would be elected according to their quota in the population, would have been considered a fit candidate for the loony bin. As well he might.

And while I’m on this topic, this is the year 1992, so I am tempted to say, repeat after me: COLUMBUS DISCOVERED AMERICA!

Even though a fan of diversity, the only revisionism I will permit on this topic is whether Columbus discovered America, or whether it was Amerigo Vespucci.

Poor Italian-Americans! They have never been able to make it to accredited victim status. The only thing they ever got was Columbus Day. And now, they’re trying to take it away!

If I may be pardoned a personal note, I joined the Old Right in 1946. I grew up in New York City in the 1930s in the midst of what can only be called a communist culture. As middle-class Jews in New York, my relatives, friends, classmates, and neighbors faced only one great moral decision in their lives: should they join the Communist Party and devote 100 percent of their lives to the cause, or should they remain fellow travelers and devote only a fraction of their lives? That was the great range of debate.

I had two sets of aunts and uncles on both sides of the family who were in the Communist Party. The older uncle was an engineer who helped build the legendary Moscow subway; the younger one was an editor for the Communist-dominated Drug Workers Union, headed by one of the famous Foner brothers. But I hasten to add that I am not, in the current fashion, like Roseanne Barr Arnold or William F. Buckley, Jr., claiming that I was a victim of child abuse. (Buckley’s claim is that he was the victim of the high crime of insouciant anti-Semitism at his father’s dinner table.)

On the contrary, my father was an individualist — and he was always strongly anticommunist and antisocialist — who turned against the New Deal in 1938 because it had failed to correct the depression: a pretty good start. In my high-school, and in my college career at Columbia University, I never met a Republican, much less anyone strongly right-wing.

By the way, even though I am admittedly several years younger than Daniel Bell, Irving Kristol, and the rest, I must say that during all those years I never heard of Leon Trotsky, much less of Trotskyites, until I got to graduate school after World War II. I was fairly politically aware, and in New York in those days, the “Left” meant the Communist Party, period. So I think that Kristol and the rest are weaving pretty legends about the cosmic importance of the debates between Trotskyites and Stalinists in alcoves A and B at the City College cafeteria.

As far as I’m concerned, the only Trotskyites were a handful of academics. By the way, there is a perceptive saying in left-wing circles in New York: that the Trotskyites all went into academia, and the Stalinists went into real estate. Perhaps that’s why the Trotskyites are running the world.

At Columbia College, I was only one of two Republicans on the entire campus, the other being a literature major with whom I had little in common. Not only that: but — a remarkable thing for a cosmopolitan place like Columbia — Lawrence Chamberlain, distinguished political scientist and dean of Columbia College, admitted one time that he had never met a Republican either.

By 1946, I had become politically active, and joined the Young Republicans of New York. Unfortunately, the Republicans in New York weren’t much of an improvement: the Dewey-Rockefeller forces constituted the extreme right of the party; most of them being either pro-Communist like Stanley Isaacs, or social democrats like Jacob Javits.

I did, however, have fun writing a paper for the Young Republicans denouncing price control and rent control. And after the Republican capture of Congress in 1946, I was ecstatic. My first publication ever was a “hallelujah!” letter in the New York World-Telegram exulting that now, at last, the Republican 80th Congress would repeal the entire New Deal. So much for my strategic acumen in 1946.

At any rate, I found the Old Right and was happy there for a decade. For a couple of years, I was delighted to subscribe to the Chicago Tribune, whose every news item was filled with great Old Right punch and analysis. It is forgotten now that the only organized opposition to the Korean War was not on the Left — which, except for the Communist Party and I.F. Stone, fell for the chimera of Wilsonian-Rooseveltian “collective security” — but was on the so-called extreme Right, particularly in the House of Representatives.

One of the leaders was my friend Howard Buffett, Congressman from Omaha, who was a pure libertarian and was Senator Taft’s Midwestern campaign manager at the monstrous Republican convention of 1952, when the Eisenhower-Wall Street cabal stole the election from Robert Taft. After that, I left the Republican Party, only to return this year for the Buchanan campaign. During the 1950s, I joined every right-wing third party I could find, most of which collapsed after the first meeting. I supported the last presidential thrust of the Old Right, the Andrews-Werdel ticket in 1956, but unfortunately, they never made it up to New York City.

After this excursion on my personal activity in the Old Right, I return to a key strategic question: who are the major bad guys, the unwashed masses or the power elite? Very early, I concluded that the big danger is the elite, and not the masses, and for the following reasons:

First, even granting for a moment that the masses are the worst possible, that they are perpetually hell-bent on lynching anyone down the block, the mass of people simply don’t have the time for politics or political shenanigans. The average person must spend most of his time on the daily business of life, being with his family, seeing his friends, etc. He can only get interested in politics or engage in it sporadically.

The only people who have time for politics are the professionals: the bureaucrats, politicians, and special-interest groups dependent on political rule. They make money out of politics, and so they are intensely interested and lobby and are active 24 hours a day. Therefore, these special-interest groups will tend to win out over the uninterested masses. This is the basic insight of the public-choice school of economics. The only other groups interested full-time in politics are ideologists like ourselves, again not a very large segment of the population. So the problem is the ruling elite, the professionals, and their dependent special-interest groups.

A second crucial point: society is divided into a ruling elite, which is necessarily a minority of the population, and lives off the second group — the rest of the population. Here I point to one of the most brilliant essays on political philosophy ever written, John C. Calhoun’s “Disquisition on Government.”

Calhoun pointed out that the very fact of government and of taxation creates inherent conflict between two great classes: those who pay taxes, and those who live off them; the net tax payers vs. the tax consumers. The bigger government gets, Calhoun noted, the greater and more intense the conflict between those two social classes. By the way, I’ve never thought of Governor Pete Wilson of California as a distinguished political theorist, but the other day he said something, presumably unwittingly, that was remarkably Calhounian. Wilson lamented that the tax recipients in California were beginning to outnumber the tax payers. Well, it’s a start.

If a minority of elites rule over, tax, and exploit the majority of the public, then this brings up starkly the main problem of political theory: what I like to call the mystery of civil obedience. Why does the majority of the public obey these turkeys, anyway? This problem, I believe, was solved by three great political theorists, mainly but not all libertarian: Etienne de la Boetie, French libertarian theorist of the mid-16th century; David Hume; and Ludwig von Mises. They pointed out that, precisely because the ruling class is a minority, in the long run, force per se cannot rule. Even in the most despotic dictatorship, the government can only persist when it is backed by the majority of the population. In the long run, ideas, not force, rule; and any government has to have legitimacy in the minds of the public.

This truth was starkly demonstrated in the collapse of the Soviet Union last year. Simply put, when the tanks were sent to capture Yeltsin, they were persuaded to turn their guns around and defend Yeltsin and the Russian Parliament instead. More broadly, it is clear that the Soviet government had totally lost legitimacy and support among the public. To a libertarian, it was a particularly wonderful thing to see unfolding before our very eyes, the death of a state, particularly a monstrous one such as the Soviet Union. Toward the end, Gorby continued to issue decrees as before, but now no one paid any attention. The once-mighty Supreme Soviet continued to meet, but nobody bothered to show up. How glorious!

But we still haven’t solved the mystery of civil obedience. If the ruling elite is taxing, looting, and exploiting the public, why does the public put up with this for a single moment? Why does it take them so long to withdraw their consent?

Here we come to the solution: the critical role of the intellectuals, the opinion-molding class in society. If the masses knew what was going on, they would withdraw their consent quickly: they would soon perceive that the emperor has no clothes, that they are being ripped off. That is where the intellectuals come in.

The ruling elite, whether it be the monarchs of yore or the Communist parties of today, are in desperate need of intellectual elites to weave apologias for state power: the state rules by divine edict; the state insures the common good or the general welfare; the state protects us from the bad guys over the mountain; the state guarantees full employment; the state activates the multiplier effect; the state insures social justice, and on and on.

The apologias differ over the centuries; the effect is always the same. As Karl Wittfogel shows in his great work, Oriental Despotism, in Asian empires the intellectuals were able to get away with the theory that the emperor or pharaoh was himself divine. If the ruler is God, few will be induced to disobey or question his commands.

We can see what the state rulers get out of their alliance with the intellectuals; but what do the intellectuals get out of it? Intellectuals are the sort of people who believe that, in the free market, they are getting paid far less than their wisdom requires. Now the state is willing to pay them salaries, both for apologizing for state power, and in the modern state, for staffing the myriad jobs in the welfare, regulatory-state apparatus.

In past centuries, the churches constituted the exclusive opinion-molding classes in the society. Hence the importance to the state and its rulers of an established church, and the importance to libertarians of the concept of separating church and state, which really means not allowing the state to confer upon one group a monopoly of the opinion-molding function.

In the 20th century, of course, the church has been replaced in its opinion-molding role, or, in that lovely phrase, the “engineering of consent,” by a swarm of intellectuals, academics, social scientists, technocrats, policy scientists, social workers, journalists and the media generally, and on and on. Often included, for old times’ sake, so to speak, is a sprinkling of social gospel ministers and counselors from the mainstream churches.

So, to sum up: the problem is that the bad guys, the ruling classes, have gathered unto themselves the intellectual and media elites, who are able to bamboozle the masses into consenting to their rule, to indoctrinate them, as the Marxists would say, with “false consciousness.” What can we, the right-wing opposition, do about it?

One strategy, endemic to libertarians and classical liberals, is what we can call the “Hayekian” model, after F.A. Hayek, or what I have called “educationism.” Ideas, the model declares, are crucial, and ideas filter down a hierarchy, beginning with top philosophers, then seeping down to lesser philosophers, then academics, and finally to journalists and politicians, and then to the masses. The thing to do is to convert the top philosophers to the correct ideas; they will convert the lesser, and so on, in a kind of “trickle-down effect,” until, at last, the masses are converted and liberty has been achieved.

First, it should be noted that this trickle-down strategy is a very gentle and genteel one, relying on quiet mediation and persuasion in the austere corridors of intellectual cerebration. This strategy fits, by the way, with Hayek’s personality, for Hayek is not exactly known as an intellectual gut-fighter.

Of course, ideas and persuasion are important, but there are several fatal flaws in the Hayekian strategy. First, of course, the strategy at best will take several hundred years, and some of us are a bit more impatient than that. But time is by no means the only problem.

Many people have noted, for example, mysterious blockages of the trickle. Thus, most real scientists have a very different view of such environmental questions as Alar than do a few left-wing hysterics, and yet somehow it is always the same few hysterics that are exclusively quoted by the media. The same applies to the vexed problem of inheritance and IQ testing. So how come the media invariably skew the result, and pick and choose the few leftists in the field? Clearly, because the media, especially the respectable and influential media, begin, and continue, with a strong left-liberal bias.

More generally, the Hayekian trickle-down model overlooks a crucial point: that, and I hate to break this to you, intellectuals, academics, and the media are not all motivated by truth alone. As we have seen, the intellectual classes may be part of the solution, but also they are a big part of the problem. For, as we have seen, the intellectuals are part of the ruling class, and their economic interests, as well as their interests in prestige, power and admiration, are wrapped up in the present welfare/warfare-state system.

Therefore, in addition to converting intellectuals to the cause, the proper course for the right-wing opposition must necessarily be a strategy of boldness and confrontation, of dynamism and excitement, a strategy, in short, of rousing the masses from their slumber and exposing the arrogant elites that are ruling them, controlling them, taxing them, and ripping them off.

Another alternative right-wing strategy is that commonly pursued by many libertarian or conservative think tanks: that of quiet persuasion, not in the groves of academe, but in Washington, D.C., in the corridors of power. This has been called the “Fabian” strategy, with think tanks issuing reports calling for a two percent cut in a tax here, or a tiny drop in a regulation there. The supporters of this strategy often point to the success of the Fabian Society, which, by its detailed empirical researches, gently pushed the British state into a gradual accretion of socialist power.

The flaw here, however, is that what works to increase state power does not work in reverse. For the Fabians were gently nudging the ruling elite precisely in the direction they wanted to travel anyway. Nudging the other way would go strongly against the state’s grain, and the result is far more likely to be the state’s co-opting and Fabianizing the think tankers themselves rather than the other way around. This sort of strategy may, of course, be personally very pleasant for the think tankers, and may be profitable in cushy jobs and contracts from the government. But that is precisely the problem.

It is important to realize that the establishment doesn’t want excitement in politics, it wants the masses to continue to be lulled to sleep. It wants kinder, gentler; it wants the measured, judicious, mushy tone, and content, of a James Reston, a David Broder, or a Washington Week in Review. It doesn’t want a Pat Buchanan, not only for the excitement and hard edge of his content, but also for his similar tone and style.

And so the proper strategy for the right wing must be what we can call “right-wing populism”: exciting, dynamic, tough, and confrontational, rousing and inspiring not only the exploited masses, but the often-shell-shocked right-wing intellectual cadre as well. And in this era where the intellectual and media elites are all establishment liberal-conservatives, all in a deep sense one variety or another of social democrat, all bitterly hostile to a genuine Right, we need a dynamic, charismatic leader who has the ability to short-circuit the media elites, and to reach and rouse the masses directly. We need a leadership that can reach the masses and cut through the crippling and distorting hermeneutical fog spread by the media elites.

But can we call such a strategy “conservative”? I, for one, am tired of the liberal strategy, on which they have rung the changes for forty years, of presuming to define “conservatism” as a supposed aid to the conservative movement. Whenever liberals have encountered hard-edged abolitionists who, for example, have wanted to repeal the New Deal or Fair Deal, they say “But that’s not genuine conservatism. That’s radicalism.” The genuine conservative, these liberals go on to say, doesn’t want to repeal or abolish anything. He is a kind and gentle soul who wants to conserve what left-liberals have accomplished.

The left-liberal vision, then, of good conservatives is as follows: first, left-liberals, in power, make a Great Leap Forward toward collectivism; then, when, in the course of the political cycle, four or eight years later, conservatives come to power, they of course are horrified at the very idea of repealing anything; they simply slow down the rate of growth of statism, consolidating the previous gains of the Left, and providing a bit of R&R for the next liberal Great Leap Forward. And if you think about it, you will see that this is precisely what every Republican administration has done since the New Deal. Conservatives have readily played the desired Santa Claus role in the liberal vision of history.

I would like to ask: How long are we going to keep being suckers? How long will we keep playing our appointed roles in the scenario of the Left? When are we going to stop playing their game, and start throwing over the table?

I must admit that, in one sense, the liberals have had a point. The word “conservative” is unsatisfactory. The original right never used the term “conservative”: we called ourselves individualists, or “true liberals,” or rightists. The word “conservative” only swept the board after the publication of Russell Kirk’s highly influential Conservative Mind in 1953, in the last years of the Original Right.

There are two major problems with the word “conservative.” First, that it indeed connotes conserving the status quo, which is precisely why the Brezhnevites were called “conservatives” in the Soviet Union. Perhaps there was a case for calling us “conservatives” in 1910, but surely not now. Now we want to uproot the status quo, not conserve it. And secondly, the word conservative harks back to struggles in 19th-century Europe, and in America conditions and institutions have been so different that the term is seriously misleading. There is a strong case here, as in other areas, for what has been called “American exceptionalism.”

So what should we call ourselves? I haven’t got an easy answer, but perhaps we could call ourselves radical reactionaries, or “radical rightists,” the label that was given to us by our enemies in the 1950s. Or, if there is too much objection to the dread term “radical,” we can follow the suggestion of some of our group to call ourselves “the Hard Right.” Any of these terms is preferable to “conservative,” and it also serves the function of separating ourselves out from the official conservative movement, which, as I shall note in a minute, has been largely taken over by our enemies.

It is instructive to turn now to a prominent case of right-wing populism headed by a dynamic leader who appeared in the last years of the Original Right, and whose advent, indeed, marked a transition between the Original and the newer, Buckleyite Right. Quick now: who was the most hated, the most smeared man in American politics in this century, more hated and reviled than even David Duke, even though he was not a Nazi or a Klu Kluxer? He was not a libertarian, he was not an isolationist, he was not even a conservative, but in fact was a moderate Republican. And yet, he was so universally reviled that his very name became a generic dictionary synonym for evil.

I refer, of course, to Joe McCarthy. The key to the McCarthy phenomenon was the comment made by the entire political culture, from moderate left to moderate right: “we agree with McCarthy’s goals, we just disagree with his means.” Of course, McCarthy’s goals were the usual ones absorbed from the political culture: the alleged necessity of waging war against an international Communist conspiracy, whose tentacles reached from the Soviet Union and spanned the entire globe. McCarthy’s problem, and ultimately his tragedy, is that he took this stuff seriously; if communists and their agents and fellow travelers are everywhere, then shouldn’t we, in the midst of the Cold War, root them out of American political life?

The unique and the glorious thing about McCarthy was not his goals or his ideology, but precisely his radical, populist means. For McCarthy was able, for a few years, to short-circuit the intense opposition of all the elites in American life: from the Eisenhower-Rockefeller administration to the Pentagon and the military-industrial complex to liberal and left media and academic elites — to overcome all that opposition and reach and inspire the masses directly. And he did it through television, and without any real movement behind him; he had only a guerrilla band of a few advisers, but no organization and no infrastructure.

Fascinatingly enough, the response of the intellectual elites to the specter of McCarthyism was led by liberals such as Daniel Bell and Seymour Martin Lipset, who are now prominent neoconservatives. For, in this era, the neocons were in the midst of the long march which was to take them from Trotskyism to right-wing Trotskyism to right-wing social democracy, and finally to the leadership of the conservative movement. At this stage of their hegira the neocons were Truman-Humphrey-Scoop Jackson liberals.

The major intellectual response to McCarthyism was a book edited by Daniel Bell, The New American Right (1955) later updated and expanded to The Radical Right (1963), published at a time when McCarthyism was long gone and it was necessary to combat a new menace, the John Birch Society. The basic method was to divert attention from the content of the radical-right message and direct attention instead to a personal smear of the groups on the Right.

The classical, or hard, Marxist method of smearing opponents of socialism or communism was to condemn them as agents of monopoly capital or of the bourgeoisie. While these charges were wrong, at least they had the virtue of clarity and even a certain charm, compared to the later tactics of the soft Marxists and liberals of the 1950s and ’60s, who engaged in Marxo-Freudian psychobabble to infer, in the name of psychological “science,” that their opponents were, well, kind of crazy.

The preferred method of the time was invented by one of the contributors to the Bell volume, and also one of my least favorite distinguished American historians, Professor Richard Hofstadter. In Hofstadter’s formulation, any radical dissenters from any status quo, be they rightists or leftists, engage in a “paranoid” style (and you know, of course, what paranoids are), and suffer from “status anxiety.”

Logically, at any time there are three and only three social groups: those who are declining in status, those who are rising in status, and those whose status is about even. (You can’t fault that analysis!) The declining groups are the ones whom Hofstadter focused on for the neurosis of status anxiety, which causes them to lash out irrationally at their betters in a paranoid style, and you can fill in the rest.

But, of course, the rising groups can also suffer from the anxiety of trying to keep their higher status, and the level groups can be anxious about a future decline. The result of his hocus-pocus is a nonfalsifiable, universally valid theory that can be trotted out to smear and dispose of any person or group which dissents from the status quo. For who, after all, wants to be, or to associate with, paranoids and the status anxious?

Also permeating the Bell volume is dismissal of these terrible radicals as suffering from the “politics of resentment.” It is interesting, by the way, how left-liberals deal with political anger. It’s a question of semantics. Anger by the good guys, the accredited victim groups, is designated as “rage,” which is somehow noble: the latest example was the rage of organized feminism in the Clarence Thomas/Willie Smith incidents. On the other hand, anger by designated oppressor groups is not called “rage,” but “resentment”: which conjures up evil little figures, envious of their betters, skulking around the edges of the night.

And indeed the entire Bell volume is permeated by a frank portrayal of the noble, intelligent, ivy-league governing elite, confronted and harassed by a mass of odious, uneducated, redneck, paranoid, resentment-filled, authoritarian working and middle-class types in the heartland, trying irrationally to undo the benevolent rule of wise elites concerned for the public good.

History, however, was not very kind to Hofstadterian liberalism. For Hofstadter and the others were consistent: they were defending what they considered a wonderful status quo of elite rule from any radicals whatever, be they right or left. And so, Hofstadter and his followers went back through American history tarring all radical dissenters from any status quo with the status anxious, paranoid brush, including such groups as progressives, populists, and Northern abolitionists before the Civil War.

At the same time, Bell, in 1960, published a once-famous work proclaiming the End of Ideology: from now on, consensus elitist liberalism would rule forever, ideology would disappear, and all political problems would be merely technical ones, such as which machinery to use to clear the streets. (Foreshadowing thirty years later, a similar neocon proclamation of the “End of History.”) But shortly afterwards, ideology came back with a bang, with the radical civil rights and then the New Left revolutions, part of which, I am convinced, was in reaction to these arrogant liberal doctrines. Smearing radicals, at least left-wing ones, was no longer in fashion, either in politics or in historiography.

Meanwhile, of course, poor McCarthy was undone, partly because of the smears, and the lack of a movement infrastructure, and partly too because his populism, even though dynamic, had no goals and no program whatsoever, except the very narrow one of rooting out communists. And partly, too, because McCarthy was not really suited for the television medium he had ridden to fame: being a “hot” person in a “cool” medium, with his jowls, his heavy five-o’clock shadow (which also helped ruin Nixon), and his lack of a sense of humor. And also, too, since he was neither a libertarian nor really a radical rightist, McCarthy’s heart was broken by the censure of the US Senate, an institution which he actually loved.

The Original Right, the radical Right, had pretty much disappeared by the time of the second edition of the Bell volume in 1963, and in a minute we shall see why. But now, all of a sudden, with the entry of Pat Buchanan into the presidential race, my God, they’re back! The radical right is back, all over the place, feistier than ever, and getting stronger!

The response to this historic phenomenon, by the entire spectrum of established and correct thought, by all the elites from left over to official conservatives and neoconservatives, is very much like the reaction to the return of Godzilla in the old movies. And wouldn’t you know that they would trot out the old psychobabble, as well as the old smears of bigotry, anti-Semitism, the specter of Franco, and all the rest? Every interview with, and article on Pat, dredges his “authoritarian Catholic” background (ooh!) and the fact that he fought a lot when he was a kid (gee whiz, like most of the American male population).

Also: that Pat has been angry a lot. Ooh, anger! And of course, since Pat is not only a right-winger but hails from a designated oppressor group (white, male, Irish Catholic), his anger can never be righteous rage, but only a reflection of a paranoid, status-anxious personality, filled with, you got it, “resentment.” And sure enough, this week, January 13, the august New York Times, whose every word, unlike the words of the rest of us, is fit to print, in its lead editorial sets the establishment line, a line which by definition is fixed in concrete, on Pat Buchanan.

After deploring the hard-edged and therefore politically incorrect vocabulary (tsk, tsk!) of Pat Buchanan, the New York Times, I am sure for the first time, solemnly quotes Bill Buckley as if his words were holy writ (and I’ll get to that in a minute), and therefore decides that Buchanan, if not actually anti-Semitic, has said anti-Semitic things. And the Times concludes with this final punch line, so reminiscent of the Bell-Hofstadter line of yesteryear: “What his words convey, much as his bid for the nomination conveys, is the politics, the dangerous politics, of resentment.”

Resentment! Why should anyone in his right mind resent contemporary America? Why should anyone, for example, going out into the streets of Washington or New York, resent what is surely going to happen to him? But, for heaven’s sake, what person in his right mind, doesn’t resent it? What person is not filled with noble rage, or ignoble resentment, or whatever you choose to call it?

Finally, I want to turn to the question: what happened to the Original Right, anyway? And how did the conservative movement get into its present mess? Why does it need to be sundered, and split apart, and a new radical right movement created upon its ashes?

The answer to both of these seemingly disparate questions is the same: what happened to the Original Right, and the cause of the present mess, is the advent and domination of the right wing by Bill Buckley and the National Review. By the mid-1950s, much of the leadership of the Old Right was dead or in retirement. Senator Taft and Colonel McCormick had died, and many of the right-wing congressmen had retired.

The conservative masses, for a long time short on intellectual leadership, were now lacking in political leadership as well. An intellectual and power vacuum had developed on the Right, and rushing to fill it, in 1955, were Bill Buckley, fresh from several years in the CIA, and National Review, an intelligent, well-written periodical staffed with ex-communists and ex-leftists eager to transform the Right from an isolationist movement into a crusade to crush the Soviet god that had failed them.

Also, Buckley’s writing style, while in those days often witty and sparkling, was rococo enough to give the reader the impression of profound thought, an impression redoubled by Bill’s habit of sprinkling his prose with French and Latin terms. Very quickly, National Review became the dominant, if not the only, power center on the right-wing.

This power was reinforced by a brilliantly successful strategy (perhaps guided by National Review editors trained in Marxist cadre tactics) of creating front groups: Intercollegiate Studies Institute for college intellectuals, and Young Americans for Freedom for campus activists. Moreover, lead by veteran Republican politico and National Review publisher Bill Rusher, the National Review complex was able to take over, in swift succession, the College Young Republicans, then the National Young Republicans, and finally to create a Goldwater movement in 1960 and beyond.

And so, with almost blitzkrieg swiftness, by the early 1960s, the new global crusading conservative movement, transformed and headed by Bill Buckley, was almost ready to take power in America. But not quite, because first, all the various heretics of the Right — some left over from the Original Right — all the groups that were in any way radical or could deprive the new conservative movement of its much-desired respectability in the eyes of the liberal and centrist elite, all these had to be jettisoned. Only such a denatured, respectable, nonradical, conserving right was worthy of power.

And so the purges began. One after another, Buckley and the National Review purged and excommunicated all the radicals, all the nonrespectables. Consider the roll call: isolationists (such as John T. Flynn), anti-Zionists, libertarians, Ayn Randians, the John Birch Society, and all those who continued, like the early National Review, to dare to oppose Martin Luther King and the civil-rights revolution after Buckley had changed and decided to embrace it. But if, by the middle and late 1960s, Buckley had purged the conservative movement of the genuine Right, he also hastened to embrace any group that proclaimed its hard anticommunism, or rather anti-Sovietism or anti-Stalinism.

And of course the first anti-Stalinists were the devotees of the martyred communist Leon Trotsky. And so the conservative movement, while purging itself of genuine right-wingers, was happy to embrace anyone, any variety of Marxist: Trotskyites, Schachtmanites, Mensheviks, social democrats (such as grouped around the magazine the New Leader), Lovestonite theoreticians of the American Federation of Labor, extreme right-wing Marxists like the incredibly beloved Sidney Hook — anyone who could present not antisocialist but suitably anti-Soviet, anti-Stalinist credentials.

The way was then paved for the final, fateful influx: that of the ex-Trotskyite, right-wing social democrat, democrat capitalist, Truman-Humphrey-Scoop Jackson liberals, displaced from their home in the Democratic party by the loony left that we know so well: the feminist, deconstructing, quota-loving, advanced victimological left. And also, we should point out, at least a semi-isolationist, semi-antiwar left. These displaced people are, of course, the famed neoconservatives, a tiny but ubiquitous group with Bill Buckley as their aging figurehead, now dominating the conservative movement. Of the 35 neoconservatives, 34 seem to be syndicated columnists.

And so the neocons have managed to establish themselves as the only right-wing alternative to the Left. The neocons now constitute the right-wing end of the ideological spectrum. Of the respectable, responsible right wing, that is. For the neocons have managed to establish the notion that anyone who might be to the right of them is, by definition, a representative of the forces of darkness, of chaos, Old Right, racism, and anti-Semitism. At the very least.

So that’s how the dice have been loaded in our current political game. And virtually the only prominent media exception, the only genuine rightist spokesman who has managed to escape neocon anathema has been Pat Buchanan.

It was time. It was time to trot out the old master, the prince of excommunication, the self-anointed pope of the conservative movement, William F. Buckley, Jr. It was time for Bill to go into his old act, to save the movement that he had made over into his own image. It was time for the man hailed by neocon Eric Breindel, in his newspaper column (New York Post, Jan. 16), as the “authoritative voice on the American right.” It was time for Bill Buckley’s papal bull, his 40,000-word Christmas encyclical to the conservative movement, “In Search of Anti-Semitism,” the screed solemnly invoked in the anti-Buchanan editorial of the New York Times.

The first thing to say about Buckley’s essay is that it is virtually unreadable. Gone, all gone, is the wit and the sparkle. Buckley’s tendency to the rococo has elongated beyond measure. His prose is serpentine, involuted and convoluted, twisted and qualified, until virtually all sense is lost. Reading the whole thing through is doing penance for one’s sins, and one can accomplish the task only if possessed by a stern sense of duty, as one grits one’s teeth and plows through a pile of turgid and pointless student term papers — which, indeed, Buckley’s essay matches in content, in learning, and in style.

Lest anyone think that my view of Buckley’s and National Review’s role in the past and present right wing merely reflects my own “paranoid style,” we turn to the only revealing art of the Buckley piece, the introduction by his acolyte John O’Sullivan, who, however, is at least still capable of writing a coherent sentence.

Here is John’s remarkable revelation of National Review’s self image: “Since its foundation, National Review has quietly played the role of conscience of the right.” After listing a few of Buckley’s purges — although omitting isolationists, Randians, libertarians, and anti–civil rightsers — O’Sullivan gets to anti-Semites, and the need for wise judgment on the issue.

And then comes the revelation of Bill’s papal role: “Before pronouncing [judgment, that is], we wanted to be sure,” and then he goes on: was there something substantial in the charges? “Was it a serious sin deserving ex-communication, an error inviting a paternal reproof, or something of both?” I’m sure all the defendants in the dock appreciated the “paternal” reference: Papa Bill, the wise, stern, but merciful father of us all, dispensing judgment. This statement of O’Sullivan’s is matched in chutzpah only by his other assertion in the introduction that his employer’s treatise is a “great read.” For shame, John, for shame!

The only other point worth noting on the purges is Buckley’s own passage on exactly why he had found it necessary to excommunicate the John Birch Society (O’Sullivan said it was because they were “cranks”). In a footnote, Buckley admits that “the Birch society was never anti-Semitic,” but “it was a dangerous distraction to right reasoning and had to be exiled. National Review,” Bill goes on, “accomplished exactly that.”

Well, my, my! Exiled to outer Siberia! And for the high crime of “distracting” pope William from his habitual contemplation of pure reason, a distraction that he never seems to suffer while skiing, yachting, or communing with John Kenneth Galbraith or Abe Rosenthal! What a wondrous mind at work!

Merely to try to summarize Buckley’s essay is to give it far too much credit for clarity. But, taking that risk, here’s the best I can do:

1. His long-time disciple and NR editor Joe Sobran is (a) certainly not an anti-Semite, but (b) is “obsessed with” and “cuckoo about” Israel, and (c) is therefore “contextually anti-Semitic,” whatever that may mean, and yet, worst of all, (d) he remains “unrepentant”;
2. Pat Buchanan is not an anti-Semite, but he has said unacceptably anti-Semitic things, “probably” from an “iconoclastic temperament,” yet, curiously, Buchanan too remains unrepentant;
3. Gore Vidal is an anti-Semite, and the Nation, by presuming to publish Vidal’s article (by the way, a hilarious one) critical of Norman Podhoretz has revealed the Left’s increasing proclivity for anti-Semitism;
4. Buckley’s bully-boy disciples at Dartmouth Review are not anti-Semitic at all, but wonderful kids put upon by vicious leftists; and
5. Norman Podhoretz and Irving Kristol are wonderful, brilliant people, and it is “unclear” why anyone should ever want to criticize them, except possibly for reasons of anti-Semitism.

Gore Vidal and the Nation, absurdly treated in Bill’s article, can and do take care of themselves, in the Nation in a blistering counterattack in its January 6–13 issue. On Buchanan and Sobran, there is nothing new, whether of fact or insight: it’s the same thin old junk, tiresomely rehashed.

Something, however, should be said about Buckley’s vicious treatment of Sobran, a personal and ideological disciple who has virtually worshipped his mentor for two decades. Lashing out at a friend and disciple in public in this fashion, in order to propitiate Podhoretz and the rest, is odious and repellent: at the very least, we can say it is extremely tacky.

More importantly: Buckley’s latest encyclical may play well in the New York Times, but it’s not going to go down very well in the conservative movement. The world is different now; it is no longer 1958. National Review is no longer the monopoly power center on the Right. There are new people, young people, popping up all over the place, Pat Buchanan for one, all the paleos for another, who frankly don’t give a fig for Buckley’s papal pronunciamentos. The Original Right and all its heresies are back!

In fact, Bill Buckley is the Mikhail Gorbachev of the conservative movement. Like Gorbachev, Bill goes on with his old act, but like Gorbachev, nobody trembles anymore, nobody bends the knee and goes into exile. Nobody cares anymore — nobody, except the good old New York Times. Bill Buckley should have accepted his banquet and stayed retired. His comeback is going to be as successful as Mohammed Ali’s.

When I was growing up, I found that the main argument against laissez-faire, and for socialism, was that socialism and communism were inevitable: “You can’t turn back the clock!” they chanted, “you can’t turn back the clock.” But the clock of the once-mighty Soviet Union, the clock of Marxism-Leninism, a creed that once mastered half the world, is not only turned back but lies dead and broken forever. But we must not rest content with this victory. For though Marxism-Bolshevism is gone forever, there still remains, plaguing us everywhere, its evil cousin: call it “soft Marxism,” “Marxism-Humanism,” “Marxism-Bernsteinism,” “Marxism-Trotskyism,” “Marxism-Freudianism,” well, let’s just call it “Menshevism,” or “social democracy.”

Social democracy is still here in all its variants, defining our entire respectable political spectrum, from advanced victimology and feminism on the Left over to neoconservatism on the Right. We are now trapped, in America, inside a Menshevik fantasy, with the narrow bounds of respectable debate set for us by various brands of Marxists. It is now our task, the task of the resurgent right, of the paleo movement, to break those bonds, to finish the job, to finish off Marxism forever.

One of the authors of the Daniel Bell volume says, in horror and astonishment, that the radical right intends to repeal the 20th century. Heaven forfend! Who would want to repeal the 20th century, the century of horror, the century of collectivism, the century of mass destruction and genocide, who would want to repeal that! Well, we propose to do just that.

With the inspiration of the death of the Soviet Union before us, we now know that it can be done. We shall break the clock of social democracy. We shall break the clock of the Great Society. We shall break the clock of the welfare state. We shall break the clock of the New Deal. We shall break the clock of Woodrow Wilson’s New Freedom and perpetual war. We shall repeal the 20th century.

One of the most inspiring and wonderful sights of our time was to see the peoples of the Soviet Union rising up last year to tear down in their fury the statues of Lenin, to obliterate the Leninist legacy. We, too, shall tear down all the statues of Franklin D. Roosevelt, of Harry Truman, of Woodrow Wilson, melt them down and beat them into plowshares and pruning hooks, and usher in a 21st century of peace, freedom, and prosperity.

Source: https://mises.org/library/strategy-right

For the history you didn’t learn in school, check out Liberty Classroom:

The post A Strategy for the Right appeared first on Actual Anarchy.

While this may have some merits in practice, using it as your basis for decision making is dubious at best; and downright dangerous at worst.

While economics may be value-free, it is a tool, like a weapon that can be used to protect life and property, or it can be misused and destroy it.  Without having the principled moral grounding, a utilitarian can justify damn near anything.

Here are several articles by Murray Rothbard, with appropriate quotes presented making the case that Natural Rights are necessary when considering appropriate action, and though utilitarianism may often support the conclusions of moral actions – they cannot alone be justifications in taking such action.

Utilitarianism vs. Natural Rights

The utilitarians declare, from their study of the consequences of liberty as opposed to alternative systems, that liberty will lead more surely to widely approved goals: harmony, peace, prosperity, etc. Now no one disputes that relative consequences should be studied in assessing the merits or demerits of respective creeds.

But there are many problems in confining ourselves to a utilitarian ethic. For one thing, utilitarianism assumes that we can weigh alternatives, and decide upon policies, on the basis of their good or bad consequences.

But if it is legitimate to apply value judgments to the consequences of X, why is it not equally legitimate to apply such judgments to X itself?

May there not be something about an act itself which, in its very nature, can be considered good or evil?

…

Let us consider a stark example: Suppose a society which fervently considers all redheads to be agents of the Devil and therefore to be executed whenever found. Let us further assume that only a small number of redheads exist in any generation—so few as to be statistically insignificant.

The utilitarian-libertarian might well reason: “While the murder of isolated redheads is deplorable, the executions are small in number; the vast majority of the public, as non-redheads, achieves enormous psychic satisfaction from the public execution of redheads. The social cost is negligible, the social, psychic benefit to the rest of society is great; therefore, it is right and proper for society to execute the redheads.”

The natural rights libertarian, overwhelmingly concerned as he is for the justice of the act, will react in horror and staunchly and unequivocally oppose the executions as totally unjustified murder and aggression upon nonaggressive persons. The consequence of stopping the murders—depriving the bulk of society of great psychic pleasure—would not influence such a libertarian, the “absolutist” libertarian, in the slightest.

Dedicated to justice and to logical consistency, the natural rights libertarian cheerfully admits to being “doctrinaire,” to being, in short, an unabashed follower of his own doctrines.

Property and Exchange

Let us take, for example, two of the leading anarcho-capitalist works of the last few years: my own For a New Liberty and David Friedman’s Machinery of Freedom. Superficially, the major differences between them are my own stand for natural rights and for a rational libertarian law code, in contrast to Friedman’s amoralist utilitarianism and call for logrolling and trade-offs between nonlibertarian private police agencies.

But the difference really cuts far deeper. There runs through For a New Liberty (and most of the rest of my work as well) a deep and pervasive hatred of the State and all of its works, based on the conviction that the State is the enemy of mankind. In contrast, it is evident that David does not hate the State at all; that he has merely arrived at the conviction that anarchism and competing private police forces are a better social and economic system than any other alternative. Or, more fully, that anarchism would be better than laissez-faire, which in turn is better than the current system.

Amidst the entire spectrum of political alternatives, David Friedman has decided that anarcho-capitalism is superior. But superior to an existing political structure which is pretty good too. In short, there is no sign that David Friedman in any sense hates the existing American State or the State per se, hates it deep in his belly as a predatory gang of robbers, enslavers, and murderers. No, there is simply the cool conviction that anarchism would be the best of all possible worlds, but that our current set-up is pretty far up with it in desirability.

For there is no sense in Friedman that the State — any State — is a predatory gang of criminals.

Do You Hate the State?

Bеnthаm’ѕ fаmоuѕ рhrаѕе, “the grеаtеѕt gооd for thе grеаtеѕt numbеr,” which іѕ thе соrnеrѕtоnе of his dосtrіnе, оnе оf thе problems with that, of соurѕе, one оf the mаnу problems іѕ ѕuрроѕе you’re іn thе lesser numbеr, thеn whаt? Whаt hарреnѕ thеn? Utilitarianism саn justify almost еvеrуthіng.

I thіnk Bеnthаmіtеѕ wоuld аdmіt thіѕ. In оthеr words, ѕіnсе thеrе’ѕ nо juѕtісе, nо such thing аѕ natural rіghtѕ, juѕtісе or аnуthіng еlѕе.

The Panopticon – Key to Jeremy Bentham’s Thought

Turning from these men of narrow vision, we must also see that utilitarianism — the common ground of free-market economists — is unsatisfactory for developing a flourishing libertarian movement. While it is true and valuable to know that a free market would bring far greater abundance and a healthier economy to everyone, rich and poor alike, a critical problem is whether this knowledge is enough to bring many people to a lifelong dedication to liberty.

In short, how many people will man the barricades and endure the many sacrifices that a consistent devotion to liberty entails, merely so that umpteen percent more people will have better bathtubs? Will they not rather set up for an easy life and forget the umpteen percent bathtubs? Ultimately, then, utilitarian economics, while indispensable in the developed structure of libertarian thought and action, is almost as unsatisfactory a basic ground work for the movement as those opportunists who simply seek a short-range profit.

Why Be Libertarian?

I stand with Rothbard with the following analogy, if Natural Rights is the “hand”, then Utilitarianism is the “glove”.  Without the hand, the glove is without form, is not performing a function, and is incomplete.

Utilitarianism will often support the conclusions of actions taken in accordance with Natural Rights, but that should not be THE reason those actions were chosen.

The post Utilitarianism and Natural Rights appeared first on Actual Anarchy.

This article was originally published in The Review of Austrian Economics in 1991, during the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Introduction

At the root of the dazzling revolutionary implosion and collapse of socialism and central planning in the “socialist bloc” is what everyone concedes to be a disastrous economic failure. The peoples and the intellectuals of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union are crying out not only for free speech, democratic assembly, and glasnost, but also for private property and free markets. And yet, if I may be pardoned a moment of nostalgia, four-and-a-half-decades ago, when I entered graduate school, the economics Establishment of that era was closing the book on what had been for two decades the famed “socialist calculation debate.” And they had all decided, left, right, and center, that there was not a thing economically wrong with socialism: that socialism’s only problems, such as they might be, were political. Economically, socialism could work just as well as capitalism.

Mises and the Challenge of Calculation

Before Ludwig von Mises raised the calculation problem in his celebrated article in 1920,[1]  everyone, socialists and non-socialists alike, had long realized that socialism suffered from an incentive problem. If, for example, everyone under socialism were to receive an equal income, or, in another variant, everyone was supposed to produce “according to his ability” but receive “according to his needs,” then, to sum it up in the famous question: Who, under socialism, will take out the garbage? That is, what will be the incentive to do the grubby jobs, and, furthermore, to do them well? Or, to put it another way, what would be the incentive to work hard and be productive at any job?

The traditional socialist answer held that the socialist society would transform human nature, would purge it of selfishness, and remold it to create a New Socialist Man. That new man would be devoid of any selfish, or indeed any self-determined, goals; his only wish would be to work as hard and as eagerly as possible to achieve the goals and obey the orders of the socialist State. Throughout the history of socialism, socialist ultras, such as the early Lenin and Bukharin under “War Communism,” and later Mao Tse-tung and Che Guevara, have sought to replace material by so-called “moral” incentives. This notion was properly and wittily ridiculed by Alexander Gray as “the idea that the world may find its driving force in a Birthday Honours List (giving to the King, if necessary, 165 birthdays a year).”[2]  At any rate, the socialists soon found that voluntary methods could hardly yield them the New Socialist Man. But even the most determined and bloodthirsty methods could not avail to create this robotic New Socialist Man. And it is a testament to the spirit of freedom that cannot be extinguished in the human breast that the socialists continued to fail dismally, despite decades of systemic terror.

But the uniqueness and the crucial importance of Mises’s challenge to socialism is that it was totally unrelated to the well-known incentive problem. Mises in effect said: All right, suppose that the socialists have been able to create a mighty army of citizens all eager to do the bidding of their masters, the socialist planners. What exactly would those planners tell this army to do? How would they know what products to order their eager slaves to produce, at what stage of production, how much of the product at each stage, what techniques or raw materials to use in that production and how much of each, and where specifically to locate all this production? How would they know their costs, or what process of production is or is not efficient?

Mises demonstrated that, in any economy more complex than the Crusoe or primitive family level, the socialist planning board would simply not know what to do, or how to answer any of these vital questions. Developing the momentous concept of calculation, Mises pointed out that the planning board could not answer these questions because socialism would lack the indispensable tool that private entrepreneurs use to appraise and calculate: the existence of a market in the means of production, a market that brings about money prices based on genuine profit-seeking exchanges by private owners of these means of production. Since the very essence of socialism is collective ownership of the means of production, the planning board would not be able to plan, or to make any sort of rational economic decisions. Its decisions would necessarily be completely arbitrary and chaotic, and therefore the existence of a socialist planned economy is literally “impossible” (to use a term long ridiculed by Mises’s critics).

The Lange-Lerner Solution

In the course of intense discussion throughout the 1920s and 1930s, the socialist economists were honest enough to take Mises’s criticism seriously, and to throw in the towel on most traditional socialist programs: in particular, the original communist vision that workers, not needing such institutions as bourgeois money fetishism, would simply produce and place their products on some vast socialist heap, with everyone simply taking from that heap “according to his needs.”

The socialist economists also abandoned the Marxian variant that everyone should be paid according to the labor time embodied into his product. In contrast, what came to be known as the Lange-Lerner solution (or, less commonly but more accurately, the Lange-Lerner-Taylor solution), acclaimed by virtually all economists, asserted that the socialist planning board could easily resolve the calculation problem by ordering its various managers to fix accounting prices. Then, according to the contribution of Professor Fred M. Taylor, the central planning board could find the proper prices in much the same way as the capitalist market: trial and error. Thus, given a stock of consumer goods, if the accounting prices are set too low, there will be a shortage, and the planners will raise prices until the shortage disappears and the market is cleared. If, on the other hand, prices are set too high, there will be a surplus on the shelves, and the planners will lower the price, until the markets are cleared. The solution is simplicity itself![3]

In the course of his two-part article and subsequent book, Lange concocted what could only be called the Mythology of the Socialist Calculation Debate, a mythology which, aided and abetted by Joseph Schumpeter, was accepted by virtually all economists of whatever ideological stripe. It was this mythology I found handed down as the Orthodox Line when I entered Columbia University’s graduate school at the end of World War II – a line promulgated in lectures by no less an expert on the Soviet economy than Professor Abram Bergson, then at Columbia. In 1948, indeed, Professor Bergson was selected to hand down the Received Opinion on the subject by a committee of the American Economic Association, and Bergson interred the socialist calculation question with the Orthodox Line as its burial rite.[4]

The Lange-Bergson Orthodox Line went about as follows: Mises, in 1920, had done an inestimable service to socialism by raising the problem of economic calculation, a problem of which socialists had not generally been aware. Then Pareto and his Italian disciple Enrico Barone had shown that Mises’s charge, that socialist calculation was impossible, was incorrect, since the requisite number of supply, demand, and price equations existed under socialism as under a capitalist system. At that point, F.A. Hayek and Lionel Robbins, abandoning Mises’s extreme position, fell back on a second line of defense: that, while the calculation problem could be solved theoretically, in practice it would be too difficult. Thereby Hayek and Robbins fell back on a practical problem, or one of degree of efficiency rather than of a drastic difference in kind. But now, happily, the day has been saved for socialism, since Taylor-Lange-Lerner have shown that, by jettisoning utopian ideas of a money-less or price-less socialism, or of pricing according to a labor theory of value, the socialist planning board can solve these pesky equations simply by the good old capitalist method of trial and error.[5]

Bergson, attempting to be magisterial in his view of the debate, summed up Mises as contending that “without private ownership of, or (what comes to the same thing for Mises) a free market for the means of production, the rational evaluation of these goods for the purposes of calculating costs is ruled out…”

Bergson correctly adds that to put Mises’s point somewhat more sharply than is customary, let us imagine a Board of Supermen, with unlimited logical faculties, with a complete scale of values for the different consumers’ goods, and present and future consumption, and detailed knowledge of production techniques. Even such a Board would be unable to evaluate rationally the means of production. In the absence of a free market for these goods, decisions on resource allocation in Mises’ view necessarily would be on a haphazard basis.

Bergson sharply comments that this “argument is easily disposed of.” Lange and Schumpeter both point out that, as Pareto and Barone had shown, once tastes and techniques are given, the values of the means of production can be determined unambiguously by imputation without the intervention of a market process. The Board of Supermen could decide readily how to allocate resources so as to assure the optimum welfare. It would simply have to solve the equations of Pareto and Barone.[6]

So much for Mises. As for the Hayek-Robbins problem of practicality, Bergson adds, that can be settled by the Lange-Taylor trial-and-error method; any remaining problems are only a matter of degree of efficiency, and political choices. The Mises problem has been satisfactorily solved.

Some Fallacies of the Lange-Lerner Solution

The breathtaking naïveté of the Orthodox Line should have been evident even in the 1940s. As Hayek later chided Schumpeter on the assumption of “imputation” outside the market, this formulation “presumably means … that the valuation of the factors of production is implied in, or follows necessarily from, the valuation of consumers’ goods. But … implication is a logical relationship which can be meaningfully asserted only of propositions simultaneously present to one and the same mind.”[7]

Economists were convinced of the Lange solution because they had already come under the sway of the Walrasian general equilibrium model; Schumpeter, for example, was an ardent Walrasian. In this model, the economy is always in static general equilibrium, a changeless world in which all “data”  – tastes or value scales, alternative technologies, and lists of resources – are known to everyone, and where costs are known and always equal to price. The Walrasian world is also one of “perfect” competition, where prices are given to all managers. Indeed, both Taylor and Lange make the point that the socialist planning board will be better able to calculate than capitalist markets, since the socialist planners can ensure “perfect competition,” whereas the real world of capitalism is shot through with various sorts of “monopolies”! The socialist planners can act like the absurdly fictional Walrasian “auctioneer,” bringing about equilibrium rapidly by trial and error.

Set aside the obvious absurdity of trusting a coercive governmental monopoly to act somehow as if it were in “perfect competition” with parts of itself. Another grievous flaw in the Lange model is thinking that general equilibrium, a world of certainty where there is no room for the driving force of entrepreneurship, can somehow be used to depict the real world. The actual world is one not of changeless “givens” but of incessant change and systemic uncertainty. Because of this uncertainty, the capitalist entrepreneur, who stakes assets and resources in attempting to achieve profits and avoid losses, becomes the crucial actor in the economic system, an actor who can in no way be portrayed by a world of general equilibrium. Furthermore, it is ludicrous, as Hayek pointed out, to think of general equilibrium as the only legitimate “theory,” with all other areas or problems dismissed as mere matters of practicality and degree. No economic theory worth its salt can be worthwhile if it omits the role of the entrepreneur in an uncertain world. The Pareto-Barone-Lange, etc. “equations” is not simply excellent theory that faces problems in practice; for in order to be “good,” a theory must be useful in explaining real life.[8]

Another grave flaw in the Lange-Taylor trial-and-error approach is that it concentrates on consumer goods pricing. It is true that retailers, given the stock of a certain type of good, can clear the market by adjusting the prices of that good upward or downward. But, as Mises pointed out in his original 1920 article, consumers’ goods are not the real problem. Consumers, these “market socialists” are postulating, are free to express their values by using money they had earned on a range of consumers’ goods. Even the labor market – at least in principle[9]  – can be treated as a market with self-owning suppliers who are free to accept or reject bids for their labor and to move to different occupations. The real problem, as Mises has insisted from the beginning, is in all the intermediate markets for land and capital goods. Producers have to use land and capital resources to decide what the stocks of the various consumer goods should be. Here there are a huge number of markets where the State monopoly can only be both buyer and seller for each transaction, and these intra-monopoly, intra-state transactions permeate the most vital markets of an advanced economy – the complex lattice-work of the capital markets. And here is precisely where calculational chaos necessarily reigns, and there is no way for rationality to intrude on the immense number of decisions on the allocation of prices and factors of production in the structure of capital goods.

Mises’s Rebuttal: The Entrepreneur

Moreover, Mises’s brilliant and devastating rebuttal to his Lange-Lerner-“market socialism” critics has virtually never been considered – neither by the economics establishment nor by the post–World War II Hayekians. In both cases, the writers were eager to dispose of Mises as having safely made his pioneering contribution in 1920, but being superseded later, either by Lange-Lerner or by Hayek, as the case may be. In both cases, it was inconvenient to ponder that Mises continued to elaborate his position with a penetrating critique of his critics, or that Mises’s “extreme” formulation may, after all, have been correct.[10]

Mises began his rebuttal in Human Action by discussing the “trial-and-error” method, and pointing out that this process only works in the capitalist market. There the entrepreneurs are strongly motivated to make greater profits and to avoid losses, and further, such a criterion does not apply to the capital goods or land market under socialism where all resources are controlled by one entity, the government.

Continuing his reply, Mises pressed on to a brilliant critique, not only of socialism, but of the entire Walrasian general equilibrium model. The major fallacy of the “market socialists,” Mises pointed out, is that they look at the economic problem from the point of view of the manager of the individual firm, who seeks to make profits or avoid losses within a rigid framework of a given, external allocation of capital to each of the various branches of industry and indeed to the firm itself. In other words, the “market socialist” manager is akin, not to the real driving force of the capitalist market, the capitalist entrepreneur, but rather to the relatively economically insignificant manager of the corporate firm under capitalism. As Mises brilliantly puts it:

the cardinal fallacy implied in [market socialist] proposals is that they look at the economic problem from the perspective of the subaltern clerk whose intellectual horizon does not extend beyond subordinate tasks. They consider the structure of industrial production and the allocation of capital to the various branches and production aggregates as rigid, and do not take into account the necessity of altering this structure in order to adjust it to changes in conditions…. They fail to realize that the operations of the corporate officers consist merely in the loyal execution of the tasks entrusted to them by their bosses, the shareholders…. The operations of the managers, their buying and selling, are only a small segment of the totality of market operations. The market of the capitalist society also performs those operations which allocate the capital goods to the various branches of industry. The entrepreneurs and capitalists establish corporations and other firms, enlarge or reduce their size, dissolve them or merge them with other enterprises; they buy and sell the shares and bonds of already existing and of new corporations; they grant, withdraw, and recover credits; in short they perform all those acts the totality of which is called the capital and money market. It is these financial transactions of promoters and speculators that direct production into those channels in which it satisfies the most urgent wants of the consumers in the best possible way.[11]

Mises goes on to remind the reader that the corporate manager performs only a “managerial function,” a subsidiary service that “can never become a substitute for the entrepreneurial function.” Who are the capitalist-entrepreneurs? They are “the speculators, promoters, investors and moneylenders, [who] in determining the structure of the stock and commodity exchanges and of the money market, circumscribe the orbit within which definite tasks can be entrusted to the manager’s discretion.” The crucial question, Mises continues, is not managerial activities, but: “In which branches should production be increased or restricted, in which branches should the objective of production be altered, what new branches should be inaugurated?” In short, the crucial decisions in the capitalist economy are the allocation of capital to firms and industries. “With regard to these issues,” Mises adds, “it is vain to cite the honest corporation manager and his well-tried efficiency. Those who confuse entrepreneurship and management close their eyes to the economic problem … The capitalist system is not a managerial system; it is an entrepreneurial system.”

But here, Mises triumphantly concludes, no “market socialist” has ever suggested preserving or carrying over, much less understood the importance of, the specifically entrepreneurial functions of capitalism:

Nobody has ever suggested that the socialist commonwealth could invite the promoters and speculators to continue their speculations and then deliver their profits to the common chest. Those suggesting a quasi-market for the socialist system have never wanted to preserve the stock and commodity exchanges, the trading in futures, and the bankers and money-lenders as quasi-institutions.[12]

Mises has been cited as stating, in Human Action, that it is absurd for the socialist planning board to tell their managers to “play market,” to act as if they are owners of their firms in trying to maximize profits and avoid losses. But it is important to stress that Mises was focusing, not so much on the individual managers of socialist “firms,” but on the speculators and investors who decide the crucial allocations of capital throughout the structure of industry. It is at least conceivable that one can order a manager to play market and act as if he were enjoying the profits and suffering losses; but it is clearly ludicrous to ask investors and capital speculators to act as if their fortunes were at stake. As Mises adds:

one cannot play speculation and investment. The speculators and investors expose their own wealth, their own destiny. This fact makes them responsible to the consumers, the ultimate bosses of the capitalist economy. If one relieves them of this responsibility, one deprives them of their very character.[13]

One time, during Mises’s seminar at New York University, I asked him whether, considering the broad spectrum of economies from a purely free market economy to pure totalitarianism, he could single out one criterion according to which he could say that an economy was essentially “socialist” or whether it was a market economy. Somewhat to my surprise, he replied readily: “Yes, the key is whether the economy has a stock market.” That is, if the economy has a full-scale market in titles to land and capital goods. In short: Is the allocation of capital basically determined by government or by private owners? At the time, I did not fully understand the vital importance of Mises’s answer, which I realized recently when poring over the great merits of the Misesian, as compared to the Hayekian, analysis of the socialist calculation problem.

For Mises, in short, the key to the capitalist market economy and its successful functioning is the entrepreneurial forecasting and decision-making of private owners and investors. The key is emphatically not the more minor decisions made by corporate managers within a framework already set by entrepreneurs and the capital markets. And it is obvious that Lange, Lerner, and the other market socialists merely envisioned the relatively lesser managerial decisions. These economists, who had never grasped the function of speculation or capital markets, therefore had no idea that they would need to be or could be replicated in a socialist system.[14]  And this is not surprising, since in the Walrasian general micro-equilibrium model, there is no capital structure, there is no role for capital, and capital theory has become totally submerged into “growth theory,” that is, growth of a homogeneous “level,” or blob, of aggregate macro-capital. The allocation of capital is considered external and given, and receives no consideration.

The Structure of Capital

Joseph Schumpeter and Frank H. Knight are interesting examples of two eminent economists who were personally anti-socialist but were seduced by their Walrasian devotion to general equilibrium and their lack of a genuine capital theory into strongly endorsing the orthodox view that there is no economic calculation problem under socialism. In particular, in capital theory, both Schumpeter and Knight were disciples of J.B. Clark, who denied any role at all for time in the process of production. For Schumpeter, production takes no time because production and consumption are somehow always “synchronized.” Time is erased from the picture, even to assuming away the existence of any accumulated stocks of capital goods, and therefore of any age structure of such goods. Since production is magically synchronized, there is then no necessity for land or labor to receive advances in payment from capitalists out of accumulated savings. Schumpeter achieves this feat by sundering capital completely from its embodiment in capital goods, and limiting the concept to a money fund used to purchase such goods.[15]

Frank Knight, the doyen of the Chicago School, was also an ardent believer in the Clarkian view that time preference has no influence on interest paid by producers, and that production is synchronized so that time plays no role in the production structure. Hence, Knight believed, along with modern orthodoxy, that capital is a homogeneous, self-perpetuating blob that has nolattice-like, time-oriented structure. Knight’s fiercely anti–Böhm-Bawerkian, anti-Austrian views on capital and interest led him to a then-famous war of journal articles over capital theory during the 1930s, a war he won by default when Austrianism disappeared because of the Keynesian evolution.[16]

In his negative review of Mises’s Socialism, Frank Knight, after hailing Lange’s “excellent” 1936 article, brusquely dismisses the socialist calculation debate as “largely sound and fury.” To Knight, it is simply “truistical” that the “technical basis of economic life” would continue as before under socialism, and that therefore “the managers of various technical units in production – farms, factories, railways, stores, etc. – would carry on in essentially the same way.” Note, there is no reference whatever to the crucial capital market, or to the allocation of capital to various branches of production. If capital is an automatically renewing homogeneous blob, all one need worry about is growth in the amount of that blob. Hence, Knight concludes that “socialism is a political problem, to be discussed in terms of social and political psychology, and economic theory has relatively little to say about it.”[17]  Certainly, that is true of Knight’s orthodox-Chicagoite brand of economic theory!

It is instructive to compare the naïveté and the brusque dismissal of the problem by Schumpeter and Knight with the penetrating Misesian critique of socialism by Professor Georg Halm:

Because capital is no longer owned by many private persons, but by the community, which itself disposes of it directly, a rate of interest can no longer be determined. A pricing process is always possible only when demand and supply meet in a market…. In the socialist economy … there can be no demand and no supply when the capital from the outset is in the possession of its intending user, in this case the socialistic central authority.

Now it might perhaps be suggested that, since the rate of interest cannot be determined automatically, it should be fixed by the central authority. But this likewise would be quite impossible. It is true that the central authority would know quite well how many capital goods of a given kind it possessed or could procure…; it would know the capacity of the existing plant in the various branches of production; but it would not know how scarce capital was. For the scarcity of means of production must always be related to the demand for them, whose fluctuations give rise to variations in the value of the good in question…

If it should be objected that a price for consumption-goods would be established, and that in consequence the intensity of the demand and so the value of the means of production would be determinate, this would be a further serious mistake…. The demand for means of production, labor and capital goods, is only indirect.

Halm goes on to add that if there were only one single factor of production in making consumers’ goods, the socialist “market” might be able to determine its proper price. But this can not be true in the real world where several factors of production take part in the production of goods in various markets.

Halm then adds that the central authority, contrary to his above concession, would not even be able to find out how much capital it is employing. For capital goods are heterogeneous, and therefore how “can the total plant of one factory be compared with that of another? How can a comparison be made between the values of even only two capital-goods?” In short, while under capitalism such comparisons can be made by means of money prices set on the market for every good, in the socialist economy the absence of genuine money prices arising out of a market precludes any such value comparisons. Hence, there is also no way for a socialist system to rationally estimate the costs (which are dependent on prices in factor markets) of any process of production.[18]

Mises’s Rebuttal: Valuation and Monetary Appraisement

In his original 1920 article, Mises emphasized that “as soon as one gives up the conception of a freely established monetary price for goods of a higher order, rational production becomes completely impossible.” Mises then states, prophetically:

One may anticipate the nature of the future socialist society. There will be hundreds and thousands of factories in operation. Very few of these will be producing wares ready for use; in the majority of cases what will be manufactured will be unfinished goods and production goods. All these concerns will be interrelated. Every good will go through a whole series of stages before it is ready for use. In the ceaseless toil and moil of this process, however, the administration will be without any means of testing their bearings. It will never be able to determine whether a given good has not been kept for a superfluous length of time in the necessary processes of production, or whether work and material have not been wasted in its completion. How will it be able to decide whether this or that method of production is the more profitable? At best it will only be able to compare the quality and quantity of the consumable end-product produced, but will in the rarest cases be in a position to compare the expenses entailed in production.

Mises points out that while the government may be able to know what ends it is trying to achieve, and what goods are most urgently needed, it will have no way of knowing the other crucial element required for rational economic calculation: valuation of the various means of production, which the capitalist market can achieve by the determination of money prices for all products and their factors.[19]

Mises concludes that, in the socialist economy “in place of the economy of the ‘anarchic’ method of production, recourse will be had to the senseless output of an absurd apparatus. The wheels will turn, but will run to no effect.”[20]

Moreover, in his later rebuttal to the champions of the Pareto-Barone equations, Mises points out that the crucial problem is not simply that the economy is not and can never be in the general equilibrium state described by these differential equations. In addition to other grave problems with the equilibrium model (e.g.: that the socialist planners do not now know their value scales in future equilibrium; that money and monetary exchange cannot fit into the model; that units of productive factors are neither perfectly divisible nor infinitesimal – and that marginal utilities, of different people cannot be equated – on the market or anywhere else), the equations “do not provide any information about the human actions by means of which the hypothetical state of equilibrium” has been or can be reached. In short, the equations offer no information whatever on how to get from the existing disequilibrium state to the general equilibrium goal.

In particular, Mises points out, “even if, for the sake of argument, we assume that a miraculous inspiration has enabled the director without economic calculation to solve all problems concerning the most advantageous arrangement of all production activities and that the price image of the final goal he must aim at is present to his mind,” there remain crucial problems on the path from here to there. For the socialist planner does not start from scratch and then build a capital goods structure most perfectly designed to meet his goals. He necessarily starts with a capital goods structure produced at many stages of the past and determined by past consumer values and past technological methods of production. There are different degrees of such past determinants built into the existing capital structure, and anyone starting today must use these resources as best he can to meet present and expected future goals. For these heterogeneous choices, no mathematical equations can be of the slightest use.[21]

Finally, the unique root of Mises’s position, and one that distinguishes him and his “socialist impossibility” thesis from Hayek and the Hayekians, has been neglected until the present day. And this neglect has persisted despite Mises’s own explicit avowal in his memoirs of the root, and groundwork of his calculation thesis.[22]  For Mises was not, like Hayek and his followers, concentrating on the flaws in the general equilibrium model when he arrived at his position; nor was he led to his discussion solely by the triumph of the socialist revolution in the Soviet Union.

For Mises records that his position on socialist calculation emerged out of his first great work, The Theory of Money and Credit (1912). In the course of that notable integration of monetary theory and “micro” marginal utility theory, Mises was one of the very first to realize that subjective valuations of the consumers (and of laborers) on the market are purely ordinal, and are in no way measurable. But market prices are cardinal and measurable in terms of money, and market money prices bring goods into cardinal comparability and calculation (e.g., a $10 hat is “worth” five times as much as a $2 loaf of bread).[23]  But Mises realized that this insight meant it was absurd to say (as Schumpeter would) that the market “imputes” the values of consumer goods back to the factors of production. Values are not directly “imputed”; the imputation process works only indirectly, by means of money prices on the market. Therefore socialism, necessarily devoid of a market in land and capital goods, must lack the ability to calculate and compare goods and services, and therefore any rational allocation of productive resources under socialism is indeed impossible.[24]

For Mises, then, his work on socialist calculation was part and parcel of his expanded integration of direct and monetary exchange – of “micro” and “macro” – that he had begun but not yet completed in The Theory of Money and Credit.[25]

Fallacies of Hayek and Kirzner

The orthodox line of the 1930s and ’40s was wrong in claiming that Hayek and his followers (such as Lionel Robbins) abandoned Mises’s “theoretical” approach by bowing down to the Pareto-Barone equations, falling back on “practical” objections to socialist planning.[26]  As we have already seen, Hayek scarcely ceded to mathematical equations of general equilibrium the monopoly of correct economic theory. But it is also true that Hayek and his followers fatally and radically changed the entire focus of their “Austrian” position, either by misconstruing Mises’s argument or by consciously though silently shifting the crucial terms of the debate.

It is no accident, in short, that Hayek and the Hayekians dropped Mises’s term “impossible” as embarrassingly extreme and imprecise. For Hayek, the major problem for the socialist planning board is its lack of knowledge. Without a market, the socialist planning board has no means of knowing the value-scales of the consumers, or the supply of resources or available technologies. The capitalist economy is, for Hayek, a valuable means of disseminating knowledge from one individual to another through the pricing “signals” of the free market. A static, general equilibrium economy would be able to overcome the Hayekian problem of dispersed knowledge, since eventually all data would come to be known by all, but the ever-changing, uncertain data of the real world prevents the socialist planning board from acquiring such knowledge. Hence, as is usual for Hayek, the argument for the free economy and against statism rests on an argument from ignorance.

But to Mises the central problem is not “knowledge.” He explicitly points out that even if the socialist planners knew perfectly, and eagerly wished to satisfy, the value priorities of the consumers, and even if the planners enjoyed a perfect knowledge of all resources and all technologies, they still would not be able to calculate, for lack of a price system of the means of production. The problem is not knowledge, then, but calculability. As Professor Salerno points out, the knowledge conveyed by present – or immediate “past” – prices is consumer valuations, technologies, supplies, etc. of the immediate or recent past. But what acting man is interested in, in committing resources into production and sale, is future prices, and the present committing of resources is accomplished by the entrepreneur, whose function is to appraise – to anticipate – future prices, and to allocate resources accordingly. It is precisely this central and vital role of the appraising entrepreneur, driven by the quest for profits and the avoidance of losses, that cannot be fulfilled by the socialist planning board, for lack of a market in the means of production. Without such a market, there are no genuine money prices and therefore no means for the entrepreneur to calculate and appraise in cardinal monetary terms.

More philosophically, the entire Hayekian emphasis on “knowledge” is misplaced and misconceived. The purpose of human action is not to “know” but to employ means to satisfy goals. As Salerno perceptively summarizes Mises’s position:

The price system is not – and praxeologically cannot be – a mechanism for economizing and communicating the knowledge relevant to production plans [the Hayekian position]. The realized prices of history are an accessory of appraisement, the mental operation in which the faculty of understanding is used to assess the quantitative structure of price relationships which corresponds to an anticipated constellation of economic data. Nor are anticipated future prices tools of knowledge; they are instruments of economic calculation. And economic calculation itself is not the means of acquiring knowledge, but the very prerequisite of rational action within the setting of the social division of labor. It provides individuals, whatever their endowment of knowledge, the indispensable tool for attaining a mental grasp and comparison of the means and ends of social action.[27]

In a recent article, Professor Israel Kirzner argues for the Hayekian position. For Hayek and for Kirzner, the market is a “discovery procedure,” that is, an unfolding of knowledge. There is, in this view of the market and of the world, no genuine recognition of the entrepreneur, not as a “discoverer,” but as a dynamic risk taker, risking losses if his appraisal and forecast go awry. Kirzner’s commitment to the “discovery process” fits all too well with his own original concept of the entrepreneurial function as being that of “alertness,” and of different entrepreneurs as being variously alert to the opportunities that they see and discover. But this outlook totally misconceives the role of the entrepreneur. The entrepreneur is not simply “alert”; he forecasts; he appraises; he meets and bears risk and uncertainty by questing for profits and risking losses. As Salerno points out, for all their talk of dynamism and uncertainty, the Hayek-Kirzner “entrepreneur” is curiously bloodless and passive, receiving and passively imbibing knowledge imparted to him by the market. The Hayek-Kirzner entrepreneur is far closer than they like to think to theWalrasian automaton – to the fictional “auctioneer” who avoids all real trades in the marketplace.[28]

Unfortunately, while lucidly expounding the Hayekian position, Kirzner obfuscates the history of the debate by claiming that the later Mises, along with Hayek, changed his position (or, at the least, “elaborated” it) from his original, “static” view of 1920. But on the contrary, as Salerno points out, the “later” Mises explicitly spurned uncertainty of the future as the key to the calculation problem. The key to the calculation question, stated Mises in Human Action, is not that “all human action points to the future and the future is always uncertain.” No, socialism has

quite a different problem. Today we calculate from the point of view of our present knowledge and of our present anticipation of future conditions. We do not deal with the problem of whether or not the [socialist] director will be able to anticipate future conditions. What we have in mind is that the director cannot calculate from the point of view of his own present value judgments and his own present anticipation of future conditions, whatever they may be. If he invests today in the canning industry, it may happen that a change in consumers’ tastes or in the hygienic opinions concerning the wholesomeness of canned food will one day turn his investment into a malinvestment. But how can he find out today how to build and equip a cannery most economically?

Some railroad lines constructed at the turn of the century would not have been built if the people had at that time anticipated the impending advance of motoring and aviation. But those who at the time built railroads knew which of the various possible alternatives for the realization of their plans they had to choose from the point of view of their appraisements and anticipations and of the market prices of their day in which the valuations of the consumers were reflected. It is precisely this insight that the director will lack. He will be like a sailor on the high seas unfamiliar with the methods of navigation…[29][30]

Solving Equations and Lange’s Last Word

One of the unfortunate formulations of Hayek and the Hayekians in the 1930s, giving rise to the general misunderstanding that the only problems of socialist planning are “practical” not “theoretical,” was their stress on the alleged difficulty of socialist planners in computing or solving all the demand and supply functions, all the “simultaneous differential equations” needed to plan prices and the allocation of resources. If socialistic planning is to rely on the Pareto-Barone equations, then how will all of them be known, especially in a world of necessarily changing data of values, resources, and technology?

Lionel Robbins began this equation-difficulty approach in his study of the 1929 depression, The Great Depression. Conceding, with Mises, that the planners could determine consumer preferences by allowing a market in consumer goods, Robbins correctly added that the socialist planners would also have to “know the relative efficiencies of the factors of production in producing all the possible alternatives.” Robbins then unfortunately added:

On paper we can conceive this problem to be solved by a series of mathematical calculations. We can imagine tables to be drawn up expressing the consumers demands … And we can conceive technical information giving us the productivity … which could be produced by each of the various possible combinations of the factors of production. On such a basis a system of simultaneous equations could be constructed whose solution would show the equilibrium distribution of factors and the equilibrium production of commodities.

But in practice this solution is quite unworkable. It would necessitate the drawing up of millions of equations on the basis of millions of statistical tables based on many more millions of individual computations. By the time the equations were solved, the information on which they were based would have become obsolete and they would need to be calculated anew.[31]

While Robbins’s strictures about changes in data were and still are true enough, they helped divert the emphasis from Mises’s even-if-static and full-knowledge calculation approach, to Hayek’s emphasis on uncertainty and change. More important, they gave rise to the general myth that Robbins’s strictures against socialism, unlike Mises’s, were only “practical” in the sense of not being able to calculate all these simultaneous equations. Furthermore, in the concluding essay in his Collectivist Economic Planning, Hayek set forth all the reasons why the planners could not know essential data, one of which is that they would have to solve “hundreds of thousands” of unknowns. But

this means that, at each successive moment, every one of the decisions would have to be based on the solution of an equal number of simultaneous differential equations, a task which, with any of the means known at present, could not be carried out in a lifetime. And yet these decisions would … have to be made continuously…[32]

It is fascinating to note the twists and turns in Oskar Lange’s reaction to the equation-solving argument. In his 1936 article, which was long considered the last word on the subject, Lange ridiculed the very terms of the problem. Adopting his “quasi-market” socialist approach, and ignoring the crucial Misesian problem of the necessary absence of any market in land or capital, Lange simply stated that there is no need for planners to worry about these equations, since they would be “solved” by the socialist market:

Neither would the Central Planning Board have to solve hundreds of thousands … or millions … of equations. The only “equations” which would have to be “solved” would be those of the consumers and the managers of production plants. These are exactly the same “equations” which are solved in the present economic system and the persons who do the “solving” are the same also. Consumers … and managers … “solve” them by a method of trial and error… And only few of them have been graduated in higher mathematics. Professor Hayek and Professor Robbins themselves “solve” at least hundreds of equations daily, for instance, in buying a newspaper or in deciding to take a meal in a restaurant, and presumably they do not use determinants or Jacobians for that purpose.[33]

Thus, the orthodox neoclassical economic establishment had settled the calculation dispute with Lange-Lerner the acclaimed winner. Accordingly, when the end of World War II brought communism/socialism to his native Poland, Professor Oskar Lange left the plush confines of the University of Chicago to play a major role in bringing his theories to bear on the brave new world of socialist Poland. Lange became Polish ambassador to the United States, then Polish delegate to the United Nations Security Council, and finally chairman of the Polish Economic Council. And yet not once in this entire period or later, did Poland – or any other communist government, for that matter – attempt to put into practice anything remotely like Lange’s fictive accounting-type, play-at-market socialism. Instead, they all put into effect the good old Stalinist command-economy model.

It did not take long for Oskar Lange to adjust to the persistence of the Stalinist Model. Indeed, it turns out that Lange, in post-war Poland, argued strongly for the historical necessity of the persistence of the Stalinist model as opposed to his own market socialism. Arguing against his own quasi-decentralized market-socialist solution, Lange, in 1958, revealed that “in Poland, we had some discussions whether such a period of highly centralized planning and management was historical necessity or a great political mistake. Personally, I hold the view that it was a historical necessity.”

Why? Lange now claimed:

1. that the “very process of the social revolution which liquidates one social system and establishes another requires centralized disposal of resources by the new revolutionary state, and consequently centralized management and planning.”
2. second, in underdeveloped countries – and which socialist country was not underdeveloped? – “Socialist industrialization, and particularly very rapid industrialization, which was necessary in the first socialist countries, particularly in the Soviet Union … requires centralized disposal of resources.” Soon, however, Lange promised, the dialectic of history will require the socialist government to organize quasi-market, decentralized decision-making within the overall plan.[34]

Shortly before his death in 1965, however, Oskar Lange, in his neglected last word on the socialist calculation debate, implicitly revealed that his socialist-market “solution” had been little more than a hoax, to be jettisoned quickly when he indeed saw a way for the planning board to solve all those hundreds of thousands or millions of simultaneous equations! Strangely gone was his gibe that everyone “solves equations” every day without having to do so formally. Instead, technology had now supposedly come to the rescue of the planning board! As Lange put it:

Were I to rewrite my essay [“On the Economic Theory of Socialism”] today my task would be much simpler. My answer to Hayek and Robbins would be: so what’s the trouble? Let us put the simultaneous equations on an electronic computer and we shall obtain the solution in less than a second. The market process with its cumbersome tâtonnements appears old-fashioned. Indeed, it may be considered as a computing device of the pre-electronic age.[35]

Indeed, Lange claims that the computer is superior to the market, because the computer can perform long-range planning far better, since it somehow already knows “future shadow prices” which markets cannot seem to obtain.

Lange’s naïve enthusiasm for the magical planning qualities of the computer in its early days can only be considered a grisly joke to the economists and the people in the socialist countries who have seen their economies go inexorably from bad to far worse despite the use of computers. Lange apparently never became familiar with the computer adage, GIGO (“garbage in, garbage out”). Nor could he have become familiar with the recent estimate of a top Soviet economist that, even assuming that the planning board and its computers could learn the correct data, it would take even the current generation of computers 30,000 years to process the information and allocate the resources.[36]

But there is a more important flaw in Lange’s last article than his naïveté about the magical powers of the then-new technology of the computer. His eagerness to embrace a way of solving those equations he earlier had claimed didn’t need conscious solving demonstrates that he had been disingenuous in claiming that his pseudomarket trial-and-error method would provide a facile way for the socialist society to solve the calculation problem.

Socialist Impossibility and the Argument from Existence

Ever since 1917, or at least since Stalin’s great leap forward into socialism in the early 1930s, the defenders of the possibility of socialism against Mises’s strictures had one final, clinching, fallback argument. When all the arguments over general equilibrium or equations or entrepreneurship or Walrasian tâtonnements or the command economy or pseudo-markets had been hashed over, the defenders of socialism could simply fall back on one point: Well, socialism exists, doesn’t it? When all is said and done, it exists, and therefore it must be, for one reason or another, possible. Mises must clearly be wrong, even if the “practical” arguments of Hayek or Robbins, arguments of mere degrees of efficiency, need to be soberly considered. At the end of his celebrated survey essay on socialist economics Professor Abram Bergson put the point starkly:

there can hardly be any room for debate: of course, socialism can work. On this, Lange certainly is convincing. If this is the sole issue, however, one wonders whether at this stage such an elaborate theoretic demonstration is in order. After all, the Soviet planned economy has been operating for thirty years. Whatever else may be said of it, it has not broken down.[37]

In the first place, this triumphal conclusion now rings hollow, since the economies of the Soviet Union and the other socialist bloc countries have now manifestly broken down. And now it also turns out that the Soviet GNP and production figures that Bergson, the CIA, and other Sovietologists have been taking at face value for decades have been nothing but a pack of lies, designed to deceive not the United States, but the Soviet managers’ own ruling elite. Even now, Western Sovietologists are reluctant to believe the Soviet economists who are finally trying to tell them the truth about these alleged and much revered data.

But apart from all that, this sort of seemingly decisive empiricist counter to the Misesian critique reveals the perils of using allegedly simple and brute “facts” to rebut theory in the sciences of human action. For why must we assume that the Soviet Union and the Eastern European countries ever really enjoyed full and complete socialism? There are many reasons to believe that, try as they might, the communist rulers were never able to impose total socialism and central planning. For one thing, it is now known that the entire Soviet economy and society has been shot through with a vast network of black markets and evasions of controls, fueled by a pervasive system of bribery known as blat to allow escape from those controls. Managers who could not meet their annual production quotas were approached by illegal entrepreneurs and labor teams to help them meet the quotas and get paid off the books. And black markets in foreign exchange have long been familiar to every tourist. Long before the Eastern European collapse of communism, these countries stopped trying to stamp out their black markets in hard currency, even though they were blatantly visible in the streets of Warsaw, Budapest, and Prague. Without uncontrolled black markets fueled by bribery, the communist economies may well have collapsed long ago.[38]  This historical point has also been bolstered by Michael Polanyi’s “span of control” theory, which denies the possibility of effective central planning from a rather different viewpoint than Mises’s.[39]

But the decisive rebuttal has, once again, been leveled by Mises in Human Action: the Soviet Union and Eastern European economies were not fully socialist because they were, after all, islands in a world capitalist market. The communist planners were therefore able, albeit clumsily and imperfectly, to use prices set by world markets as indispensable guidelines for the pricing and allocation of capital resources. As Mises pointed out:

People did not realize that these were not isolated social systems. They were operating in an environment in which the price system still worked. They could resort to economic calculation on the ground of the prices established abroad. Without the aid of these prices their actions would have been aimless and planless. Only because they were able to refer to these foreign prices were they able to calculate, to keep books, and to prepare their much talked about plans.[40]

Mises’s insight was confirmed as early as the mid-1950s, when the British economist Peter Wiles visited Poland, where Oskar Lange was helping to plan Polish socialism. Wiles asked the Polish economists how they planned the economic system. As Wiles reported:

What actually happens is that “world prices”, i.e. capitalist world prices, are used in all intra-[Soviet] bloc trade. They are translated into rubles … entered into bilateral clearing accounts.

Wiles then asked the Polish communist planners the crucial question. Since the Poles were, as good Marxist-Leninists, presumably committed to the triumph, as soon as possible, of world-wide socialism, Wiles asked: “What would you do if there were no capitalist world” from which you could obtain all those crucial prices? The Polish planners’ rather cynical answer: “We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.” Wiles added that “In the case of electricity the bridge is already under their feet: there has been great difficulty in pricing it since there is no world market.”[41]

But fortunately for the world and for the Polish planners themselves, they were never truly forced to cross that bridge.

Epilogue: The End of Socialism and Mises’s Statue

In his supposedly definitive article of 1936 vindicating economic calculation under socialism, Oskar Lange delivered a once-famous gibe at Ludwig von Mises. Lange began his essay by ironically hailing Mises’s services to socialism: “Socialists have certainly good reason to be grateful to Professor Mises, the great advocatus diaboli of their cause. For it was his powerful challenge that forced the socialists to recognize the importance of an adequate system of economic accounting … the merit of having caused the socialists to approach this problem systematically belongs entirely to Professor Mises.” Lange then went on to taunt Mises:

Both as an expression of recognition for the great service rendered by him and as a memento of the prime importance of sound economic accounting, a statue of Professor Mises ought to occupy an honorable place in the great hall of the Ministry of Socialization or of the Central Planning Board of the socialist state.

Lange went on to say that “I am afraid that Professor Mises would scarcely enjoy what seemed the only adequate way to repay the debt of recognition incurred by the socialists … ” For one thing, Lange concluded, to complete Mises’s discomfiture

a socialist teacher might invite his students in a class on dialectical materialism to go and look at the statue, in order to exemplify the Hegelian List der Vernuft[cunning of Reason] which made even the staunchest of bourgeois economists unwittingly serve the proletarian cause.[42]

Curiously enough, Lange, during his years as socialist planner in Poland, never got around to erecting the statue to Mises at the Ministry of Socialization in Warsaw. Perhaps socialist planning was not successful enough to accord Mises that honor – or perhaps there were not enough resources to build the statue. In any case, the opportunity has been lost. The countries of Eastern Europe now stand in the rubble wrought by what used to be called in the 1930s “the great socialist experiment.” Emerging gloriously out of the rubble of the collapse of socialism are a myriad of Misesian economists, to whom socialism is little more than a grisly joke. Even as early as the 1960s it was a common quip among economists that, at international economic conferences, “the Western economists talk about the glories of planning while the Eastern economists talk about the virtues of the free market.” Now Misesian economists are springing out of the ruins of socialism in Poland, Lithuania, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Yugoslavia (especially Croatia and Slovenia) and the Soviet Union. Neither socialist planning nor Marxism-Leninism hold any charms for the economists of the once-socialist nations.

In all of these countries, the giant statues of Lenin are being unceremoniously toppled from the public squares. Whether or not the coming free societies of Eastern Europe choose to replace them with statues of Ludwig von Mises, as the prophet of their liberation, one thing seems certain: there will be no statues erected to Oskar Lange in Cracow or Warsaw. It is hard to see how even the cunning of Reason and the Hegelian dialectic can make Lange out to be a prophet or an important contributor to the laissez-faire Polish economy of the future. Perhaps the closet approach was a bitter quip pervading Eastern Europe during the revolutionary year of 1989: “Communism can be defined as the longest route from capitalism to capitalism.”

Notes

[1]  Mises’s article, published in 1920 in German, “Die Wirtschaftsrechnung im sozialistischen Gemeinwesen,” was only made available in English in 1935: Mises, “Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth,” in F. A. Hayek, ed., Collectivist Economic Planning (London: Routledge and Sons, 1935), pp. 87–130. The article was republished as a monograph by the Mises Institute with a notable postscript by Professor Joseph T. Salerno (Ludwig von Mises, Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth [Auburn, Ma.: Ludwig von Mises Institute, 1990]).

[2]  Alexander Gray, The Socialist Tradition (London: Longmans, Green, 1946), p. 90.

[3]  Oskar Lange’s well-known article was originally in two parts: “On the Economic Theory of Socialism,” Review of Economic Studies 4 (October 1936): 53–71, and ibid. 5 (February 1937): 132–42; Fred M. Taylor’s article was “The Guidance of Production in a Socialist State,” American Economic Review 19 (March 1929); Taylor was reprinted and Lange revised and published in Oskar Lange and Fred M. Taylor, On the Economic Theory of Socialism, B. Lippincott, ed. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1938).

[4]  Abram Bergson, “Socialist Economics,” in H.S. Ellls, ed., A Survey of Contemporary Economics (Philadelphia: Blakiston, 1948), pp. 412–48.

[5]  Lange was aided in this construction by being able to use Hayek’s collection of articles on the subject, which had just been published the year before his first article, as a useful foil. Hayek’s volume included the seminal article by Mises, other contributions by Pierson and Halm, two articles by Hayek himself, and the alleged refutation of Mises by Barone. See Hayek, Collectivist Economic Planning.

[6]  Bergson, “Socialist Economics,” p. 446.

[7]  F.A. Hayek, “The Use of Knowledge in Society” (1945), in Hayek, Individualism and Economic Order (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1948), p. 90.

[8]  The silliness of hailing Barone’s essay as a refutation of Mises is highlighted by the fact that Barone’s article was published in 1908, twelve years before Mises’s article which it is supposed to have refuted. The data was well known to, and made no impression upon, Ludwig von Mises. Moreover, Barone and Pareto themselves had only scorn for any notion that their equations could aid socialist planning. See Trygve J. B. Hoff, Economic Calculation in the Socialist Society (1949; Indianapolis, Ind.: Liberty Press, 1981), pp. 222–23.

[9]  Here, as in other parts of his argument – as we shall see further below – Mises is leaning over backward to concede the market socialists their best case, and is not considering whether such free consumer or labor markets are really likely in a world where the state is the only seller, as well as the only purchaser, of labor.

[10]  Mises’s later rebuttal is in his Human Action (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1949), pp. 694–711. For the establishment, the debate was supposed to be over by 1938. For an example of a Hayekian survey of the debate that does not bother to so much as mention Human Action, see Karen I. Vaughn, “Introduction,” in Hoff, Economic Calculation, pp. ix-xxxvii. Indeed, in an earlier paper, Vaughn had sneered that “Mises’ so-called final refutation in Human Action is mostly polemic and glosses over the real problems….” Vaughn, “Critical Discussion of the Four Papers,” in Lawrence Moss, ed. The Economics of Ludwig von Mises (Kansas City: Sheed and Ward, 1976), p. 107. The Hayekian doctrine will be treated further below.

For a refreshing example of an outstanding Misesian contribution to the debate that does not neglect or deprecate Human Action but rather builds upon it, see Joseph T. Salerno, “Ludwig von Mises as Social Rationalist,” Review of Austrian Economics 4 (1990): 36–48. Also see Salerno, “Why Socialist Economy is Impossible,” a Postscript to Mises, Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth (Auburn, Ala.: Ludwig von Mises Institute, 1990).

[11]  Mises, Human Action, pp. 703–04.

[12]  Ibid., pp. 704–05.

[13]  Ibid., p. 705.

[14]  The fact that some socialist bloc countries, such as Hungary, now permit a stock market, albeit small and truncated, and that other ex-communist countries are seriously considering introducing such capital markets, demonstrates the enormous importance of the de-socialization now under way in Eastern Europe.

[15]  See Murray N. Rothbard, “Breaking Out of the Walrasian Box: The Cases of Schumpeter and Hansen,” Review of Austrian Economics 1 (1987): 98–100, 107. (Available in PDF.)

[16]  On Knight vs. Hayek, Machlup, and Boulding in the 1930s. see F. A. Hayek, “The Mythology of Capital,” in W. Fellner and B. Haley, eds., Readings in the Theory of lncome Distribution (Philadelphia: Blakiston, 1946), pp. 355–83. For a Knightian attack on the Austrian discounted marginal productivity theory on behalf of what is now the orthodox undiscounted (by time-preference) marginal productivity theory, see Earl Rolph, “The Discounted Marginal Productivity Doctrine,” ibid., pp. 278–93. For an Austrian rebuttal, see Murray N. Rothbard, Man, Economy, and State, vol. 1 (Los Angeles: Nash, 1970), pp. 431–33; and Walter Block, “The DMVP-MVP Controversy: A Note,” Review of Austrian Economics 4 (1990): 199–207. (Available in PDF.)

[17]  “Frank H. Knight, “Review of Ludwig von Mises, Socialism,” Journal of Political Economy 46 (April 1938): 267–68. In another review in the same issue of the journal, Knight claims that there would be a “capital market” under socialism, but it is clear that he is referring only to a market for loans, and not to a genuine market in equities throughout the production structure. Here again, Mises has a devastating critique of this sort of scheme in Human Action, pointing out that managers bidding for governmental planning board funds would not be bidding for or staking their own property, and hence they would “not be restrained by any financial dangers they themselves run in promising too high a rate of interest for the funds borrowed…. All the hazards of this insecurity fall only upon society, the exclusive owner of all resources available. If the director were without hesitation to allocate the funds available to those who bid most, he would simply … abdicate in favor of the least scrupulous visionaries and scoundrels.” See Knight, “Two Economists on Socialism,” Journal of Political Economy 46 (April 1938): 248; and Mises, Human Action, p. 705.

[18]  Georg Halm, “Further Considerations on the Possibility of Adequate Calculation in a Socialist Community,” in Hayek, Collectivist Economic Planning, pp. 162–65. Also see ibid., pp. 13–200.

[19]  Mises, “Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth,” pp. 106–08.

[20]  Ibid., p. 106. This conclusion of 1920 is strikingly close to the quip common in the Poland of 1989, as reported by Professor Krzyztof Ostazewski of the University of Louisville: that the socialist planned economy is “a value-shredding machine run by an imbecile.”

[21]  Mises, Human Action, pp. 706–09: As Mises puts it: “socialists of all shades of opinion, repeat again and again that what makes the achievement of their ambitious plans realizable is the enormous wealth hitherto accumulated. But in the same breath, they disregard the fact that this wealth consists to a great extent in capital goods produced in the past and more or less antiquated from the point of view of our present valuations and technologica1 knowledge.” Ibid. p. 710.

[22]  In Mises’s Notes and Recollections (Spring Mills, Penn.: Libertarian Press, 1978), p. 112. Also see the discussion in Murray N. Rothbard, Ludwig von Mises: Scholar, Creator, Hero (Auburn, Ala.: Ludwig von Mises Institute, 1988), pp. 35–38.

[23]  On the market, then, consumers evaluate goods and services ordinally, whereas entrepreneurs appraise (estimate and forecast future prices) cardinally. On valuation and appraisement, see Mises, Human Action, pp. 327–330; Salerno, “Mises as Social Rationalist,” pp. 39–49; and Salerno, “Socialist Economy is Impossible.”

[24]  Mises says in his memoirs: “They [the socialists] failed to see the very first challenge: How can economic action that always consists of preferring and setting aside, that is, of making unequal valuations, be transformed into equal valuations, by the use of equations? Thus the advocates of socialism came up with the absurd recommendation of substituting equations of mathematical catallactics, depicting an image from which human action is eliminated, for the monetary calculation in the market economy.” Mises, Notes and Recollections, p. 112.

[25]  This integration was later completed by his business-cycle theory in the 1920s, and then in his monumental treatise Human Action.

[26]  Except for the unfortunate emphasis of Hayek and Robbins on the alleged socialist difficulty of computing or “counting” the equations. See below.

[27]  Salerno, “Mises as Social Rationalist,” p. 44.

[28]  Israel M. Kirzner, “The Economic Calculation Debate: Lessons for Austrians,” Review of Austrian Economics 2 (1988): 1–18 [PDF]. Hayek coined the term “discovery procedure” in F. A. Hayek, “Competition as a Discovery Procedure,” in New Studies in Philosophy, Politics, Economics and the History of Ideas (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), pp. 179–90. For a critique of Kirzner’s concept of entrepreneurship, see Murray N. Rothbard, “Professor Hébert on Entrepreneurship,” Journal of Libertarian Studies 7 (Fall 1985): 281–85 [PDF]. For Hayek’s own contributions to the socialist calculation debate after Lange-Lerner, see F.A. Hayek, “Socialist Calculation 111: The Competitive ‘Solution'” (1940), and “The Use of Knowledge in Society,” (1945), in Individualism and Economic Order, pp. 181–208; 77–91.

[29]  Mises, Human Action, p. 696. Also see Salerno, “Mises as social Rationalist,” pp. 46–47ff.

[30]  Kirzner apparently believes that Mises’s concentration on entrepreneurship in his Human Action discussion of socialism demonstrates that Mises had gone over to the Hayek position. Kirzner seems to overlook the vast difference between Mises’s forecasting and appraisement view of entrepreneurship and his own “alertness” doctrine, which totally leaves out the possibility of entrepreneurial loss.

[31]  Lionel Robbins, The Great Depression (New York: Macmillan, 1934), p. 151.

[32]  F.A. Hayek, The Present State of the Debate,” in Hayek, Collectivist Economic Planning, p. 212.

[33]  Oskar Lange, “On the Economic Theory of Socialism, Part One,” p. 67. The Norwegian economist and defender of Mises’s position, Trygve Hoff, commented that “Quite apart from the fact that the equations the central authority would have to solve are of quite a different nature to those of the private individual, the latter tend to solve themselves automatically, which Dr. Lange must admit the former do not.” Hoff, Economic Calculation in the Socialist Society, pp. 221–22. This excellent book on the socialist calculation controversy was originally published in Norwegian in 1938. In contrast to Bergson’s almost contemporaneous survey article, Hoff’s English-language translation, published in 1949 in Britain but not in the United States, sank without a trace.

[34]  Oskar Lange, “The Role of Planning in Socialist Economy,” in The Political Economy of Socialism (1958) in M. Bornstein, ed., Comparative Economic Systems, rev. ed. (Homewood, Ill.: Richard D. Irwin, 1969), pp. 170–71.

[35]  Oskar Lange, “The Computer and the Market,” in A. Nove and D. Nuti, eds. Socialist Economics (London: Penguin Books, 1972), pp. 401–02.

[36]  Yuri M. Maltsev, “Soviet Economic Reforms: An Inside Perspective,” The Freeman (March 1990).

[37]  Bergson, “Socialist Economics,” p. 447.

[38]  One source on this pervasive system in the Soviet Union is Konstantin M. Simis, USSR: The Corrupt Society (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1982).

[39]  Michael Polanyi, The Logic of Liberty (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1951), pp. 111–37 and passim.

[40]  Mises, Human Action, pp. 698–99.

[41]  Peter J. D. Wiles, “Changing Economic Thought in Poland,” Oxford Economic Papers 9 (June 1957): 202–03. Also see Murray N. Rothbard, “Ludwig von Mises and Economic Calculation Under Socialism,” in Lawrence Moss, The Economics of Ludwig von Mises, pp. 67–77.

[42]  Lange, “The Economic Theory of Socialism,” p. 53.

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The road to Civil War must be divided into two parts:

1.  the causes of the controversy over slavery leading to secession, and
2.  the immediate causes of the war itself.

The reason for such split is that secession need not have led to Civil War, despite the assumption to the contrary by most historians.

The basic root of the controversy over slavery to secession, in my opinion, was the aggressive, expansionist aims of the Southern “slavocracy.” Very few Northerners proposed to abolish slavery in the Southern states by aggressive war; the objection – and certainly a proper one – was to the attempt of the Southern slavocracy to extend the slave system to the Western territories. The apologia that the Southerners feared that eventually they might be outnumbered and that federal abolition might ensue is no excuse; it is the age-old alibi for “preventive war.” Not only did the expansionist aim of the slavocracy to protect slavery by federal fiat in the territories as “property” aim to foist the immoral system of slavery on Western territories; it even violated the principles of states’ rights to which the South was supposedly devoted – and which would logically have led to a “popular sovereignty” doctrine.

Actually, with Texas in the Union, there was no hope of gaining substantial support for slavery in any of the territories except Kansas, and this had supposedly been settled by the Missouri Compromise. “Free-Soil” principles for the Western territories could therefore have been easily established without disruption of existing affairs, if not for the continual aggressive push and trouble making of the South.

If Van Buren had been president, he might have been able to drive through Congress the free-soil principles of the Wilmot Proviso, and that would have been that. As it was, President Taylor’s bill would have settled the Western territory problem by simply adopting “popular sovereignty” principles in New Mexico, Utah, Oregon, and California territories – admitting them all eventually as free states. Instead, the unfortunate death of President Taylor, and the accession of Fillmore, ended this simple and straightforward solution, and brought forth the pernicious so-called “Compromise” of 1850, which exacerbated rather than reduced interstate tensions by adding to the essential Taylor program provisions for stricter enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Law. Since the Fugitive Slave Law not only forced the Northern people to collaborate in what they considered – correctly – to be moral crime, but also violated Northern state rights, the strict Fugitive Slave Law was a constant irritant to the North.

The shift from free-soil principles in the Democratic Party and toward the Compromise of 1850 wrecked the old Jacksonian Democracy. The open break became apparent in Van Buren and the Free Soil candidacy of 1848; the failure of the Democratic Party to take an antislavery stand pushed the old libertarians into Free Soil or other alliances, even into the new Republican Party eventually: this tragic split in the Democratic Party lost it its libertarian conscience and drive.

Pro-southern domination of the Democratic Party in the 1850s, with Pierce and Buchanan, the opening up of the Kansas territory to slave expansion (or potential slave expansion) in 1854, led to the creation of the antislavery Republican Party. One tragedy here is that the surrender of the Democrat and Whig parties to the spirit of the Compromise of 1850 forced the free-soilers into a new party that was not only free soil, but showed dangerous signs (in Seward and others) of ultimately preparing for an abolitionist war against the South. Thus, Southern trouble making shifted Northern sentiment into potentially dangerous channels. Not only that: it also welded in the Republican Party a vehicle dedicated, multifold, to old Federalist-Whig principles: to high tariffs, to internal improvements and government subsidies, to paper money and government banking, etc. Libertarian principles were now split between the two parties.

The fantastic Dred Scott decision changed the political scene completely: for in it the Supreme Court had apparently outlawed free-soil principles, even including the Missouri Compromise. There was now only one course left to the lovers of freedom short of open rebellion against the Court, or Garrison’s secession by the North from a Constitution that had indeed become a “compact with Hell”; and that escape hatch was Stephen Douglas’s popular sovereignty doctrine, in its “Freeport” corollary: i.e., in quiet, local nullification of the Dred Scott decision.

At this critical juncture, the South continued on its suicidal course by breaking with Douglas, insistent on the full Dred Scott principle, and leading to the victory of their enemy Lincoln. Here again, secession was only “preventive,” as Lincoln had given no indication of moving to repress slavery in the South.

It is here that we must split our analysis of the “causes of the Civil War”; for, while this analysis leads, in my view, to a “pro-Northern” position in the slavery-in-the-territories struggles of the 1850s, it leads, paradoxically, to a “pro-Southern” position in the Civil War itself. For secession need not, and should not, have been combated by the North; and so we must pin the blame on the North for aggressive war against the seceding South. The war was launched in the shift from the original Northern position (by Garrison included) to “let our erring sisters depart in peace” to the determination to crush the South to save that mythical abstraction known as the “Union” – and in this shift, we must put a large portion of the blame upon the maneuvering of Lincoln to induce the Southerners to fire the first shot on Fort Sumter – after which point, flag-waving could and did take over.

The War Against the South and Its Consequences

The Civil War was one of the most momentous events in American history, not only for its inherent drama and destruction, but because of the fateful consequences for America that flowed from it.

We have said above that the War of 1812 had devastating consequences for the libertarian movement; indeed, it might be said that it took twenty years of devotion and hard work for the Jacksonian movement to undo the étatist consequences of that utter failure of a war. It is the measure of the statist consequences of the Civil War that America never recovered from it: never again was the libertarian movement to have a party of its own, or as close a chance at success. Hamiltonian neo-Federalism beyond the wildest dreams of even a J.Q. Adams had either been foisted permanently on America, or had been inaugurated, to be later fulfilled.

Let us trace the leading consequences of the War Against the South: there is, first, the enormous toll of death, injury, and destruction. There is the complete setting aside of the civilized “rules of war” that Western civilization had laboriously been erecting for centuries: instead, a total war against the civilian population was launched against the South. The symbol of this barbaric and savage oppression was, of course, Sherman’s march through Georgia and the rest of the South, the burning of Atlanta, etc. (For the military significance of this reversion to barbarism, see F.J.P. Veale, Advance to Barbarism). Another consequence, of course, was the ending of effective states’ rights, and of the perfectly logical and reasonable right of secession – or, for that matter, nullification. From now on, the Union was a strictly compulsory entity.

Further, the Civil War foisted upon the country the elimination of Jacksonian hard money: the greenbacks established government fiat paper, which it took 14 long years to tame; and the National Bank Act ended the separation of government from banking, effectively quasi-nationalizing and regulating the banking system, and creating an engine of governmentally sponsored inflation.

So ruthlessly did the Lincoln administration overturn the old banking system (including the effective outlawing of state bank notes) that it became almost impossible to achieve a return – impossible that is, without a radical and almost revolutionary will for hard money, which did not exist. On the tariff, the virtual destruction of the Democratic Party led to the foisting of a high, protective tariff to remain for a generation – indeed, permanently, for the old prewar low tariff was never to return. It was behind this wall of tariff-subsidy that the “trusts” were able to form. Further, the administration embarked on a vast program of subsidies to favored businesses: land grants to railroads, etc. The Post Office was later monopolized and private postal services outlawed. The national debt skyrocketed, the budget increased greatly and permanently, and taxes increased greatly – including the first permanent foisting on America of excise taxation, especially on whiskey and tobacco.

Thus, on every point of the old Federalist-Whig vs. Democrat-Republican controversy, the Civil War and the Lincoln administration achieved a neo-Federalist triumph that was complete right down the line. And the crushing of the South, the military Reconstruction period, etc. assured that the Democratic Party would not rise again to challenge this settlement for at least a generation. And when it did rise, it would have a much tougher row to hoe than did Van Buren and Co. in an era much more disposed to laissez-faire.

But this was not all: for the Civil War saw also the inauguration of despotic and dictatorial methods beyond the dreams of the so-called “despots of ’98.” Militarism ran rampant, with the arrogant suspension of habeas corpus, the crushing and mass arrests in Maryland, Kentucky, etc.; the suppression of civil liberties and opposition against the war, among the propeace “Copperheads” – the persecution of Vallandigham, etc.; and the institution of conscription. Also introduced on the American scene at this time was the income tax, reluctantly abandoned later, but to reappear. Federal aid to education began in earnest and permanently with federal land grants for state agricultural colleges. There was no longer any talk, of course, about abolition of the standing army or the navy. Almost everything, in short, that is currently evil on the American political scene, had its roots and its beginnings in the Civil War.

Because of the slavery controversy of the 1850s, there was no longer a single libertarian party in America, as the Democratic had been. Now the free-soilers had left the Democrat ranks. But, especially after Dred Scott had pushed the Douglas “Freeport Doctrine” to the fore as libertarian policy, there was hope for a reunited Democracy, especially since the Democrat party was still very good on all questions except slavery. But the Civil War wrecked all that, and monolithic Republican rule could impress its neo-Federalist program on America to such an extent as to make it extremely difficult to uproot.

[This article by Murray N. Rothbard is excerpted from a 30,000-word report to the Volker Fund, written in September 1961, giving a very detailed description of everything wrong with A History of the American Republic by George B. DeHuszar. The full memo will be included in the forthcoming collection Renaissance Man, edited by David Gordon.]

Source:  https://mises.org/blog/road-civil-war

The post The Road to Civil War appeared first on Actual Anarchy.

By Murray N. Rothbard

[Given Donald Trump’s recent comments regarding Andrew Jackson and the Civil War, it is a good time point out the historical context and the justifications as presented in the modern classroom vs. a more informed interpretation.  It is our view that Donald Trump was making a point that the Civil War and its attendant horrors were avoidable and the absolution of slavery still possible had a tyrant such as Lincoln not been in the dictatorial seat of power.]

My own view of war can be put simply: a just war exists when a people tries to ward off the threat of coercive domination by another people, or to overthrow an already-existing domination. A war is unjust, on the other hand, when a people try to impose domination on another people, or try to retain an already existing coercive rule over them.

During my lifetime, my ideological and political activism has focused on opposition to America’s wars, first because I have believed our waging them to be unjust, and, second, because war, in the penetrating phrase of the libertarian Randolph Bourne in World War I, has always been “the health of the State,” an instrument for the aggrandizement of State power over the health, the lives, and the prosperity, of their subject citizens and social institutions. Even a just war cannot be entered into lightly; an unjust one must therefore be anathema.

There have been only two wars in American history that were, in my view, assuredly and unquestionably proper and just; not only that, the opposing side waged a war that was clearly and notably unjust. Why? Because we did not have to question whether a threat against our liberty and property was clear or present; in both of these wars, Americans were trying to rid themselves of an unwanted domination by another people. And in both cases, the other side ferociously tried to maintain their coercive rule over Americans. In each case, one side — “our side” if you will — was notably just, the other side — “their side” — unjust.

To be specific, the two just wars in American history were the American Revolution and the War for Southern Independence.

I would like to mention a few vital features of the treatment of war by the classical international natural lawyers, and to contrast this great tradition with the very different “international law” that has been dominant since 1914, by the dominant partisans of the League of Nations and the United Nations.

The classical international lawyers from the 16th through the 19th centuries were trying to cope with the implications of the rise and dominance of the modern nation-state. They did not seek to “abolish war,” the very notion of which they would have considered absurd and utopian. Wars will always exist among groups, peoples, nations; the desideratum, in addition to trying to persuade them to stay within the compass of “just wars,” was to curb and limit the impact of existing wars as much as possible. Not to try to “abolish war,” but to constrain war with limitations imposed by civilization.

Specifically, the classical international lawyers developed two ideas, which they were broadly successful in getting nations to adopt:

1. Above all, don’t target civilians. If you must fight, let the rulers and their loyal or hired retainers slug it out, but keep civilians on both sides out of it, as much as possible. The growth of democracy, the identification of citizens with the State, conscription, and the idea of a “nation in arms,” all whittled away this excellent tenet of international law.
2. Preserve the rights of neutral states and nations. In the modern corruption of international law that has prevailed since 1914, “neutrality” has been treated as somehow deeply immoral. Nowadays, if countries A and B get into a fight, it becomes every nation’s moral obligation to figure out, quickly, which country is the “bad guy,” and then if, say, A is condemned as the bad guy, to rush in and pummel A in defense of the alleged good guy B.

Classical international law, which should be brought back as quickly as possible, was virtually the opposite. In a theory which tried to limit war, neutrality was considered not only justifiable but a positive virtue. In the old days, “he kept us out of war” was high tribute to a president or political leader; but now, all the pundits and professors condemn any president who “stands idly by” while “people are being killed” in Bosnia, Somalia, Rwanda, or the hot spot of the day. In the old days, “standing idly by” was considered a mark of high statesmanship. Not only that: neutral states had “rights” which were mainly upheld, since every warring country knew that someday it too would be neutral. A warring state could not interfere with neutral shipping to an enemy state; neutrals could ship to such an enemy with impunity all goods except “contraband,” which was strictly defined as arms and ammunition, period. Wars were kept limited in those days, and neutrality was extolled.

In modern international law, where “bad-guy” nations must be identified quickly and then fought by all, there are two rationales for such worldwide action, both developed by Woodrow Wilson, whose foreign policy and vision of international affairs has been adopted by every president since. The first is “collective security against aggression.” The notion is that every war, no matter what, must have one “aggressor” and one or more “victims,” so that naming the aggressor becomes a prelude to a defense of “heroic little” victims. The analogy is with the cop-on-the-corner. A policeman sees A mugging B; he rushes after the aggressor, and the rest of the citizens join in the pursuit. In the same way, supposedly, nations, as they band together in “collective security” arrangements, whether they be the League, the United Nations, or NATO, identify the “aggressor” nation and then join together as an “international police force,” like the cop-on-the-corner, to zap the criminal.

In real life, however, it’s not so easy to identify one warring “aggressor.” Causes become tangled, and history intervenes. Above all, a nation’s current border cannot be considered as evidently just as a person’s life and property. Therein lies the problem. How about the very different borders 10 years, 20 years, or even centuries ago? How about wars where claims of all sides are plausible? But any complication of this sort messes up the plans of our professional war crowd. To get Americans stirred up about intervening in a war thousands of miles away about which they know nothing and care less, one side must be depicted as the clear-cut bad guy, and the other side pure and good; otherwise, Americans will not be moved to intervene in a war that is really none of their business. Thus, feverish attempts by American pundits and alleged foreign-policy “experts” to get us to intervene against the demonized Serbs ran aground when the public began to realize that all three sides in the Bosnian war were engaging in “ethnic cleansing” whenever they got the chance. This is even forgetting the fatuity of the propaganda about the “territorial integrity” of a so-called Bosnian state which has never existed even formally until a year or two ago, and of course in actuality does not exist at all.

If classical international law limited and checked warfare, and kept it from spreading, modern international law, in an attempt to stamp out “aggression” and to abolish war, only insures, as the great historian Charles Beard put it, a futile policy of “perpetual war for perpetual peace.”

The second Wilsonian excuse for perpetual war, particularly relevant to the “Civil War,” is even more utopian: the idea that it is the moral obligation of America and of all other nations to impose “democracy” and “human rights” throughout the globe. In short, in a world where “democracy” is generally meaningless, and “human rights” of any genuine sort virtually nonexistent, that we are obligated to take up the sword and wage a perpetual war to force topia on the entire world by guns, tanks, and bombs.

The Somalian intervention was a perfect case study in the workings of this Wilsonian dream. We began the intervention by extolling a “new kind of army” (a new model army if you will) engaged in a new kind of high moral intervention: the US soldier with a CARE package in one hand, and a gun in the other. The new “humanitarian” army, bringing food, peace, democracy, and human rights to the benighted peoples of Somalia, and doing it all the more nobly and altruistically because there was not a scrap of national interest in it for Americans. It was this prospect of a purely altruistic intervention — of universal love imposed by the bayonet — that swung almost the entire “antiwar” Left into the military intervention camp. Well, it did not take long for our actions to have consequences, and the end of the brief Somalian intervention provided a great lesson if we only heed it: the objects of our “humanitarianism” being shot down by American guns, and striking back by highly effective guerrilla war against American troops, culminating in savaging the bodies of American soldiers. So much for “humanitarianism,” for a war to impose democracy and human rights; so much for the new model army.

In both of these cases, the modern interventionists have won by seizing the moral high ground; theirs is the cosmic “humanitarian” path of moral principle; those of us who favor American neutrality are now derided as “selfish,” “narrow,” and “immoral.” In the old days, however, interventionists were more correctly considered propagandists for despotism, mass murder, and perpetual war, if not spokesmen for special interest groups, or agents of the “merchants of death.” Scarcely a high ground.

The cause of “human rights” is precisely the critical argument by which, in retrospect, Abraham Lincoln’s War of Northern Aggression against the South is justified and even glorified. The “humanitarian” goes forth and rights the wrong of slavery, doing so through mass murder, the destruction of institutions and property, and the wreaking of havoc which has still not disappeared.

Isabel Paterson, in The God of the Machine, one of the great books on political philosophy of this century, zeroed in on what she aptly called “the humanitarian with the guillotine.” “The humanitarian,” Mrs. Paterson wrote, “wishes to be a prime mover in the lives of others. He cannot admit either the divine or the natural order, by which men have the power to help themselves. The humanitarian puts himself in the place of God.” But Mrs. Paterson notes, the humanitarian is “confronted by two awkward facts: first that the competent do not need his assistance; and second, that the majority of people, if unperverted, positively do not want to be ‘done good’ by the humanitarian.” Having considered what the “good” of others might be, and who is to decide on the good and on what to do about it, Mrs. Paterson points out, “Of course what the humanitarian actually proposes is that he shall do what he thinks is good for everybody. It is at this point that the humanitarian sets up the guillotine.” Hence, she concludes, “the humanitarian in theory is the terrorist in action.”

There is an important point about old-fashioned, or classical, international law which applies to any sort of war, even a just one:

Even if country A is waging a clearly just war against country B, and B’s cause is unjust, this fact by no means imposes any sort of moral obligation on any other nation, including those who wish to abide by just policies, to intervene in that war. On the contrary, in the old days neutrality was always considered a more noble course, if a nation had no overriding interest of its own in the fray, there was no moral obligation whatever to intervene. A nation’s highest and most moral course was to remain neutral; its citizens might cheer in their heart for A’s just cause, or, if someone were overcome by passion for A’s cause he could rush off on his own to the front to fight, but generally citizens of nation C were expected to cleave to their own nation’s interests over the cause of a more abstract justice. Certainly, they were expected not to form a propaganda pressure group to try to bulldoze their nation into intervening; if champions of country A were sufficiently ardent, they could go off on their own to fight, but they could not commit their fellow countrymen to do the same.

Many of my friends and colleagues are hesitant to concede the existence of universal natural rights, lest they find themselves forced to support American, or worldwide intervention, to try to enforce them. But for classical natural-law international jurists, that consequence did not follow at all. If, for example, Tutsis are slaughtering Hutus in Rwanda or Burundi, or vice versa, these natural lawyers would indeed consider such acts as violations of the natural rights of the slaughtered; but that fact in no way implies any moral or natural-law obligation for any other people in the world to rush in to try to enforce such rights. We might encapsulate this position into a slogan: “Rights may be universal, but their enforcement must be local,” or, to adopt the motto of the Irish rebels: Sinn Fein, “ourselves alone.” A group of people may have rights, but it is their responsibility, and theirs alone, to defend or safeguard such rights.

To put it another way, I have always believed that when the Left claims that all sorts of entities — animals, alligators, trees, plants, rocks, beaches, the earth, or “the ecology” — have “rights,” the proper response is this: when those entities act like the Americans who set forth their declaration of rights, when they speak for themselves and take up arms to enforce them, then and only then can we take such claims seriously.

I want to now return to America’s two just wars. It is plainly evident that the American Revolution, using my definition, was a just war, a war of peoples forming an independent nation and casting off the bonds of another people insisting on perpetuating their rule over them. Obviously, the Americans, while welcoming French or other support, were prepared to take on the daunting task of overthrowing the rule of the most powerful empire on earth, and to do it alone if necessary.

What I want to focus on here is not the grievances that led the American rebels to the view that it had become “necessary for One People to dissolve the political bonds which have connected them with another.” What I want to stress here is the ground on which the Americans stood for this solemn and fateful act of separation. The Americans were steeped in the natural-law philosophy of John Locke and the Scholastics, and in the classical republicanism of Greece and Rome. There were two major political theories in Britain and in Europe during this time. One was the older, but by this time obsolete, absolutist view: the king was the father of his nation, and absolute obedience was owed to the king by the lesser orders; any rebellion against the king was equivalent to Satan’s rebellion against God.

The other, natural-law, view countered that sovereignty originated not in the king but in the people, but that the people had delegated their powers and rights to the king. Hugo Grotius and conservative natural lawyers believed that the delegation of sovereignty, once transferred, was irrevocable, so that sovereignty must reside permanently in the king. The more radical libertarian theorists, such as Father Mariana, and John Locke and his followers, believed, quite sensibly, that since the original delegation was voluntary and contractual, the people had the right to take back that sovereignty should the king grossly violate his trust.

The American revolutionaries, in separating themselves from Great Britain and forming their new nation, adopted the Lockean doctrine. In fact, if they hadn’t done so, they would not have been able to form their new nation. It is well known that the biggest moral and psychological problem the Americans had, and could only bring themselves to overcome after a full year of bloody war, was to violate their oaths of allegiance to the British king. Breaking with the British Parliament, their de facto ruler, posed no problem; Parliament they didn’t care about. But the king was their inherited sovereign lord, the person to whom they had all sworn fealty. It was the king to whom they owed allegiance; thus, the list of grievances in the Declaration of Independence mentioned only the king, even though Parliament was in reality the major culprit.

Hence, the crucial psychological importance, to the American revolutionaries, of Thomas Paine’s Common Sense, which not only adopted the Lockean view of a justified reclaiming of sovereignty by the American people but also particularly zeroed in on the office of the king. In the words of the New Left, Paine delegitimized and desanctified the king in American eyes. The king of Great Britain, Paine wrote, is only the descendent of “nothing better than the principal ruffian of some restless gang; whose savage manner or preeminence in subtlety obtained him the title of chief among plunderers.” And now the kings, including the “Royal Brute of Great Britain,” are but “crowned ruffians.”

In making their revolution, then, the Americans cast their lot, permanently, with a contractual theory or justification for government. Government is not something imposed from above, by some divine act of conferring sovereignty; but contractual, from below, by “consent of the governed.” That means that American polities inevitably become republics, not monarchies. What happened, in fact, is that the American Revolution resulted in something new on earth. The people of each of the 13 colonies formed new, separate, contractual, republican governments. Based on libertarian doctrines and on republican models, the people of the 13 colonies each set up independent sovereign states: with powers of each government strictly limited, with most rights and powers reserved to the people, and with checks, balances, and written constitutions severely limiting state power.

These 13 separate republics, in order to wage their common war against the British Empire, each sent representatives to the Continental Congress, and then later formed a Confederation, again with severely limited central powers, to help fight the British. The hotly contested decision to scrap the Articles of Confederation and to craft a new Constitution demonstrates conclusively that the central government was not supposed to be perpetual, not to be the sort of permanent one-way trap that Grotius had claimed turned popular sovereignty over to the king forevermore. In fact, it would be very peculiar to hold that the American Revolutionaries had repudiated the idea that a pledge of allegiance to the king was contractual and revocable, and break their vows to the king, only to turn around a few short years later to enter a compact that turned out to be an irrevocable one-way ticket for a permanent central government power. Revocable and contractual to a king, but irrevocable to some piece of paper!

And finally, does anyone seriously believe for one minute that any of the 13 states would have ratified the Constitution had they believed that it was a perpetual one-way Venus fly trap — a one-way ticket to sovereign suicide? The Constitution was barely ratified as it is!

So, if the Articles of Confederation could be treated as a scrap of paper, if delegation to the confederate government in the 1780s was revocable, how could the central government set up under the Constitution, less than a decade later, claim that its powers were permanent and irrevocable? Sheer logic insists that: if a state could enter a confederation it could later withdraw from it; the same must be true for a state adopting the Constitution.

And yet of course, that monstrous illogic is precisely the doctrine proclaimed by the North, by the Union, during the War Between the States.

In 1861, the Southern states, believing correctly that their cherished institutions were under grave threat and assault from the federal government, decided to exercise their natural, contractual, and constitutional right to withdraw, to “secede” from that Union. The separate Southern states then exercised their contractual right as sovereign republics to come together in another confederation, the Confederate States of America. If the American Revolutionary War was just, then it follows as the night the day that the Southern cause, the War for Southern Independence, was just, and for the same reason: casting off the “political bonds” that connected the two peoples. In neither case was this decision made for “light or transient causes.” And in both cases, the courageous seceders pledged to each other “their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor.”

What of the grievances of the two sets of seceders? Were they comparable? The central grievance of the American rebels was the taxing power: the systematic plunder of their property by the British government. Whether it was the tax on stamps, or the tax on imports, or finally the tax on imported tea, taxation was central. The slogan “no taxation without representation” was misleading; in the last analysis, we didn’t want “representation” in Parliament; we wanted not to be taxed by Great Britain. The other grievances, such as opposition to general search warrants, or to overriding of the ancient Anglo-Saxon principle of trial by jury, were critical because they involved the power to search merchants’ properties for goods that had avoided payment of the customs taxes, that is for “smuggled” goods, and trial by jury was vital because no American jury would ever convict such smugglers.

One of the central grievances of the South, too, was the tariff that Northerners imposed on Southerners whose major income came from exporting cotton abroad. The tariff at one and the same time drove up prices of manufactured goods, forced Southerners and other Americans to pay more for such goods, and threatened to cut down Southern exports. The first great constitutional crisis with the South came when South Carolina battled against the well named Tariff of Abomination of 1828. As a result of South Carolina’s resistance, the North was forced to reduce the tariff, and finally, the Polk administration adopted a two-decade long policy of virtual free trade.

John C. Calhoun, the great intellectual leader of South Carolina, and indeed of the entire South, pointed out the importance of a very low level of taxation. All taxes, by their very nature, are paid, on net, by one set of people, the “taxpayers,” and the proceeds go to another set of people, what Calhoun justly called the “tax-consumers.” Among the net tax-consumers, of course, are the politicians and bureaucrats who live full-time off the proceeds. The higher the level of taxation, the higher the percentage which the country’s producers have to give the parasitic ruling class that enforces and lives off of taxes. In zeroing in on the tariff, Calhoun pointed out that “the North has adopted a system of revenue and disbursements, in which an undue proportion of the burden of taxation has been imposed on the South, and an undue proportion appropriated to the North, and for the monopolization of Northern industry.”

What of the opposition to these two just wars? Both were unjust since in both the case of the British and of the North, they were waging fierce war to maintain their coercive and unwanted rule over another people. But if the British wanted to hold on and expand their empire, what were the motivations of the North? Why, in the famous words of the abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, at least early in the struggle, didn’t the North “let their erring sisters go in peace?”

The North, in particular the North’s driving force, the “Yankees” — that ethnocultural group who either lived in New England or migrated from there to upstate New York, northern and eastern Ohio, northern Indiana, and northern Illinois — had been swept by a new form of Protestantism. This was a fanatical and emotional neo-Puritanism driven by a fervent “postmillenialism” which held that as a precondition for the Second Advent of Jesus Christ, man must set up a thousand-year Kingdom of God on Earth.

The Kingdom is to be a perfect society. In order to be perfect, of course, this Kingdom must be free of sin; sin, therefore, must be stamped out, and as quickly as possible. Moreover, if you didn’t try your darndest to stamp out sin by force you yourself would not be saved. It was very clear to these neo-Puritans that in order to stamp out sin, government, in the service of the saints, is the essential coercive instrument to perform this purgative task. As historians have summed up the views of all the most prominent of these millennialists, “government is God’s major instrument of salvation.”

Sin was very broadly defined by the Yankee neo-Puritans as anything which might interfere with a person’s free will to embrace salvation, anything which, in the words of the old Shadow radio serial, could “cloud men’s minds.” The particular cloud-forming occasions of sin, for these millennialists, were liquor (“demon rum”), any activity on the Sabbath except reading the Bible and going to church, slavery, and the Roman Catholic Church.

If antislavery, prohibitionism, and anti-Catholicism were grounded in fanatical postmillennial Protestantism, the paternalistic big government required for this social program on the state and local levels led logically to a big-government paternalism in national economic affairs. Whereas the Democratic Party in the 19th century was known as the “party of personal liberty,” of states’ rights, of minimal government, of free markets and free trade, the Republican Party was known as the “party of great moral ideas,” which amounted to the stamping-out of sin. On the economic level, the Republicans adopted the Whig program of statism and big government: protective tariffs, subsidies to big business, strong central government, large-scale public works, and cheap credit spurred by government.

The Northern war against slavery partook of fanatical millennialist fervor, of a cheerful willingness to uproot institutions, to commit mayhem and mass murder, to plunder and loot and destroy, all in the name of high moral principle and the birth of a perfect world. The Yankee fanatics were veritable Patersonian humanitarians with the guillotine: the Anabaptists, the Jacobins, the Bolsheviks of their era. This fanatical spirit of Northern aggression for an allegedly redeeming cause is summed up in the pseudo-Biblical and truly blasphemous verses of that quintessential Yankee Julia Ward Howe, in her so-called “Battle Hymn of the Republic.”

Modern left-liberal historians of course put this case in a slightly different way. Take for example, the eminent abolitionist historian of the Civil War James McPherson. Here’s the way McPherson revealingly puts it: “Negative liberty [he means “liberty”] was the dominant theme in early American history — freedom from constraints on individual rights imposed by a powerful state.” “The Bill of Rights,” McPherson goes on, “is the classic expression of negative liberty, or Jeffersonian humanistic liberalism. These first ten amendments to the Constitution protect individual liberties by placing a straitjacket of ‘shall not’ on the federal government.” “In 1861,” McPherson continues, “Southern states invoked the negative liberties of state sovereignty and individual rights of property [i.e., slaves] to break up the United States.”

What was McPherson’s hero Abraham Lincoln’s response? Lincoln, he writes, “thereby gained an opportunity to invoke the positive liberty [he means “statist tyranny”] of reform liberalism, exercised through the power of the army and the state, to overthrow the negative liberties of disunion and ownership of slaves.” Another New Model Army at work! McPherson calls for a “blend” of positive and negative liberties, but as we have seen, any such “blend” is nonsense, for statism and liberty are always at odds. The more that “reform liberalism” “empowers” one set of people, the less “negative liberty” there is for everyone else. It should be mentioned that the southern United States was the only place in the 19th century where slavery was abolished by fire and by “terrible swift sword.” In every other part of the New World, slavery was peacefully bought out by agreement with the slaveholders. But in these other countries, in the West Indies or Brazil, for example, there were no Puritan millennialists to do their bloody work, armed with gun in one hand and hymn book in the other.

In the Republican Party, the “party of great moral ideas,” different men and different factions emphasized different aspects of this integrated despotic world-outlook. In the fateful Republican convention of 1860, the major candidates for president were two veteran abolitionists: William Seward, of New York, and Salmon P. Chase of Ohio. Seward, however, was distrusted by the anti-Catholic hotheads because he somehow did not care about the alleged Catholic menace; on the other hand, while Chase was happy to play along with the former Know-Nothings, who stressed the anti-Catholic pant of the coalition, he was distrusted by Sewardites and others who were indifferent to the Catholic question. Abraham Lincoln of Illinois was a dark horse who was able to successfully finesse the Catholic question. His major emphasis was on Whig economic statism: high tariffs, huge subsidies to railroads, public works. As one of the nation’s leading lawyers for Illinois Central and other big railroads, indeed, Lincoln was virtually the candidate from Illinois Central and the other large railroads.

One reason for Lincoln’s victory at the convention was that Iowa railroad entrepreneur Grenville M. Dodge helped swing the Iowa delegation to Lincoln. In return, early in the Civil War, Lincoln appointed Dodge to army general. Dodge’s task was to clear the Indians from the designated path of the country’s first heavily subsidized federally chartered transcontinental railroad, the Union Pacific. In this way, conscripted Union troops and hapless taxpayers were coerced into socializing the costs on constructing and operating the Union Pacific. This sort of action is now called euphemistically “the cooperation of government and industry.”

But Lincoln’s major focus was on raising taxes, in particular raising and enforcing the tariff. His convention victory was particularly made possible by support from the Pennsylvania delegation. Pennsylvania had long been the home and the political focus of the nation’s iron and steel industry which, ever since its inception during the War of 1812, had been chronically inefficient, and had therefore constantly been bawling for high tariffs and, later, import quotas. Virtually the first act of the Lincoln administration was to pass the Morrill protective tariff act, doubling existing tariff rates, and creating the highest tariff rates in American history.

In his first inaugural address, Lincoln was conciliatory about maintaining slavery; what he was hard-line about toward the South was insistence on collecting all the customs tariffs in that region. As Lincoln put it, the federal government would “collect the duties and imposts, but beyond what may be necessary for these objects, there will be no invasion, no using of force against … people anywhere.” The significance of the federal forts is that they provided the soldiers to enforce the customs tariffs; thus, Fort Sumter was at the entrance to Charleston Harbor, the major port, apart from New Orleans, in the entire South. The federal troops at Sumter were needed to enforce the tariffs that were supposed to be levied at Charleston Harbor.

Of course, Abraham Lincoln’s conciliatory words on slavery cannot be taken at face value. Lincoln was a master politician, which means that he was a consummate conniver, manipulator, and liar. The federal forts were the key to his successful prosecution of the war. Lying to South Carolina, Abraham Lincoln managed to do what Franklin D. Roosevelt and Henry Stimson did at Pearl Harbor 80 years later — maneuvered the Southerners into firing the first shot. In this way, by manipulating the South into firing first against a federal fort, Lincoln made the South appear to be “aggressors” in the eyes of the numerous waverers and moderates in the North.

Outside of New England and territories populated by transplanted New Englanders, the idea of forcing the South to stay in the Union was highly unpopular. In many middle-tier states, including Maryland, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania, there was a considerable sentiment to mimic the South by forming a middle Confederacy to isolate the pesky and fanatical Yankees. Even after the war began, the mayor of New York City and many other dignitaries of the city proposed that the city secede from the Union and make peace and engage in free trade with the South. Indeed, Jefferson Davis’s lawyer after the war was what we would now call the “paleo-libertarian” leader of the New York City bar, Irish-Catholic Charles O’Conor, who ran for president in 1878 on the Straight Democrat ticket, in protest that his beloved Democratic Party’s nominee for president was the abolitionist, protectionist, socialist, and fool Horace Greeley.

The Lincoln administration and the Republican Party took advantage of the overwhelmingly Republican Congress after the secession of the South to push through almost the entire Whig economic program. Lincoln signed no less than ten tariff-raising bills during his administration. Heavy “sin” taxes were levied on alcohol and tobacco, the income tax was levied for the first time in American history, huge land grants and monetary subsidies were handed out to transcontinental railroads (accompanied by a vast amount of attendant corruption), and the government went off the gold standard and virtually nationalized the banking system to establish a machine for printing new money and to provide cheap credit for the business elite. And furthermore, the New Model Army and the war effort rested on a vast and unprecedented amount of federal coercion against Northerners as well as the South; a huge army was conscripted, dissenters and advocates of a negotiated peace with the South were jailed, and the precious Anglo-Saxon right of habeas corpus was abolished for the duration.

While it is true that Lincoln himself was not particularly religious, that did not really matter because he adopted all the attitudes and temperament of his evangelical allies. He was stern and sober, he was personally opposed to alcohol and tobacco, and he was opposed to the private carrying of guns. An ambitious seeker of the main chance from early adulthood, Lincoln acted viciously toward his own humble frontier family in Kentucky. He abandoned his fiancée in order to marry a wealthier Mary Todd, whose family were friends of the eminent Henry Clay, he repudiated his brother, and he refused to attend his dying father or his father’s funeral, monstrously declaring that such an experience “would be more painful than pleasant.” No doubt!

Lincoln, too, was a typical example of a humanitarian with the guillotine in another dimension: a familiar modern “reform liberal” type whose heart bleeds for and yearns to “uplift” remote mankind, while he lies to and treats abominably actual people whom he knew. And so Abraham Lincoln, in a phrase prefiguring our own beloved Mario Cuomo, declared that the Union was really “a family, bound indissolubly together by the most intimate organic bonds.” Kick your own family, and then transmute familial spiritual feelings toward a hypostatized and mythical entity, “The Union,” which then must be kept intact regardless of concrete human cost or sacrifice.

Indeed, there is a vital critical difference between the two unjust causes we have described: the British and the North. The British, at least, were fighting on behalf of a cause which, even if wrong and unjust, was coherent and intelligible: that is, the sovereignty of a hereditary monarch. What was the North’s excuse for their monstrous war of plunder and mass murder against their fellow Americans? Not allegiance to an actual, real person, the king, but allegiance to a nonexistent, mystical, quasi-divine alleged entity, “the Union.” The King was at least a real person, and the merits or demerits of a particular king or the monarchy in general can be argued. But where is “the Union” located? How are we to gauge the Union’s deeds? To whom is this Union accountable?

The Union was taken, by its Northern worshipers, from a contractual institution that can either be cleaved to or scrapped, and turned into a divinized entity, which must be worshipped, and which must be permanent, unquestioned, all-powerful. There is no heresy greater, nor political theory more pernicious, than sacralizing the secular. But this monstrous process is precisely what happened when Abraham Lincoln and his northern colleagues made a god out of the Union. If the British forces fought for bad King George, the Union armies pillaged and murdered on behalf of this pagan idol, this “Union,” this Moloch that demanded terrible human sacrifice to sustain its power and its glory.

For in this War Between the States, the South may have fought for its sacred honor, but the Northern war was the very opposite of honorable. We remember the care with which the civilized nations had developed classical international law. Above all, civilians must not be targeted; wars must be limited. But the North insisted on creating a conscript army, a nation in arms, and broke the 19th-century rules of war by specifically plundering and slaughtering civilians, by destroying civilian life and institutions so as to reduce the South to submission. Sherman’s infamous March through Georgia was one of the great war crimes, and crimes against humanity, of the past century-and-a-half. Because by targeting and butchering civilians, Lincoln and Grant and Sherman paved the way for all the genocidal honors of the monstrous 20th century. There has been a lot of talk in recent years about memory, about never forgetting about history as retroactive punishment for crimes of war and mass murder. As Lord Acton, the great libertarian historian, put it, the historian, in the last analysis, must be a moral judge. The muse of the historian, he wrote, is not Clio, but Rhadamanthus, the legendary avenger of innocent blood. In that spirit, we must always remember, we must never forget, we must put in the dock and hang higher than Haman, those who, in modern times, opened the Pandora’s Box of genocide and the extermination of civilians: Sherman, Grant, and Lincoln.

Perhaps, some day, their statues, like Lenin’s in Russia, will be toppled and melted down; their insignias and battle flags will be desecrated, their war songs tossed into the fire. And then Davis and Lee and Jackson and Forrest, and all the heroes of the South, “Dixie” and the Stars and Bars, will once again be truly honored and remembered. The classic comment on that meretricious TV series The Civil War was made by that marvelous and feisty Southern writer Florence King. Asked her views on the series, she replied, “I didn’t have time to watch The Civil War. I’m too busy getting ready for the next one.” In that spirit, I am sure that one day, aided and abetted by Northerners like myself in the glorious “copperhead” tradition, the South shall rise again.

The post Just War appeared first on Actual Anarchy.

The Liberals are, at last, beginning to wake up. For decades the Liberals and the Old Left have been regaling us with exaltation of the power, the glory, the grandeur of the President, especially in foreign and military affairs. The President was, uniquely and miraculously, the living embodiment of the Will of the People.

Once every four years the individual American is allowed, nay exhorted, to troop to the polls, where he may pull down a lever beside the name of one out of two indistinguishable Personalities. After the winner is duly chosen by about one-fourth of the eligible electorate, the mantle of the Popular Mandate settles about his regal shoulders, and he is then to do as he pleases with us all until the hour of the next quadrennial extravaganza.

The Liberals have been in the forefront of the advancement and glorification of this despotic process:  anyone who dared to question or grumble at the burgeoning of unchecked power in the President was damned as an obstructionist, reactionary, and Neanderthal, heartlessly and wilfully attempting to block America’s divinely-appointed path to her future destiny. And within the Pantheon of Presidents, the deified ones were the ‘strong’ (i. e. war-making) Presidents–the Lincolns, the Wilsons, the Roosevelts, while the pacific and ‘do-nothing’ Presidents were denigrated and scorned.

Too often it all depends on whose ox is being gored. World War II and the Korean ‘police action’ were preeminently Liberal wars, and so the Liberals of course saw nothing wrong in them or in the Presidential powers that brought the wars about or were greatly intensified by the conflict.

But the Vietnam War is a war of a different color, and many Liberals find that their chickens have truly come home to roost. Here and there Liberal voices are being raised, suddenly alarmed that something thing has gone wrong in the Paradise of presidential power.

The latest recruit to the growing body of the alarmed is the eminent Professor Hans J. Morgenthau of the University of Chicago, quondam adviser to Presidents and diplomats, apostle of the Cold War and of hard-nosed realpolitik. More than most of his fellow Liberals, Morgenthau realizes not only that the Liberal-propelled process has gone too far, but even more that something is fundamentally wrong in the political system itself.

Thus, Morgenthau laments that:

What the Founding Fathers feared has indeed come to pass: The President of the United States has become an uncrowned king. Lyndon B. Johnson has become the Julius Caesar of the American Republic.1

Furthermore, Morgenthau recognizes that it is precisely the U. S. Constitution that has furnished the necessary framework for this appalling development. Morgenthau writes:

The objective conditions for the ascendancy of presidential powers have been long in the making; they only awaited a President willing and able to make full use of them. . . Thus the stage was set for a new Caesar to bestride it. Only Caesar was missing. Presidents Truman and Kennedy could not fill the role because they were unable to manipulate Congress, and President Eisenhower, even though he created the administrative machinery of the contemporary presidency, was not interested in using it for the actual enlargement of the President’s powers. It is the signal contribution Lyndon Johnson has made to American political life that he has taken advantage of the objective conditions of American politics with extraordinary skill and with an extraordinary taste for power. He has well-nigh exhausted the possibilities of power of the modern presidency, dwarfing the other branches of the government and reducing the people at large to helplessly approving bystanders.2

We welcome Professor Morgenthau to the anti-presidential ranks; but, as is generally the case with Liberals, his analysis is not thoroughgoing enough, and his positive proposals are far less penetrating than his analysis. All he can offer is to call briefly for more exertions by Congress and for a return to the “checks and balances’ supposedly envisioned by the Founding Fathers.

For far more light as well as heat on the American Constitution we must turn to the great and eloquent Patrick Henry, a radical not a liberal, and a man whose root-and-branch opposition to the Constitution envisioned what sort of political system that document would promote. In the course of his fiery and determined opposition to the Constitution at the Virginia ratifying convention, Patrick Henry thundered:

This Constitution is said to have beautiful features; but when I come to examine these features, sir, they appear to me horribly frightful. Among other deformities, it has an awful squinting. It squints toward monarchy; and does not this raise indignation in the breast of every true American? Your President may easily become King. . . Where are your checks in this government? Your strongholds will be in the hands of your enemies. It is on a supposition that our American governors shall be honest, that all the good qualities of this government are founded; but its defective and imperfect construction puts it in their power to perpetrate the worst of mischiefs, should they be bad men; and, sir, would not all the world. . . blame our distracted folly in resting our rights upon the contingency of our rulers being good or bad? Show me that age and country where the rights and liberties of the people were placed on the sole chance of their rulers being good men, without a consequent loss of liberty!. . .

If your American chief be a man of ambition and abilities, how easy is it for him to render himself absolute! The army is in his hands, and if he be a man of address, it will be attached to him. . .I would rather infinitely. . . have a King, Lords and Commons, than a government so replete with such insupportable evils. If we make a King, we may prescribe the rules by which be shall rule his people and interpose such checks as shall prevent him from infringing them; but the President, in the field, at the head of his army, can prescribe the terms on which he shall reign master, so far that it will puzzle any American ever to get his neck from under the galling yoke. . . But, sir, where is the existing force to punish him? Can he not, at the head of his army, beat down every opposition? Away with your President! We shall have a King! The army will salute him monarch; your militia will leave you, and assist in making him King, and fight against you; and what have you to oppose this force? What will then become of you and your rights? Will not absolute despotism ensue?3

1. Hans J. Morgenthau, “The Colossus of Johnson City”,
The New York Review of Books (March 31, 1966).p. 11.
2. Ibid., p. 12.
3. Available in Samuel Eliot Morison, ed., Sources and
Documents Illustrating American Revolution (New York: Oxford University Press, 1965), pp. 330-31.

Rothbard, Murray N. “The Power of The President” Left and Right 2, No. 2 (Spring 1966): 8-11.

Source:  https://mises.org/library/power-president

The post The Power of The President appeared first on Actual Anarchy.

Abоlіtіоn оf thе рublіс ѕесtоr means, of соurѕе, thаt all ріесеѕ оf lаnd, аll land аrеаѕ, including streets аnd roads, wоuld bе оwnеd рrіvаtеlу, by іndіvіduаlѕ, соrроrаtіоnѕ, соореrаtіvеѕ, оr аnу other vоluntаrу grоuріngѕ оf іndіvіduаlѕ аnd саріtаl. The fасt that аll ѕtrееtѕ аnd lаnd аrеаѕ wоuld bе рrіvаtе wоuld bу itself ѕоlvе mаnу of the seemingly іnѕоlublе problems оf private ореrаtіоn. What we nееd tо do іѕ tо reorient оur thіnkіng tо consider a world in which all lаnd аrеаѕ are рrіvаtеlу оwnеd. 

Lеt uѕ tаkе, for example, роlісе рrоtесtіоn. Hоw would police protection bе furnіѕhеd іn a tоtаllу private есоnоmу? 

Part оf thе аnѕwеr bесоmеѕ еvіdеnt іf we consider a world оf tоtаllу рrіvаtе land аnd street ownership. Cоnѕіdеr thе Times Sԛuаrе area of New Yоrk City, a notoriously crime-ridden аrеа whеrе there іѕ lіttlе police рrоtесtіоn furnіѕhеd bу thе сіtу аuthоrіtіеѕ. Evеrу Nеw Yоrkеr knоwѕ, іn fасt, thаt he lіvеѕ аnd wаlkѕ the streets, аnd not only Tіmеѕ Sԛuаrе, virtually іn a state оf “anarchy,” dереndеnt ѕоlеlу оn the nоrmаl реасеfulnеѕѕ аnd gооd wіll оf his fеllоw сіtіzеnѕ. Pоlісе рrоtесtіоn іn New Yоrk іѕ mіnіmаl, a fact drаmаtісаllу rеvеаlеd іn a recent week-long роlісе ѕtrіkе whеn, lо аnd bеhоld!, crime іn nо way іnсrеаѕеd frоm its nоrmаl ѕtаtе whеn thе роlісе аrе supposedly аlеrt and оn thе jоb. 

At аnу rаtе, suppose thаt thе Tіmеѕ Sԛuаrе area, іnсludіng thе streets, wаѕ privately оwnеd, say bу the “Tіmеѕ Sԛuаrе Mеrсhаntѕ Aѕѕосіаtіоn.” Thе merchants would knоw full wеll, оf соurѕе, thаt іf сrіmе was rampant in their аrеа, іf muggings аnd hоlduрѕ аbоundеd, thеn their customers would fаdе аwау and wоuld раtrоnіzе соmреtіng аrеаѕ and neighborhoods. Hеnсе, іt wоuld bе tо the economic interest оf thе merchants’ association to supply efficient аnd рlеntіful роlісе protection, ѕо thаt сuѕtоmеrѕ wоuld bе аttrасtеd tо, rаthеr than rереllеd from, their nеіghbоrhооd. Private business, аftеr аll, іѕ always trуіng tо attract аnd kеер іtѕ customers. 

But whаt gооd would bе served bу attractive ѕtоrе dіѕрlауѕ аnd расkаgіng, рlеаѕаnt lіghtіng аnd соurtеоuѕ service, іf thе сuѕtоmеrѕ may be robbed or аѕѕаultеd if they walk thrоugh thе аrеа? 

Thе merchants’ association, furthеrmоrе, wоuld bе іnduсеd, bу thеіr drіvе for profits аnd fоr аvоіdіng lоѕѕеѕ, to supply nоt оnlу ѕuffісіеnt роlісе рrоtесtіоn but also соurtеоuѕ and рlеаѕаnt рrоtесtіоn. Gоvеrnmеntаl роlісе have not оnlу nо іnсеntіvе tо bе еffісіеnt оr worry аbоut their “сuѕtоmеrѕ’” nееdѕ; they also lіvе wіth thе еvеr-рrеѕеnt tеmрtаtіоn to wield thеіr power of fоrсе іn a brutal and coercive mаnnеr. 

“Pоlісе brutality” іѕ a wеll-knоwn feature оf thе роlісе system, аnd it іѕ hеld іn сhесk only bу rеmоtе complaints оf thе hаrаѕѕеd сіtіzеnrу. But іf thе private mеrсhаntѕ’ police ѕhоuld yield to thе tеmрtаtіоn of brutalizing the mеrсhаntѕ’ customers, those customers wіll ԛuісklу dіѕарреаr аnd go еlѕеwhеrе. Hеnсе, the mеrсhаntѕ’ аѕѕосіаtіоn will see tо іt thаt іtѕ роlісе аrе courteous as well аѕ рlеntіful. Suсh еffісіеnt and hіgh-ԛuаlіtу роlісе protection would prevail thrоughоut thе lаnd, throughout аll thе рrіvаtе streets аnd land areas. 

Fасtоrіеѕ would guаrd thеіr ѕtrееt аrеаѕ, mеrсhаntѕ their ѕtrееtѕ, аnd road соmраnіеѕ would рrоvіdе ѕаfе аnd еffісіеnt роlісе protection fоr their tоll roads and other privately owned rоаdѕ. Thе ѕаmе wоuld bе truе for rеѕіdеntіаl nеіghbоrhооdѕ. 

We саn envision twо роѕѕіblе tуреѕ оf рrіvаtе street оwnеrѕhір іn ѕuсh nеіghbоrhооdѕ. In one tуре, all the lаndоwnеrѕ in a сеrtаіn blосk might bесоmе thе jоіnt оwnеrѕ оf that blосk, lеt uѕ say аѕ thе “85th St. Blосk Cоmраnу.” This соmраnу wоuld thеn provide police рrоtесtіоn, the соѕtѕ being раіd еіthеr bу thе hоmе-оwnеrѕ directly оr оut оf tenants’ rеnt if thе ѕtrееt іnсludеѕ rental араrtmеntѕ. Again, hоmеоwnеrѕ wіll оf соurѕе have a direct interest in ѕееіng thаt thеіr block іѕ safe, while lаndlоrdѕ wіll try tо аttrасt tеnаntѕ by ѕuррlуіng ѕаfе ѕtrееtѕ іn аddіtіоn to thе more usual services ѕuсh аѕ hеаt, water, and janitorial service. ‘ 

To ask why landlords ѕhоuld provide ѕаfе ѕtrееtѕ in thе libertarian, fully рrіvаtе ѕосіеtу is juѕt as ѕіllу аѕ аѕkіng now whу thеу ѕhоuld рrоvіdе thеіr tеnаntѕ wіth heat оr hоt wаtеr. Thе force оf соmреtіtіоn аnd of соnѕumеr dеmаnd would make them ѕuррlу ѕuсh ѕеrvісеѕ. Furthermore, whether we аrе соnѕіdеrіng homeowners or rеntаl housing, іn еіthеr саѕе the саріtаl vаluе of the lаnd and thе hоuѕе wіll bе a function оf the safety оf thе street аѕ wеll аѕ оf thе other wеll-knоwn сhаrасtеrіѕtісѕ of the hоuѕе аnd the nеіghbоrhооd. 

Sаfе аnd wеll-раtrоllеd ѕtrееtѕ will rаіѕе thе vаluе of thе lаndоwnеrѕ’ lаnd and hоuѕеѕ іn the same way аѕ wеll-tеndеd houses dо; crime-ridden streets wіll lоwеr the value оf the land аnd hоuѕеѕ as surely аѕ dilapidated hоuѕіng іtѕеlf does. Since lаndоwnеrѕ аlwауѕ рrеfеr hіghеr tо lоwеr mаrkеt values for thеіr рrореrtу, there іѕ a built-in іnсеntіvе to рrоvіdе еffісіеnt, well -paved, аnd ѕаfе ѕtrееtѕ. 

Private enterprise does еxіѕt, and ѕо most реорlе саn rеаdіlу еnvіѕіоn a frее mаrkеt in most goods and ѕеrvісеѕ. Prоbаblу thе most difficult ѕіnglе area to grаѕр, hоwеvеr, іѕ the аbоlіtіоn оf government ореrаtіоnѕ іn the ѕеrvісе of protection: police, the соurtѕ, еtс. — the аrеа encompassing defense оf person and property аgаіnѕt attack or іnvаѕіоn. 

Hоw соuld рrіvаtе еntеrрrіѕе аnd thе frее mаrkеt possibly provide such service? How соuld роlісе, lеgаl ѕуѕtеmѕ, judicial ѕеrvісеѕ, lаw enforcement, prisons — how could thеѕе be provided in a frее mаrkеt? 

Wе hаvе аlrеаdу seen how a grеаt deal of police рrоtесtіоn, аt thе least, could be supplied bу the various оwnеrѕ of streets аnd lаnd аrеаѕ. But we now nееd to еxаmіnе thіѕ entire area ѕуѕtеmаtісаllу. In thе fіrѕt рlасе, thеrе іѕ a common fаllасу, hеld even by most аdvосаtеѕ оf lаіѕѕеz-fаіrе, thаt thе government muѕt ѕuррlу “роlісе рrоtесtіоn,” аѕ if police protection wеrе a single, absolute entity, a fіxеd ԛuаntіtу оf something whісh thе gоvеrnmеnt supplies tо аll. But іn асtuаl fact there іѕ nо аbѕоlutе соmmоdіtу called “роlісе рrоtесtіоn” any more than there is аn absolute ѕіnglе commodity called “fооd” оr “shelter.” 

It іѕ truе thаt еvеrуоnе рауѕ taxes for a ѕееmіnglу fіxеd ԛuаntіtу оf рrоtесtіоn, but this is a mуth. In асtuаl fасt, thеrе аrе аlmоѕt infinite dеgrееѕ оf аll sorts of рrоtесtіоn. Fоr аnу given person оr buѕіnеѕѕ, thе police саn рrоvіdе everything frоm a policeman оn the beat whо раtrоlѕ оnсе a night, to two policemen раtrоllіng constantly оn еасh blосk, to сruіѕіng patrol cars, tо оnе or еvеn several round-the-clock реrѕоnаl bоdуguаrdѕ. 

Furthеrmоrе, thеrе are mаnу other dесіѕіоnѕ the роlісе muѕt make, thе complexity оf which becomes еvіdеnt аѕ soon аѕ wе lооk beneath the veil оf the myth оf absolute “protection.” Hоw ѕhаll the роlісе аllосаtе thеіr funds whісh аrе, of course, always lіmіtеd аѕ are thе fundѕ of аll other іndіvіduаlѕ, organizations, and аgеnсіеѕ? How much ѕhаll the роlісе іnvеѕt іn еlесtrоnіс еԛuірmеnt? fіngеrрrіntіng equipment? dеtесtіvеѕ аѕ аgаіnѕt uniformed police? раtrоl саrѕ as against fооt роlісе, еtс.? 

Thе роіnt іѕ thаt thе gоvеrnmеnt hаѕ nо rational way to mаkе these allocations. Thе government оnlу knоwѕ thаt it has a lіmіtеd budgеt. Itѕ allocations of fundѕ are then ѕubjесt tо thе full рlау оf politics, bооndоgglіng, and burеаuсrаtіс inefficiency, with nо іndісаtіоn at аll аѕ to whеthеr thе роlісе department іѕ ѕеrvіng thе соnѕumеrѕ in a way rеѕроnѕіvе tо their dеѕіrеѕ оr whether іt іѕ doing ѕо еffісіеntlу. Thе ѕіtuаtіоn wоuld bе different іf police ѕеrvісеѕ were ѕuррlіеd оn a free, соmреtіtіvе market. In thаt саѕе, соnѕumеrѕ would рау fоr whatever dеgrее of protection thеу wish tо purchase. 

Thе соnѕumеrѕ who juѕt wаnt to ѕее a policeman оnсе in a while wоuld pay lеѕѕ thаn those whо wаnt continuous раtrоllіng, аnd fаr lеѕѕ thаn thоѕе whо demand twenty-four-hour bоdуguаrd ѕеrvісе. On the free mаrkеt, рrоtесtіоn wоuld be ѕuррlіеd іn рrороrtіоn and іn whаtеvеr wау thаt the consumers wіѕh tо рау for іt. A drіvе for efficiency wоuld bе іnѕurеd, аѕ іt аlwауѕ is on thе market, bу the соmрulѕіоn tо make profits аnd avoid lоѕѕеѕ, аnd thеrеbу tо kеер costs low and tо ѕеrvе thе hіghеѕt demands of the consumers. Any роlісе fіrm that ѕuffеrѕ from grоѕѕ inefficiency would ѕооn gо bаnkruрt аnd dіѕарреаr. 

Onе bіg рrоblеm a government police fоrсе muѕt аlwауѕ face is: whаt lаwѕ rеаllу tо еnfоrсе? Pоlісе departments аrе thеоrеtісаllу fасеd with thе аbѕоlutе іnjunсtіоn, “еnfоrсе аll lаwѕ,” but іn рrасtісе a limited budgеt forces thеm tо аllосаtе thеіr personnel аnd еԛuірmеnt to thе mоѕt urgеnt сrіmеѕ. But thе absolute dісtum pursues them аnd works аgаіnѕt a rаtіоnаl аllосаtіоn оf rеѕоurсеѕ. On thе frее market, whаt would be еnfоrсеd іѕ whatever the сuѕtоmеrѕ аrе wіllіng tо pay fоr. 

Suppose, for example, thаt Mr. Jоnеѕ hаѕ a precious gem hе believes mіght soon be ѕtоlеn. Hе саn аѕk, and рау fоr, rоund-thе-сlосk роlісе protection аt whаtеvеr ѕtrеngth hе may wіѕh to work оut wіth thе роlісе соmраnу. He mіght, on thе other hand, аlѕо hаvе a рrіvаtе rоаd оn hіѕ еѕtаtе hе dоеѕn’t wаnt mаnу реорlе tо travel on — but hе might nоt саrе very much аbоut trеѕраѕѕеrѕ оn that rоаd. In that саѕе, hе won’t devote аnу роlісе rеѕоurсеѕ tо protecting thе road. Aѕ оn thе mаrkеt іn gеnеrаl, іt іѕ uр to the соnѕumеr — and since аll оf uѕ are соnѕumеrѕ this mеаnѕ each реrѕоn іndіvіduаllу dесіdеѕ hоw much and what kind оf рrоtесtіоn he wаntѕ аnd is wіllіng tо buу. All that we hаvе ѕаіd аbоut landowners’ police аррlіеѕ tо рrіvаtе police in gеnеrаl. 

Frее-mаrkеt роlісе wоuld nоt only bе еffісіеnt, they wоuld hаvе a ѕtrоng incentive to bе соurtеоuѕ and tо rеfrаіn frоm brutаlіtу against either thеіr сlіеntѕ or their clients’ frіеndѕ оr сuѕtоmеrѕ. A рrіvаtе Central Park wоuld bе guarded efficiently іn order tо mаxіmіzе раrk revenue, rather than hаvе a рrоhіbіtіvе curfew іmроѕеd оn innocent — and рауіng — сuѕtоmеrѕ. A free mаrkеt іn роlісе would rеwаrd еffісіеnt and courteous роlісе рrоtесtіоn to сuѕtоmеrѕ and penalize аnу fаllіng оff frоm this standard. No lоngеr wоuld thеrе bе thе current dіѕjunсtіоn between service аnd payment inherent іn аll government operations, a dіѕjunсtіоn which means that police, lіkе аll other government аgеnсіеѕ, асԛuіrе thеіr revenue, nоt vоluntаrіlу and соmреtіtіvеlу frоm consumers, but from thе tаxрауеrѕ coercively. In fасt, as government police hаvе bесоmе іnсrеаѕіnglу inefficient, consumers have bееn turning more and mоrе tо private fоrmѕ оf рrоtесtіоn. We hаvе аlrеаdу mеntіоnеd blосk оr nеіghbоrhооd рrоtесtіоn. 

Thеrе аrе аlѕо рrіvаtе guаrdѕ, insurance соmраnіеѕ, private dеtесtіvеѕ, аnd such іnсrеаѕіnglу sophisticated equipment аѕ ѕаfеѕ, locks, аnd сlоѕеd-сіrсuіt TV аnd burglar alarms. Thе Prеѕіdеnt’ѕ Cоmmіѕѕіоn оn Lаw Enforcement аnd thе Administration оf Juѕtісе еѕtіmаtеd іn 1969 thаt gоvеrnmеnt police соѕt thе Amеrісаn public $2.8 bіllіоn a year, while іt ѕреndѕ $1.35 bіllіоn on private protection ѕеrvісе аnd another $200 mіllіоn оn еԛuірmеnt, so thаt private protection expenses аmоuntеd tо over hаlf the оutlау оn gоvеrnmеnt police. These fіgurеѕ ѕhоuld gіvе раuѕе to thоѕе сrеdulоuѕ fоlk whо believe that police рrоtесtіоn іѕ somehow, bу some mystic rіght оr power, necessarily аnd forevermore аn аttrіbutе оf State sovereignty. 

[Exсеrрtеd frоm Chapters 11 and 12 of Fоr A New Lіbеrtу.] 

The post Abolish the Police appeared first on Actual Anarchy.

I have been ruminating recently on what are the crucial questions that divide libertarians. Some that have received a lot of attention in the last few years are: anarcho-capitalism vs. limited government, abolitionism vs. gradualism, natural rights vs. utilitarianism, and war vs. peace. But I have concluded that as important as these questions are, they don’t really cut to the nub of the issue, of the crucial dividing line between us.

Let us take, for example, two of the leading anarcho-capitalist works of the last few years: my own For a New Liberty and David Friedman’s Machinery of Freedom. Superficially, the major differences between them are my own stand for natural rights and for a rational libertarian law code, in contrast to Friedman’s amoralist utilitarianism and call for logrolling and trade-offs between nonlibertarian private police agencies. But the difference really cuts far deeper. There runs through For a New Liberty (and most of the rest of my work as well) a deep and pervasive hatred of the State and all of its works, based on the conviction that the State is the enemy of mankind. In contrast, it is evident that David does not hate the State at all; that he has merely arrived at the conviction that anarchism and competing private police forces are a better social and economic system than any other alternative. Or, more fully, that anarchism would be better than laissez-faire, which in turn is better than the current system. Amidst the entire spectrum of political alternatives, David Friedman has decided that anarcho-capitalism is superior. But superior to an existing political structure which is pretty good too. In short, there is no sign that David Friedman in any sense hates the existing American State or the State per se, hates it deep in his belly as a predatory gang of robbers, enslavers, and murderers. No, there is simply the cool conviction that anarchism would be the best of all possible worlds, but that our current set-up is pretty far up with it in desirability. For there is no sense in Friedman that the State — any State — is a predatory gang of criminals.

The same impression shines through the writing, say, of political philosopher Eric Mack. Mack is an anarcho-capitalist who believes in individual rights; but there is no sense in his writings of any passionate hatred of the State, or, a fortiori, of any sense that the State is a plundering and bestial enemy.

Perhaps the word that best defines our distinction is “radical.” Radical in the sense of being in total, root-and-branch opposition to the existing political system and to the State itself. Radical in the sense of having integrated intellectual opposition to the State with a gut hatred of its pervasive and organized system of crime and injustice. Radical in the sense of a deep commitment to the spirit of liberty and antistatism that integrates reason and emotion, heart and soul.

Furthermore, in contrast to what seems to be true nowadays, you don’t have to be an anarchist to be radical in our sense, just as you can be an anarchist while missing the radical spark. I can think of hardly a single limited governmentalist of the present day who is radical — a truly amazing phenomenon, when we think of our classical-liberal forbears who were genuinely radical, who hated statism and the States of their day with a beautifully integrated passion: the Levellers, Patrick Henry, Tom Paine, Joseph Priestley, the Jacksonians, Richard Cobden, and on and on, a veritable roll call of the greats of the past. Tom Paine’s radical hatred of the State and statism was and is far more important to the cause of liberty than the fact that he never crossed the divide between laissez-faire and anarchism.

And closer to our own day, such early influences on me as Albert Jay Nock, H.L. Mencken, and Frank Chodorov were magnificently and superbly radical. Hatred of “Our Enemy, the State” (Nock’s title) and all of its works shone through all of their writings like a beacon star. So what if they never quite made it all the way to explicit anarchism? Far better one Albert Nock than a hundred anarcho-capitalists who are all too comfortable with the existing status quo.

Where are the Paines and Cobdens and Nocks of today? Why are almost all of our laissez-faire limited governmentalists, plonky conservatives, and patriots? If the opposite of “radical” is “conservative,” where are our radical laissez-fairists? If our limited statists were truly radical, there would be virtually no splits between us. What divides the movement now, the true division, is not anarchist vs. minarchist, but radical vs. conservative. Lord, give us radicals, be they anarchists or no.

To carry our analysis further, radical anti-statists are extremely valuable even if they could scarcely be considered libertarians in any comprehensive sense. Thus, many people admire the work of columnists Mike Royko and Nick von Hoffman because they consider these men libertarian sympathizers and fellow-travelers. That they are, but this does not begin to comprehend their true importance. For throughout the writings of Royko and von Hoffman, as inconsistent as they undoubtedly are, there runs an all-pervasive hatred of the State, of all politicians, bureaucrats, and their clients which, in its genuine radicalism, is far truer to the underlying spirit of liberty than someone who will coolly go along with the letter of every syllogism and every lemma down to the “model” of competing courts.

Taking the concept of radical vs. conservative in our new sense, let us analyze the now famous “abolitionism” vs. “gradualism” debate. The latter jab comes in the August issue of Reason (a magazine every fiber of whose being exudes “conservatism”), in which editor Bob Poole asks Milton Friedman where he stands on this debate. Freidman takes the opportunity of denouncing the “intellectual cowardice” of failing to set forth “feasible” methods of getting “from here to there.” Poole and Friedman have between them managed to obfuscate the true issues. There is not a single abolitionist who would not grab a feasible method, or a gradual gain, if it came his way. The difference is that the abolitionist always holds high the banner of his ultimate goal, never hides his basic principles, and wishes to get to his goal as fast as humanly possible. Hence, while the abolitionist will accept a gradual step in the right direction if that is all that he can achieve, he always accepts it grudgingly, as merely a first step toward a goal which he always keeps blazingly clear.

The abolitionist is a “button pusher” who would blister his thumb pushing a button that would abolish the State immediately, if such a button existed.

But the abolitionist also knows that alas, such a button does not exist, and that he will take a bit of the loaf if necessary — while always preferring the whole loaf if he can achieve it.

It should be noted here that many of Milton’s most famous “gradual” programs such as the voucher plan, the negative income tax, the withholding tax, fiat paper money — are gradual (or even not so gradual) steps in the wrong direction, away from liberty, and hence the militance of much libertarian opposition to these schemes.

His button-pushing position stems from the abolitionist’s deep and abiding hatred of the State and its vast engine of crime and oppression. With such an integrated worldview, the radical libertarian could never dream of confronting either a magic button or any real-life problem with some arid cost-benefit calculation. He knows that the State must be diminished as fast and as completely as possible. Period.

And that is why the radical libertarian is not only an abolitionist, but also refuses to think in such terms as a Four Year Plan for some sort of stately and measured procedure for reducing the State. The radical — whether he be anarchist or laissez-faire — cannot think in such terms as, e.g., “Well, the first year, we’ll cut the income tax by 2 percent, abolish the ICC, and cut the minimum wage; the second year we’ll abolish the minimum wage, cut the income tax by another 2 percent, and reduce welfare payments by 3 percent, etc.” The radical cannot think in such terms, because the radical regards the State as our mortal enemy, which must be hacked away at wherever and whenever we can. To the radical libertarian, we must take any and every opportunity to chop away at the State, whether it’s to reduce or abolish a tax, a budget appropriation, or a regulatory power. And the radical libertarian is insatiable in this appetite until the State has been abolished, or — for minarchists — dwindled down to a tiny, laissez-faire role.

Many people have wondered: Why should there be any important political disputes between anarcho-capitalists and minarchists now? In this world of statism, where there is so much common ground, why can’t the two groups work in complete harmony until we shall have reached a Cobdenite world, after which we can air our disagreements? Why quarrel over courts, etc. now? The answer to this excellent question is that we could and would march hand-in-hand in this way if the minarchists were radicals, as they were from the birth of classical liberalism down to the 1940s. Give us back the antistatist radicals, and harmony would indeed reign triumphant within the movement.

The post Do You Hate the State? appeared first on Actual Anarchy.

Bеnthаm wаѕ a Smіthіаn, ѕtаrtеd оff lіfе аѕ a Smіthіаn, a dеvоtеd Smіthіаn, and he wrote a vеrу gооd, hіѕ only gооd book, I thіnk, In Dеfеnѕе of Usury, in whісh hе attacked Smіth for ѕеllіng out on thе uѕurу question. Hе wrote thаt іn the 1790’ѕ when hе was a dеvоtеd Smіthіаn. Bеnthаm оf соurѕе was nоt thе founder, but рrоbаblу thе big systematizer оf utіlіtаrіаnіѕm, a bіttеr орроnеnt of nаturаl rіghtѕ, nаturаl lаw оr whаtеvеr.

Whеn уоu had tо сut thrоugh thе Bеnthаmіtе movement, a whоlе bunсh оf Bеnthаmіtеѕ around, уоu cut thrоugh, you find thе rеаl core of Bеnthаmіѕm, which is pretty monstrous. And of course, Bеnthаm is rеаllу thе fоundеr оf modern есоnоmісѕ, іn the ѕеnѕе оf wеlfаrе economics, соѕt-bеnеfіt analysis, іt all comes іn wіth Bеnthаm. Thеѕе реорlе, James Mill and Jоhn Stuart Mill аrе essentially Benthamites аnd bring in the Bеnthаmіtе, rерlасіng whatever natural law dосtrіnе there was, and I thіnk іt’ѕ аll fаllасіоuѕ. Personal utіlіtаrіаnіѕm іѕ fаllасіоuѕ, аnd сеrtаіnlу ѕосіаl utіlіtаrіаnіѕm, whеrе уоu trу tо аdd uр реrѕоnаl utіlіtіеѕ and реrѕоnаl benefits аnd fіgurе оut what the maximum gеnеrаl grеаtеѕt gооd for the greatest numbеr is. It’s, tо me, obvious nоnѕеnѕе—уоu саn’t аdd them uр, since аll utilities аrе ѕubjесtіvе аnd оrdіnаl.

Bеnthаm’ѕ fаmоuѕ рhrаѕе, “the grеаtеѕt gооd for thе grеаtеѕt numbеr,” which іѕ thе соrnеrѕtоnе of his dосtrіnе, оnе оf thе problems with that, of соurѕе, one оf the mаnу problems іѕ ѕuрроѕе you’re іn thе lesser numbеr, thеn whаt? Whаt hарреnѕ thеn? Utilitarianism саn justify almost еvеrуthіng.

I thіnk Bеnthаmіtеѕ wоuld аdmіt thіѕ. In оthеr words, ѕіnсе thеrе’ѕ nо juѕtісе, nо such thing аѕ natural rіghtѕ, juѕtісе or аnуthіng еlѕе, [unіntеllіgіblе] mаnірulаtе еvеrуthіng for alleged cost-benefit аrgumеntѕ. Fоr example, tаkе thе іdеа, say рunіѕhmеnt thеоrу, whісh іѕ аn аrсаnе раrt оf lіbеrtаrіаn doctrine, Benthamites are рurе dеtеrrеnсе thеоrіѕtѕ— they dоn’t bеlіеvе іn justice, it’s аll dеtеrrеnсе.

Wеll, dеtеrrеnсе—fоr example, tо dеtеr—tаkе fоr example this ѕоrt оf ѕіtuаtіоn: Mоѕt people dоn’t wаnt tо соmmіt murdеr fоr whatever reason, thеу dоn’t like іt, thеу’rе against іt, thеу’rе rеluсtаnt tо соmmіt murdеr. On thе оthеr hаnd, a lоt оf people аrе wіllіng tо steal аn аррlе from a рuѕhсаrt оr from a fооd ѕtоrе. Therefore, ассоrdіng to рurе deterrence theory, рunіѕhmеnt fоr murdеr should bе vеrу lіght аnd punishment for apple ѕtеаlіng ѕhоuld bе capital punishment, рrеfеrаblу in рublіс, to make an example оf the stealer.

Most of uѕ think thеrе’ѕ something wrоng with thіѕ, іt’ѕ whаt the рhіlоѕорhеrѕ wоuld саll counterintuitive—in оthеr wоrdѕ, nutѕо. Most of uѕ hаvе a vіеw оf juѕtісе, even іf we dоn’t have an articulate thеоrу of іt. Bеnthаm thrоwѕ that аll оut. Bеnthаmіtеѕ аrе also іn fаvоr, fоr еxаmрlе, оf рunіѕhіng the іnnосеnt, еxесutе thе innocent, provided thе public dоеѕn’t knоw thеу’rе іnnосеnt.  If thе рublіс thіnkѕ thеу’rе guіltу, іt’ѕ gооd еnоugh. No moral рrіnсірlеѕ and whatever.

What I wаnt tо tаlk аbоut wіth Bentham is thе Panopticon, the kеу tо hіѕ thоught, whісh Bеnthаmіtеѕ don’t lіkе tо tаlk аbоut. Thіѕ wаѕ Bentham’s great project, he wаѕ a great рrоjесtоr. Hе wrote millions of wоrdѕ, much оf whісh fortunately hаvе nоt bееn published yet, bесаuѕе hе hаd a flееt of ѕесrеtаrіеѕ, hе wаѕ a very wealthy аrіѕtосrаt, so he еmрlоуеd ѕесrеtаrіеѕ to take thеm down, сору them—there wаѕ no, of соurѕе, Xеrоx machine оr typewriter in that еросh.

Hе was sort of lіvіng rеduсtіо аbѕurdum іn hіѕ оwn—hіѕ Pаnорtісоn, living reductio absurdum іn hіѕ оwn thоught. Hе uѕеd tо be a Tоrу, a Tory аrіѕtосrаt, and hе соnvеrtеd to dеmосrасу, асtuаllу соnvеrtеd bу Jаmеѕ Mill, bесаuѕе thе Tоrіеѕ wоuldn’t adopt his dосtrіnе, hіѕ Pаnорtісоn. Hе fіgurеd nothing wоuld bе wоrѕе than thаt, mауbе dеmосrасу will аdорt mу Panopticon. Pаnорtісоn wаѕ a thеоrу whісh Bеnthаmіtе ароlоgіѕtѕ сlаіm оnlу applied to prisons; it did not аррlу only to рrіѕоnѕ.

Thеrе’ѕ аn excellent, very аmuѕіng article—Douglas Lоng hаѕ a book саllеd Bеnthаm аnd Liberty, a vеrу good ѕсhоlаrlу wоrk. Gеrtrudе Himmelfarb, usually nоt оnе оf my fаvоrіtе people, being nеосоnѕеrvаtіvе, has аn excellent critique of Bеnthаm саllеd The Hаuntеd Hоuѕе of Jeremy Bеnthаm in her bооk on Vісtоrіаn minds.

Panopticon wаѕ a ѕсhеmе not just fоr thе prisons; fоr аlmоѕt еvеrуbоdу—fоr the poor, fоr сhіldrеn, fоr vagrants. Everybody would be rоundеd up. It’ѕ been еѕtіmаtеd bу Bеnthаm himself frоm a third tо two-thirds оf thе рорulаtіоn wоuld bе іnсаrсеrаtеd іn Pаnорtісоnѕ, whісh wеrе еѕѕеntіаllу соmрulѕоrу соnсеntrаtіоn саmрѕ.

It was scientific. There’s no ѕuсh thіng аѕ juѕtісе оr рrіvасу; іt’ѕ аll соѕt-bеnеfіt, rіght? Yоu mаxіmіzе surveillance. So you have оnе guу ѕіttіng іn thе сеntеr of a сіrсlе, аnd all the рrіѕоnеrѕ аnd kіdѕ аnd whаtеvеr, раuреrѕ, аll lіnеd uр, ѕо уоu саn ѕее іntо them at аnу quick—this іѕ bеfоrе the аgе оf tеlеvіѕіоn аnd аll that.

A brіllіаnt рrорhеѕу of the Orwеllіаn futurе. Evеn thоugh you couldn’t ѕее еvеrуbоdу every tіmе, nobody wоuld knоw whеn уоu’rе ѕееіng them, ѕо еvеrуbоdу would fееl hе’ѕ undеr ѕurvеіllаnсе. It doesn’t fоllоw thе utіlіtаrіаn—іt’ѕ vеrу important for everybody tо fееl at all times he’s undеr ѕurvеіllаnсе by Bіg Brother, bу thе Pаnорtісоn leadership.

And so thіѕ wоuld kеер thеm, not оnlу keep thеm оn thе ѕtrаіght аnd nаrrоw, kеер them wоrkіng, you want tо gеt maximum рrоduсtіоn out оf them. 12.5 hours a dау оf fоrсеd lаbоr, ѕо fоrth аnd so on. And he had еvеrуthіng beautifully wоrkеd оut. The idea of соurѕе to hаvе maximum production bу slave lаbоr, whісh іѕ еѕѕеntіаllу what it was. Panopticon by the wау іѕ Grееk fоr “all-seeing,” іt’ѕ thе controller whо ѕееѕ everything. Sоundѕ lіkе thе Bіg Brоthеr. Alѕо, “іnѕресtіоn hоuѕе” was another wау tо рut it. Thіѕ іѕ a bіg reform. Gertrude Hіmmеlfаrb рutѕ іt vеrу neatly. Hе said Bеnthаm wаѕ an аthеіѕt, but she ѕауѕ Bеnthаm dіd nоt bеlіеvе in Gоd, but hе dіd bеlіеvе іn a ԛuаlіtу that [unіntеllіgіblе] bу іn God. Thе Pаnорtісоn wаѕ a rеаlіzаtіоn оf a dіvіnе іdеаl, ѕруіng out the wауѕ оr thе trаnѕgrеѕѕоr or potential transgressor bу mеаnѕ оf аn ingenious architectural scheme, turnіng night іntо day wіth artificial lіght аnd reflectors, hоldіng mеn сарtіvе bу аn іntrісаtе system оf іnѕресtіоn.

Thе Pаnорtісоn bесоmеѕ оmnіѕсіеnt аnd omnipotent, оmnірrеѕеnсе оf thе іnѕресtоr. Thіѕ of course makes things most еffісіеnt, the gоаlѕ оf the inspectors. At one роіnt Bentham says, “Thеrе might be ѕоmе drawing bасk tо аdорt mу scheme because іt might bе said thаt thеѕе people bесоmе robots іnѕtеаd оf people.”

As hе ѕауѕ, “[unintelligible] of an іmbесіlіtу, for the formerly free mаn wоuld not lоngеr, іn a deep ѕеnѕе, be humаn.” And hе аѕkѕ hіmѕеlf whеthеr thе result of thіѕ [unintelligible] соntrіvаnсе might not bе соnѕtruсtіng a ѕеt of mасhіnеѕ out оf thе similitude оf men. And tо thіѕ сrіtісаl question, he gіvеѕ thе utіlіtаrіаn rерlу—brutаl, bruѕԛuе and utіlіtаrіаn—nаmеlу, whо cares? Whо саrеѕ if they’re juѕt mасhіnеѕ?

Thе only real ԛuеѕtіоn is would hарріnеѕѕ be most lіkеlу to increase or dіmіnіѕh bу this dіѕсірlіnе? Of соurѕе, hе bеіng a ѕсіеntіѕt оf hарріnеѕѕ, соuld аnѕwеr thе question vеrу nеаtlу. Namely, as he ѕаіd, thеу’ll bе hарру аlmоѕt bу dеfіnіtіоn. Call thеm ѕоldіеrѕ, саll thеm mоnkѕ, саll them mасhіnеѕ, he ѕауѕ, ѕо [unintelligible] but hарру ones I ѕhоuld nоt care.

Thіѕ іѕ whаt Pаttеrѕоn wоuld саll thе humаnіtаrіаn wіth thе guіllоtіnе оr thе ѕlаvе pen. So economy аnd рrоduсtіvіtу were what hе was trуіng to mаxіmіzе. As hе put іt, іnduѕtrу is a blеѕѕіng. Seven and a hаlf hоurѕ a day іѕ еnоugh fоr ѕlеер, an hоur and a hаlf tоtаl fоr mеаlѕ, thе rеѕt оf thе tіmе working in a fоrсеd lаbоr regime. Thе рunсh lіnе оf thіѕ whole thіng, whole Pаnорtісоn scheme, іѕ thаt hе would run іt. In оthеr wоrdѕ, іt wоuld bе a рrіvаtеlу оwnеd Panopticon, giant Pаnорtісоn. Slаvе lаbоr wоuld bе оwnеd bу hіm. He, Bеnthаm.

Hе’d extract thе profits from thе slave lаbоrеrѕ. In thіѕ way wе hаvе a unіtу of рrіvаtе аnd рublіс іnѕtіtutіоnѕ. Sо hе trіеd tо lоbbу thе parliament, lоbbу the court, аnd nеvеr get іt through, fortunately for Grеаt Britain.

From Murray’s Lecture on the Pre-Austrians from the History of Economic Thought series:

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