Mises Wire |
- A Libertarian Theory of War
- Three Things the Fed Must Do to Normalize Bond Markets
- Who Will Build the Roads? Anyone Who Stands to Benefit from Them.
- Marxism versus Libertarianism: Two Types of Internationalism
- Contract Rights Are Not the Same as Natural Rights
| Posted: 30 Oct 2021 12:00 PM PDT The libertarian movement has been chided by William F. Buckley, Jr., for failing to use its "strategic intelligence" in facing the major problems of our time. We have, indeed, been too often prone to "pursue our busy little seminars on whether or not to demunicipalize the garbage collectors" (as Buckley has contemptuously written), while ignoring and failing to apply libertarian theory to the most vital problem of our time: war and peace. There is a sense in which libertarians have been utopian rather than strategic in their thinking, with a tendency to divorce the ideal system which we envisage from the realities of the world in which we live. In short, too many of us have divorced theory from practice, and have then been content to hold the pure libertarian society as an abstract ideal for some remotely future time, while in the concrete world of today we follow unthinkingly the orthodox "conservative" line. To live liberty, to begin the hard but essential strategic struggle of changing the unsatisfactory world of today in the direction of our ideals, we must realize and demonstrate to the world that libertarian theory can be brought sharply to bear upon all of the world's crucial problems. By coming to grips with these problems, we can demonstrate that libertarianism is not just a beautiful ideal somewhere on cloud nine, but a tough-minded body of truths that enables us to take our stand and to cope with the whole host of issues of our day. Let us then, by all means, use our strategic intelligence—although, when he sees the result, Mr. Buckley might well wish that we had stayed in the realm of garbage collection. Let us construct a libertarian theory of war and peace. The fundamental axiom of libertarian theory is that no one may threaten or commit violence ("aggress") against another man's person or property. Violence may be employed only against the man who commits such violence; that is, only defensively against the aggressive violence of another.1 In short, no violence may be employed against a nonaggressor. Here is the fundamental rule from which can be deduced the entire corpus of libertarian theory.2 Let us set aside the more complex problem of the State for a while and consider simply relations between "private" individuals. Jones finds that he or his property is being invaded, aggressed against, by Smith. It is legitimate for Jones, as we have seen, to repel this invasion by defensive violence of his own. But now we come to a more knotty question: Is it within the right of Jones to commit violence against innocent third parties as a corollary to his legitimate defense against Smith? To the libertarian, the answer must be clearly no. Remember that the rule prohibiting violence against the persons or property of innocent men is absolute: it holds regardless of the subjective motives for the aggression. It is wrong and criminal to violate the property or person of another, even if one is a Robin Hood, or starving, or is doing it to save one's relatives, or is defending oneself against a third man's attack. We may understand and sympathize with the motives in many of these cases and extreme situations. We may later mitigate the guilt if the criminal comes to trial for punishment, but we cannot evade the judgment that this aggression is still a criminal act, and one which the victim has every right to repel, by violence if necessary. In short, A aggresses against B because C is threatening, or aggressing against, A. We may understand C's "higher" culpability in this whole procedure, but we must still label this aggression as a criminal act which B has the right to repel by violence. To be more concrete, if Jones finds that his property is being stolen by Smith, he has the right to repel him and try to catch him; but he has no right to repel him by bombing a building and murdering innocent people or to catch him by spraying machine-gun fire into an innocent crowd. If he does this, he is as much (or more of) a criminal aggressor as Smith is. The application to problems of war and peace is already becoming evident. For while war in the narrower sense is a conflict between States, in the broader sense we may define it as the outbreak of open violence between people or groups of people. If Smith and a group of his henchmen aggress against Jones, and Jones and his bodyguards pursue the Smith gang to their lair, we may cheer Jones on in his endeavor; and we, and others in society interested in repelling aggression, may contribute financially or personally to Jones's cause. But Jones has no right, any more than does Smith, to aggress against anyone else in the course of his "just war": to steal others' property in order to finance his pursuit, to conscript others into his posse by use of violence, or to kill others in the course of his struggle to capture the Smith forces. If Jones should do any of these things, he becomes a criminal as fully as Smith, and he too becomes subject to whatever sanctions are meted out against criminality. In fact, if Smith's crime was theft, and Jones should use conscription to catch him or should kill others in the pursuit, Jones becomes more of a criminal than Smith, for such crimes against another person as enslavement and murder are surely far worse than theft. (For while theft injures the extension of another's personality, enslavement injures, and murder obliterates, that personality itself.) Suppose that Jones, in the course of his "just war" against the ravages of Smith, should kill a few innocent people, and suppose that he should declaim, in defense of this murder, that he was simply acting on the slogan, "Give me liberty or give me death." The absurdity of this "defense" should be evident at once, for the issue is not whether Jones was willing to risk death personally in his defensive struggle against Smith; the issue is whether he was willing to kill other people in pursuit of his legitimate end. For Jones was in truth acting on the completely indefensible slogan: "Give me liberty or give them death"—surely a far less noble battle cry.3 The libertarian's basic attitude toward war must then be: It is legitimate to use violence against criminals in defense of one's rights of person and property; it is completely impermissible to violate the rights of other innocent people. War, then, is only proper when the exercise of violence is rigorously limited to the individual criminals. We may judge for ourselves how many wars or conflicts in history have met this criterion. It has often been maintained, and especially by conservatives, that the development of the horrendous modern weapons of mass murder (nuclear weapons, rockets, germ warfare, etc.) is a difference only of degree rather than kind from the simpler weapons of an earlier era. Of course, one answer to this is that when the degree is the number of human lives, the difference is a very big one.4 But another answer that the libertarian is particularly equipped to give is that, while the bow and arrow and even the rifle can be pinpointed, if the will be there, against actual criminals, modern nuclear weapons cannot. Here is a crucial difference in kind. Of course, the bow and arrow could be used for aggressive purposes, but it could also be pinpointed to use only against aggressors. Nuclear weapons, even "conventional" aerial bombs, cannot be. These weapons are ipso facto engines of indiscriminate mass destruction. (The only exception would be the extremely rare case where a mass of people who were all criminals inhabited a vast geographical area.) We must, therefore, conclude that the use of nuclear or similar weapons, or the threat thereof, is a sin and a crime against humanity for which there can be no justification. This is why the old cliché no longer holds that it is not the arms but the will to use them that is significant in judging matters of war and peace. For it is precisely the characteristic of modern weapons that they cannot be used selectively, cannot be used in a libertarian manner. Therefore, their very existence must be condemned, and nuclear disarmament becomes a good to be pursued for its own sake. And if we will indeed use our strategic intelligence, we will see that such disarmament is not only a good, but the highest political good that we can pursue in the modern world. For just as murder is a more heinous crime against another man than larceny, so mass murder—indeed, murder so widespread as to threaten human civilization and human survival itself—is the worst crime that any man could possibly commit. And that crime is now imminent. And the forestalling of massive annihilation is far more important, in truth, than the demunicipalization of garbage disposal, as worthwhile as that may be. Or are libertarians going to wax properly indignant about price control or the income tax, and yet shrug their shoulders at, or even positively advocate, the ultimate crime of mass murder? This article is excerpted from "War, Peace, and the State," originally published in the Standard (April 1963). The full essay is included in Egalitarianism as a Revolt Against Nature and Other Essays and The Myth of National Defense: Essays on the Theory and History of Security Production (2003), edited by Hans-Hermann Hoppe—now available as an EPUB.
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| Three Things the Fed Must Do to Normalize Bond Markets Posted: 30 Oct 2021 08:00 AM PDT Policy normalization—defined as closing down the nonconventional toolbox and restoring a well-functioning price-signaling mechanism to the bond market—is difficult but possible. Original Article: "Three Things the Fed Must Do to Normalize Bond Markets" This Audio Mises Wire is generously sponsored by Christopher Condon. Narrated by Michael Stack.  |
| Who Will Build the Roads? Anyone Who Stands to Benefit from Them. Posted: 30 Oct 2021 06:00 AM PDT The appropriate question is not "Who will build the roads?" but rather "Who will pay for them without taxation?" History suggests the answer is "lots of people" and the "public goods" theory is wrong. Original Article: "Who Will Build the Roads? Anyone Who Stands to Benefit from Them." This Audio Mises Wire is generously sponsored by Christopher Condon. Narrated by Michael Stack.  |
| Marxism versus Libertarianism: Two Types of Internationalism Posted: 30 Oct 2021 03:30 AM PDT There are two main philosophical and ideological schools of thought that include the problem of internationalism in their principles. The first is liberal internationalism, which developed within the framework of classical liberalism. The second is orthodox Marxism and its various derivatives that entertain the idea of proletarian internationalism. The concept of internationalism has different origins, meanings, and practical implementations in the two schools of thought. Because the term "liberal" in a politico-philosophical sense was highjacked by the Left and changed its meaning in people's perception, it is better to use the term "libertarian internationalism" for the purpose of this discussion. As a component of political doctrine, libertarian internationalism is based on the concept of laissez-faire, which implies, among other things, free trade and free movement of capital. The main goal of libertarian internationalism is to ensure economic and individual freedom on a global scale that would lead to the prosperity of individual, family, community, and country, and ensure a peaceful world order. From an economic and philosophical point of view, libertarian internationalism is a logical continuation and generalization of the concept of division and cooperation of labor. Division and cooperation of labor are the result of the societal development process that obeys the objective economic laws. Division of labor results from an interplay between the evolutional forces of natural selection and market forces, and has influenced the development of human society from prehistoric times to this day. It is clear that specialized labor achieves better productivity and quality of the end product or service. Specialization was a manifestation of natural selection based on specific individual skills. At the same time, specialization suggests that an individual voluntarily gives up the production of a commodity that he is less qualified to manufacture but whose consumption is still essential to him. He relies on acquiring these lacking goods and services in the market. Basically, he trusts that some others will supply him needed things that he does not produce anymore. That someone is supposed to know better than everybody else how to produce his specialty commodity or service and, in turn, relies on others to produce something else for him, and so on. In other words, a high degree of division of labor brought members of society together as one, relying on each other. However, it is not collectivism but a voluntary cooperation of individuals who respect each other's property rights. Division of labor creates atomic, independent producers and consumers, and cooperation brings them together in production and in a marketplace. In other words, division of labor induces cooperation. The whole of humanity has found this mode of operation more advanced and gradually intensified the division of labor and reciprocal and beneficial trade. It is not done by someone's order; it simply reflects behavioral changes that humans experience under an influence of selective pressure and the unrestrained laws of the market economy. The domestic mode of production gradually drifts from "production for use" to "production for exchange." The scale of exchange has steadily increased, crossing the boundaries of the individual household over time and eventually reaching a global level. The entrepreneurial class has taken on many risks to enter manufacturing, service delivery, and trade to meet consumer demand. Under developed capitalism, national borders are crossed not only by goods and services but also by capital. Libertarian internationalism is constructive and peaceful in nature and is possible due to the entrepreneurial qualities of individuals and a universal consensus on respecting property rights. Thus, libertarian internationalism is essentially entrepreneurial internationalism. Conversely, the idea of globalization, in which the world political bureaucracy interferes with the economic issues of sovereign enterprises or entire countries, is alien to entrepreneurial internationalism. Libertarian internationalism is the ideal that the world community should strive for, but unfortunately, the continuing interference of politics in the economy and worldwide collectivist trends are alienating humanity from a natural and more just order. Proletarian internationalism arose in the minds of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels as they developed their materialist conception of history. Marxism is a deterministic catastrophe theory applied to the evolution of human society. Using the Hegelian method of dialectics, the founders of Marxism divided capitalist society into two dichotomous classes: the proletariat and the bourgeoisie. The unsolvable conflict between the two antagonistic classes, caused, according to Marx, by the unfair appropriation of surplus value by the capitalists, had to reach a boiling point, the result of which would be a social cataclysm. Marx appointed the proletariat as the driving force, agents of the socialist revolution, designed to sweep away the liberal democratic state and establish the dictatorship of the proletariat as a transitional stage on the path to building a classless society. Marx considered his theory to be the pinnacle of scientific research in economics and sociology, in which he uncovered the objective laws of the development of society. The objective laws of the development of society, as well as the laws of nature, have to be universal and operate independently of someone else's will. They cannot be disabled, canceled, or changed; they are a given that affects everything and everyone. But it was precisely with objectivity that Marx had problems. First of all, the division of society into only two classes and the appointment of the proletariat as an agent of the revolution are unwarranted. Moreover, the workers themselves have not yet realized that they are the proletariat or the role that the founder of Marxism has assigned to them. Marx understood this perfectly and proposed theoretical and practical measures for the emancipation of the proletariat, awakening their class consciousness, and preparing for the political struggle against the bourgeoisie. However, in order to meet the criterion of objectivity, the class consciousness of the proletariat would have to develop naturally and spontaneously, without the influence of anyone's will. Artificial and purposeful incitement to revolutionary sentiments and instigation to overthrow the existing system do not meet the criterion of objectivity and instead completely falsify it. Indeed, a scientific theory of the development of society is not needed to prepare for a coup. Moreover, as objective laws must be universal, the same societal developments must occur in other countries. Marxism argued that the socialist revolution must have a universal character, that is, take place on a global scale, or at least in the most industrialized countries. Marx and Engels well understood that entrepreneurs were genuinely international, as capital does not have borders and the economies of different countries are interconnected. At the same time, labor was mostly local, lacking international organizations and representations. Therefore, Marxism invented proletarian internationalism in order to accommodate Marx and Engels's teaching to these socioeconomic realities and attempt to mobilize the world proletariat for the world socialist revolution. In The Communist Manifesto, the founders of Marxism simply postulated that the proletariat has no boundaries and called on the proletariat of all countries to unite. Marx substantiated this postulate by the fact that the capitalists themselves created the preconditions for the proletarian brotherhood that would ultimately erase the "national one-sidedness" of consciousness within the masses of the proletariat. This conclusion seems farfetched and looks more like wishful thinking. The Marxist suggestion that proletarians possess exceptional moral qualities which oppose nationalism and bigotry and exhibit an unconditional love for all people is empirically unwarranted, and there is no historical evidence to support it. It was, instead, a necessary condition in order for the Marxist theory to be logically consistent; that is, the world socialist revolution against the world bourgeoisie could not take place without a united front of proletarians. Marxism consolidated and expanded internationalism as an integral feature of the workers' and socialist movements, placing itself in opposition to the contrived nationalism of capitalist society. It was an act of intellectual dishonesty that is still difficult to eradicate. Thus, internationalism in the interpretation of libertarian philosophy and Marxist doctrine are completely different concepts. Proletarian internationalism is a political myth postulated by the founders of Marxism and used as a propaganda tool then and now. It is characterized by extreme aggressiveness, since it was invented as a weapon for the political fight against world capital. Libertarian internationalism, in contrast, is peaceful and constructive. It follows naturally from the logical and consistent development of human society in terms of the division and cooperation of labor and is based on respect for private property rights.  This posting includes an audio/video/photo media file: Download Now |
| Contract Rights Are Not the Same as Natural Rights Posted: 30 Oct 2021 03:00 AM PDT Purchasing Submission: Conditions, Power, and Freedom Philip Hamburger has made a revolutionary contribution to American constitutional law. He shows that what is often regarded as a narrow topic, "unconstitutional conditions," of interest only to specialists, is in fact fundamental to understanding our contemporary system of government and moreover that its abuse poses grave dangers to liberty. We should not be surprised that Hamburger, who teaches at Columbia Law School, has made such a revolutionary contribution, as this is not the first time he has done it. In Separation of Church and State, he showed that the first amendment does not prescribe Jefferson's "wall of separation," and the "yes" answer he gave to Is Administrative Law Unlawful? blasted away the abuses of the regulatory state, much to the dismay of Adrian Vermeule and other centralizers. Libertarian readers can best grasp what Hamburger does in Purchasing Submission by thinking about the limits of two ideas we often stress. To some libertarians, contracts are basic, and voluntary bargains between consenting persons are the sum and substance of social interaction. Murray Rothbard did not view the matter that way, though, and for him contracts must be made within the structure of a law code based not on contract but on natural law. If you compare his The Ethics of Liberty with David Friedman's The Machinery of Freedom, you will see the difference between a libertarianism founded on natural law and one which consists of contracts "all the way down." Hamburger is not a libertarian, to the contrary arguing for constitutional government, based on an "originalist" approach, which he believes with justification to offer better protection for liberty than the system that now prevails in America; but his view of law is similar to Rothbard's. Constitutional law is not based on bargains between individuals: "The Constitution … cannot be altered or excused by the consent of states or private persons…. Nowadays, it is not denied that the Constitution is a law, but it is commonly assumed that individuals, institutions, and states, by their consent, can relieve the federal government of its constitutional limits. The Constitution's limits on government, however, are not merely contractual terms" (pp. 153–54). In like fashion, rights are fixed and cannot be given up in return for benefits. "One reason consent has been so widely considered a constitutional solvent is that rights are often seen as merely personal spheres of freedom and thus tradeable commodities. . .From this point of view, free speech and other constitutional rights are personal goods—no more or less than a used car or old rug, which individuals can bargain away as they please…. But constitutional rights are not merely personal claims; more broadly, they are legal limits on government" (pp. 155–56). We now need to consider one more idea to have the background to understand the thesis of Hamburger's book, and this idea has to do with the second concept stressed by libertarians, coercion, and its limits. From a libertarian perspective, so long as you do not use or threaten force against the life, liberty, and property of other people, you are not subject to other restrictions. You are free to persuade them through offers to do as you wish. Hamburger thinks that it is a mistake to apply this attitude to the government, and this leads to the book's main idea. Often, the government induces people to do things by making them conditional offers. For example, researchers will be offered grant money, provided that they follow guidelines that the government sets out. The conditional offer need not involve payments, as in cases of plea bargains, where defendants in return for waiving a jury trial are offered a lighter sentence. You might at first think that, setting aside whether government is legitimate at all, these offers are all right. After all, people are free to accept or reject them, since, by hypothesis, the government won't use force to make them accept its offer. According to a dominant, though not altogether unchallenged, position, this is correct: only conditions that directly contradict the Constitution are ruled out. For example, the government could not offer a church money in return for not teaching that same-sex marriage is wrong, because this would violate the First Amendment; but otherwise, the field is clear. We are now in a position to understand Hamburger's main thesis. He thinks that the government is not constitutionally free to make conditional offers that extend its powers beyond the limits prescribed by the Constitution, even if these offers do not on their face violate its provisions. The government must accomplish its ends with the means provided it by the Constitution and cannot extend its powers through offers, all the more so as, owing to disparities in power, influence, and knowledge between the government and private citizens, it is very difficult for people to refuse the offers. By the use of such offers, the nature of the government has been altered from the strict limits set forward in the Constitution, and in some instances, the extension has had drastic consequences. "Rather than offer money or some other privilege in exchange for a condition, agencies sometimes threaten regulatory hassle until they get acquiescence. The government in this way often imposes conditions in ways that are difficult to distinguish from extortion. Bad as this is, the extortion is even worse when the government threatens regulatory hassle to secure consent to regulatory conditions. The resulting extortion is doubly regulatory—both in the pressure to submit and in the resulting acquiescence to further regulation" (p. 221). And even this is not the worst of it. "This book has saved the worst for last. Not content to use conditions to control those from whom it secures consent, the government asks consenting states and private institutions to control others. The federal government employs conditions to turn the states and private institutions into agents for regulating Americans—often even for imposing unconstitutional restrictions" (p. 233). A case of this kind that especially troubles the author is that the Health and Human Services Department of the federal government requires universities that receive money for "human subjects research" to establish institutional review boards to approve all research in this area, and these boards have often acted to interfere with free speech and academic freedom. In one instance, a law professor who is a friend of the author could not publish an article because he had failed to secure the prior approval of his university's institutional review board, even though his research was not directly related to the ostensible mandate of the board. The board claimed the power to approve all research done at that university, and had he published the article in defiance it, by his own estimate his career would have come to an end. Hamburger warned in his earlier work of the dangers of administrative law, but conditional offers in his view pose an even graver threat to liberty. Hamburger deserves the thanks of all students of the Constitution for his intricately argued book of immense learning, written in excellent style and manifesting a passion for liberty.  This posting includes an audio/video/photo media file: Download Now |
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