Vol. 6.11, November 1974

A Monthly Newsletter

THE

Libertarian Forum

Joseph R. Peden, Publisher		Murray N. Rothbard, Editor
VOLUME VI, NO. 11	NOVEMBER, 1974	US-ISSN0047-4517

THE ELECTIONS

1. The most important fact of the election was the evisceration of the Republican Party. The unrecognized great truth of American politics is that the Republican Party has been moribund for many years; it has been twenty years since the Republicans have controlled Congress, and there is no sign of resumed control in even the far distant future. Nixon’s landslide in 1972 was less important than the remarkable fact that the Democrats continued in total control of both houses of Congress, and have done so throughout the Nixon-Ford administrations. We have had a one-party system for twenty years, and there can be no healthy evolution in American politics until we all become aware of that fact. The massive repudiation of the Republican Party in 1974 should begin the healthy process of officially burying its moribund carcass.

2. The happily low participation in the vote (about 38% of eligible voters) is a clear sign that what the public was doing was not so much endorsing the Democrats as registering their disgusted repudiation of the Republicans. Indeed, the disgust with both parties was evident throughout the country. And why should the party of Watergate, of tyranny and corruption, of me-tooing the left-liberal big spending and statist policies of the Democrats, not have been repudiated? The Republicans stand for nothing except personal power, and the era of Watergate has made this stance crystal clear. As for the conservative wing of the Republican party, they discredited themselves forevermore by supinely forming the last loyalist bastion of the insufferable Nixon. One of the happy results of the election was the repudiation of the most visible Nixon loyalists: the thuggish Sandman, the numskull Maraziti, the obfuscating Dennis, the egregious Landgrebe who vowed to stay loyal to Nixon “if they have to take both of us out to be shot.”

3. One of the most interesting aftermaths of the election has been the continuing call by the conservative weekly Human Events for repudiating, at long last, the Republican Party, and for the formation of a Reagan third-party ticket in 1976. It has finally become clear to Human Events that whether or not there is “an emerging conservative majority among the public, there sure won’t be any “emerging Republican majority” (to quote the famous phrase of conservative strategist Kevin Phillips.)

A conservative third-party would have the healthy consequence of possibly completing the destruction of the discredited Republican party, and thereby forcing an ideological re-alignment of American politics comparable to the destruction of the Whigs and their replacement by the Republicans in the 1850’s.

A truly “Old Right” party, a renascent party of small government, drastic tax and budget cuts, and a free economy would be a truly pleasant development. Not only would its emergence be a healthy development in itself, but it would also form the “water” for a Libertarian Party to “swim in”, for the LP could continually point to the inevitable gap between the Old Right party’s libertarian rhetoric and its compromised reality, and thereby serve to push such a party in an ever more libertarian direction. Libertarian ideas could only advance in such a climate.

But the chances of such a genuinely limited government party emerging are small indeed. For the right-wing has suffered for two decades now under the thrall of the cunning and articulate statists of National Review, and it shows no signs of casting off this domination. In an age that evidently suffers from a swollen and aggrandized Executive, National Review now calls once more for an even stronger Presidency, a call implicitly supported by the actions of the moronic loyalists of the Nixon regime. Furthermore, under the National Review aegis, the right-wing continues to be the party of global war and intervention abroad, and of state big-business corporatism, the military-industrial complex, and coerced “morality” at home. A new “Old Right” party, to be credible to the American public, would have to be consistent: it would have to oppose, for example, government spending on warfare as well as on welfare. It would have to adopt a frankly “isolationist” policy of peace and non-intervention abroad, thereby appealing to a public sick of war scares and foreign giveaways. But to do so, it would have to engage in a true ideological “revolution” against the National Review and allied leadership, and this it shows no real signs of doing. Certainly, such a revolutionary change could be effected; but it would require both an intelligence and a will that shows no signs of forthcoming on the right-wing. Neither does Ronald Reagan evidence any desire to lead that sort of third-party movement.

4. There are, however, some encouraging results of the November election, of thrusts in a libertarian direction. Apart from the Libertarian Party (detailed further below), the most notable was the surprise victory of independent James B. Longley as governor of Maine, for the first time in decades a genuine independent beat both of the far-better known and organized Democrat and Republican candidates. Equally important was the reason for Longley’s candidacy and presumably his victory. Longley, a wealthy 50-year-old insurance executive who rose from the ranks of poverty, had been the head of a Maine Management and Cost Survey, which recommended a cut in the Maine budget of $24 million per year. When the politicians ignored the commission’s recommendations, Longley dropped out of the Democratic Party to run for governor on the cost-saving platform. In short, Longley ran and won purely on the crucial issue of cutting government taxation and spending.

Uncompromising and independent, Longley noted, after his victory, that “credibility of politicians was definitely an issue in this campaign. Too many politicians follow the strategy of going where the fish are and saying what the fish want to hear. I just refused to do that.” Also notable was the Longley campaign’s attraction for a large number of volunteer college students throughout the state. Furthermore, Longley sees the national significance of his victory: “This election is shining like that beacon off the coast of Maine. I can see other candidates all over the country doing what I did.” (On Longley, see Robert W. Merry, “Pols Scratch Heads Over Upset in Maine,” National Observer, Nov. 16; and the New York Times, Nov. 7.)

5. Which brings us to the campaigns of the Libertarian Party for this was the first election in which the fledgling LP fielded candidates in many parts of the country. In California, the California Libertarian Alliance, with the help of some LP members, accomplished the seemingly impossible by not only triumphing over the socialists in the Peace and Freedom Party primary, but also by winning control at the state party convention, and proceeding to adopt a platform that is, from all reports, even more libertarian than the LP platform. The new PFP platform calls for the abolition of taxation, and for the immediate withdrawal of all American troops and armed installations outside the territory of the U.S. Bravo! It also advances the principle of secession and decentralization by calling for the secession of California from the U.S. In the competition for purity of libertarian principle, can the LP remain behind?

In fact, the libertarians of California had a true embarasse de richesse this November, with two sets of state-wide slates, the Hospers ticket on the LP, and the Elizabeth Keathley ticket on the PFP. Unfortunately, the LP was not on the ballot, and from all accounts the Hospers write-in campaign did not garner very many votes. On the other hand, the Keathley slate obtained somewhere in the neighborhood of 100,000 votes; and one of its state-wide candidates managed to obtain the 2% of the total vote needed for the PFP to remain on the California ballot for the next four years. Huzzahs are in order, although I understand that the one candidate who accomplished this was one of the non-libertarians on the slate. The question remains: granting the splendid nature of the Keathley victory in the primary and at the state convention, and the success of the PFP in remaining on the ballot, will the libertarian forces be able to retain control in the face of an expected attempt at counter-revolution by the socialists? At any rate, the Keathley campaign garnered a great deal of media publicity, and, if the libertarians keep control, they may grant the Presidential ticket of the LP in 1976 a line on the ballot in a state that has more organized libertarians than any other.

In Ohio, Kathleen Harroff, formerly chairman of the Ohio LP, ran a determined and energetic campaign as an independent for the U.S. Senate (the nature of Ohio election laws precluded an LP race for the Senate.) She obtained the remarkable total of 79,000 votes, approximately 2.7% of the total vote.

In New York, Jerry Tuccille’s campaign for governor mustered the energy and enthusiasm of a large number of bright and able libertarians. It gained the quiet support of numerous important Conservatives disgruntled with the statist Buckleyite rule of the Conservative Party, and Free Libertarian Party candidates for state Assembly Mary Jo Wanzer and Virginia Lee Walker gained Conservative Party endorsement, the latter by defeating the CP. designee in the party primary. Mrs. Walker, by the way, garnered about 6.5% of the total vote for Assembly on the Conservative line (FLP votes have still not been reported by the laggard state officialdom.)

Perhaps the most important fruits of the Tuccille campaign were the attention and publicity it gained for libertarianism in the media. At least four favorable articles about the campaign were published in the New York Times, as well as in other newspapers in New York City and throughout the state. The Tuccille campaign, operating on a veritable shoestring, managed to buy TV-space with a splendid ad—a first for a minor party in the history of New York State. Furthermore, favorable national media attention was gained for the Tuccille campaign. George F. Will, syndicated columnist for the Washington Post, endorsed Tuccille—an interesting defection from the Conservative ranks by National Review’s Washington editor. Furthermore, the increasingly libertarian Washington Post columnist Nicholas von Hoffman—in addition to several splendid articles on the national economy—endorsed the Tuccille campaign in a ringing column (Oct. 25). Noting that the Free Libertarians “have that peculiar buoyancy which comes from believing in what you’re doing and contrasts so strongly with the mainline politicians,” von Hoffman added that the FLP are the spiritual descendants of Locke and Mill. He hailed the FLP slogan, “Legalize Freedom”, which the Libertarians apply to gold as well as heroin, as well as to “dumping the Lockheeds, the Franklin National Banks and the Penn Central Railroads”. Von Hoffman also pointed out that the FLP has cast off the “status quo aroma” of former times, and attracts former liberals fully as well as former conservatives. Cheering rather than apologizing for libertarianism as a “middle-class movement”, von Hoffman pointed out that “that’s hardly surprising since our concepts of individual liberty were born with the middle class and have never thrived in societies which don’t have a large one.” Von Hoffman ringingly concluded that “for the overtaxed, overregulated, overburdened and underpowered millions of the American middle class”, the Libertarians “are the only people worth voting for.”

But the publicity coup of the campaign was a favorable article about libertarianism, centered around the Tuccille race, in Newsweek (Nov. 11). Considering the quickie nature of its research, the Newsweek writers did a fine job in summing up the ideas and the movement of libertarianism, summed up in Jerry Tuccille’s statement that “A libertarian is a conservative who believes in letting people have fun.”

National LP chairman Ed Crane, who has been doing a bang-up job since being installed this summer, promptly issued a Xeroxed flyer of the Newsweek and von Hoffman articles. In timely press releases, Crane has also denounced the Rockefeller nomination and called for attention to the neglected Austrian School of economics in handling the nation’s economic crisis.

Due to the sloth of our “public servants,” we still do not know at this writing whether or not Tuccille garnered the 50,000 votes needed to put the FLP permanently on the New York ballot. Rumors since that election have varied from optimistic to pessimistic, with the most recent rumors being rather gloomy. Early estimates by the campaign managers were that the FLP would have to raise $150,000 from contributions by libertarians across the country to amass the 50,000 votes. Considering that the most diligent efforts were only able to raise something like $60,000, it would not be surprising if the 50,000 vote goal was not attained. The fault for falling short of the goal, if this indeed happened, certainly does not lie with the FLP members or with the campaign staff, who have every reason to be proud of the enthusiasm, the dedication, and the ability with which the Tuccille campaign was conducted. Certainly, it is difficult to find another group of people who achieved a more widespread influence for the libertarian cause per dollar or per man-hour of energy expended. A heartfelt salute to all the dedicated men and women of the Tuccille campaign, from Jerry on down, should be accorded by everyone dedicated to the cause of liberty.

Voting And Politics

On the night before election, and again on the Today show on election morn. I appeared on nationwide NBC-TV, denouncing politics and declaring that I never vote. Despite the fact that the interview was a pure fluke, taken while minding my own business on a New Haven bus, that it was severely edited and truncated on TV to fit the anti-politics theme of mass sentiment as picked up by the reporters, I was immediately besieged by phone calls from libertarians throughout the country. Some LP people attacked me for not mentioning Tuccille and the LP, while the anti-politics forces hailed me for—at last—denouncing all politics and voting. Since I have been accused of inconsistency in being one of the few libertarians who favor both the Libertarian Party and Sy Leon’s League of Non-Voters, perhaps I can seize this occasion to make my views on the politics-voting question—I hope—crystal clear:

1. I am indeed opposed to the State and therefore to politics. If the State-and-politics disappeared tomorrow no one would be happier than myself.

2. The fewer people that vote in any election, therefore, the better. The fewer the votes, the greater the evident anti-politics sentiment throughout the country, and the greater the implicit repudiation of the entire political system. The fact that only 38% of the eligible voters cast their ballots in the 1974 election—the lowest voting percentage in three decades—is one of the most heartening results of the election. It is no coincidence that all politicians from President Ford on down begged the electorate to endorse the American Way by voting, voting for either party (“We don’t care who you vote for, but for God’s sake VOTE!”) Think of how glorious it would be if the next President were elected by a popular vote of five, to four for his opponent. The smaller the vote, the more ridiculous the claim for a “popular mandate” for the victor.

Unfortunately, politicians tend to interpret low voting as “apathy” instead of hostility to the political system (although that concept is now changing, pace the findings of NBC-TV that throughout the country people are disgusted with all politicians.) Hence the importance of the League of Non-Voters’ campaign to transform the alleged “apathy” of non-voters into an explicit repudiation of the political system.

3. I don’t vote, and haven’t done so in two decades, not because I believe voting itself to be immoral (as do the anti-LP libertarians), but because of the reasons in point No. 2, and because one person’s vote is of marginal importance, approaching zero. And for another and for me overriding reason: that the roll for compulsory jury slavery is taken from the voting lists. Compulsory jury duty differs only in degree, not in kind, from the slavery of conscription.

4. However, and unfortunately, neither politics nor voting are going to disappear overnight. Confronted with the fact that tens of millions of Americans are going to continue voting, what party should we support? Whom should we hope wins the elections? Does it make any difference who wins? I contend that it usually makes a great deal of difference. Jefferson was better than Hamilton, Jackson than Adams, Gladstone than Disraeli, Judge Parker than Teddy Roosevelt, etc. A fortiori, the Libertarian Party is infinitely better than any of the other contenders, for many important reasons: as an educational vehicle of unequalled force in influencing the public and the media; as a method of putting pressure on the other parties and on the government to curb their statist policies; and as an eventual conduit for rolling back the State. Of course, there are risks in the LP becoming corrupted if it becomes a major political force, but there are risks in any course of action or inaction. Life itself is a risk. The gripers who sit on the sidelines and carp about the LP have a responsibility, it seems to me, to come up with a course of action that will be at least as, if not more, effective than the LP in spreading the ideas and the influence of libertarianism. So far, the non-party ad hoc organizations have had only a minimal impact. The more impact that any tactical roads may have—be they the LP or any form of non-party organization—the better. This, the area of tactics, is one of the few cases where the pragmatic attitude is the proper one. Let a hundred libertarian flowers bloom. As far as I know, no one in the LP spends any time criticizing the various non-party individuals or organizations; why do the latter expend so much of their time criticizing the LP? Is it because the LP has been so successful?

After Rabat, What?

The inter-Arab conference at Rabat, Morocco, held at the end of October, was not just another conference: it was one of the most significant events in the modern history of the Middle East. Rabat changes the scene in the Middle East and will be affecting world history for many years to come. The significance of Rabat was that, for the first time, the Arab nations have forged an impressive unity on the vexed question of Palestine. Inspired by the Arab successes in the Yom Kippur War of last year, and by the substantial Arab unity in the world-wide oil crisis of last winter, Rabat has placed the endorsement of the entire Arab world on the Palestinian movement.

The most vital aspect of this endorsement was the demolition of the Jordanian roadblock. Ever since its artificial creation after World War I, the Hashemite kingdom of Jordan has been an obsequious ally of Western imperialism; and ever since its grab of the West Bank of Palestine after the 1948 conflict, it has been the major and determined Arab enemy of the national aspirations of the displaced and dispossessed Palestinian Arabs. Jordanian King Hussein’s sudden massacre of the Palestinian guerrillas in the “black September” of 1970 almost wrote finis to Palestinian aspirations. But now all that is ended; and King Hussein at Rabat once and for all liquidated all his claims to the West Bank on behalf of the Palestinians and their representatives in the Palestine Liberation Organization. Hussein and Jordan will no longer form a major implicit support for the continued aggrandizement of the State of Israel. Even Egypt, which Hussein had counted on for support, joined the other Arab nations in support of Palestine, as did the conservative King Faisal of Saudi Arabia, motivated to a large extent by a desire to end the Zionist-Israeli occupation of Jerusalem, a city dear to the religions of Moslems as well as Christians and Jews. Hussein’s capitulation, indeed, was purchased by an annual subsidy of $300,000,000, contributed by the Arab states, and largely by King Faisal.

It was because of Rabat that the United Nations received Yasir Arafat, head of the PLO, as a conquering hero, with full honors of statehood. The recognition of the PLO has irrevocably shifted attention from the humanitarian problem of the Palestinian refugees to the political question of the national as well as the property rights of the Palestinians. Rabat made particularly absurd the reply to Arafat by Israeli UN delegate Yosef Tekoah, who reiterated the old Jordanian canard that the Palestinians do not need a state because they already have one in Jordan; Tekoah doggedly repeated the old Jordanian slogan that “Jordan is Palestine and Palestine is Jordan.” Since Jordan had itself finally abandoned this absurdity at Rabat, Israel’s desperate attempt to resurrect this notion was grounded in air. As Jordanian UN delegate Abdul Hamid Sharaf rebutted to Tekoah, the Israeli position had “closed itself to right, to reality and to truth and had made itself a captive of its own dogmatism.”

Arafat’s appearance was treated with the usual incomprehension by the American media. On the lower levels, the media expressed surprise that the PLO delegates were cultured individuals and not inchoate “barbarians.” On the higher levels, the media expressed disappointment that Arafat had not been moderated by world politics to become “responsible” and “realistic.” Here, the American press showed itself unable to comprehend the politics of ideology, assuming as always that all nations’ politics are cast in the opportunistic, unprincipled mould of the contemporary United States. Arafat and the PLO are revolutionaries, and no revolutionaries are going to sound like Eric Sevareid or Evans and Novak, regardless of the hopes and dreams of American “moderation.” Reciting the history of Zionism and its conquest of Palestine, Arafat reaffirmed before a world audience the oft-expressed Palestinian ideal of a new, secular democratic state in Palestine, a land of full religious freedom “where Christian, Jew, and Muslim live in justice, equality, fraternity, and progress.”

What next, then, in the Middle East? First, it is all too clear that the Kissinger “miracle”, ballyhooed only a few months ago, lies in complete shambles, as the Lib. Forum predicted (“Reflections on the Middle East”, June. 1974). If Israel persists in its refusal to recognize or negotiate with the PLO, then the only sensible forecast is for another war in the Middle East. If such a “fifth round” develops, then the vital consideration for Americans, and even for the peace of the world, is that the United States stay the hell out, that it cease being the’ supplier’ of arms, aid and comfort for the State of Israel. Unfortunately, the chances of the U.S. remaining neutral are not very bright. In fact, they are made even dimmer by the disquieting saber-rattling going on in Washington, the muttering threats of a U.S. invasion of one or more Arab countries in order to grab their oil. It is indeed bizarre that American leaders should virtually ratify the Leninist theory of imperialism by asserting that we must go to war in order to seize natural resources. There is, of course, another way to obtain Arab oil—a method hallowed in American and Western tradition—by buying it. If the price is “too high” (whatever that may mean), then the Arabs will have to lower their price in order to sell their oil, or else we can proceed to develop oil or other energy sources elsewhere.

Already, in fact, market forces are beginning to lower the price of oil and oil products. Gasoline price wars are happily beginning to appear once again throughout the United States. Business Week (November 9) recently reports that the hysteria heard last year about an American oil refinery “shortage” has already disappeared, to be replaced, mirabile dictu, by a “surplus of capacity”. The “shortage” was removed by additions to refinery capacity, and especially by the American government’s removal, in the spring of 1973, of its disastrous 14-year program of restricting oil imports.

Furthermore, the much-touted theory that the increase in Arab oil prices is “responsible” for inflation is economic balderdash. An increase in one price does not “cause inflation”. On the contrary, the paying of higher prices for one product would ordinarily leave consumers with only one option: to cut their demand for other products, and thereby to lower other prices. The rise of prices in general cannot be caused by occurrences in one industry; they can only result from increases in consumer demand, which in turn can only come about from governmental increases in the supply of money—of dollars and of other world currencies. To blame the Arabs for American and Western accelerating inflation is but one more example of the age-old device of governments to find scapegoats for their own counterfeiting, their own continuing creation of new supplies of money. Throughout history, scapegoats for inflation have been found by governments among numerous unpopular groups: speculators, black marketeers, big businessmen, unions, greedy consumers, aliens, Jews . . . and now the Arabs. Meanwhile, government’s own inflationary activities go merrily on, as President Ford, in his “anti-inflation” speech, while abjuring us to clean our plates and sporting a numskull WIN button, hastens to assure us that the Federal Reserve Board will continue to pour out “adequate” amounts of new money.

Meanwhile, there is only one hope for Israel in the short run to avoid another round of war: to abandon its post-1967 conquests and to allow a “mini-Palestine” state organized by the PLO in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. In the likely event that Israel refuses to do so, it guarantees substantive unity between the PLO and the militant Palestinian forces that reject the entire idea of a transitional mini-state and insist on nothing less than an immediate establishment of the full “maxi” Palestine. Refusal to deal with Arafat and the PLO will force a confrontation with the ideas, if not the personnel, of Dr. George Habash and his “rejection front”, which may make Israel long for the days of Arafat just as it now longs for the days of King Hussein.

Economic Determinism, Ideology, And The American Revolution^*

It is part of the inescapable condition of the historian that he must make estimates and judgments about human motivation even though he cannot ground his judgments in absolute and apodictic certainty. If, for example, we find that Nelson Rockefeller made a secret gift of $650,000 to Dr. William J. Ronan, we can choose to interpret Rockefeller’s motivation in one of at least two ways: we can conclude, as did that eminent student of contemporary politics Malcolm Wilson, that Nelson made this and similar gifts purely as “an act of love”; or we can conclude that some sort of political quid pro quo was involved in the transaction. In my view, the good historian (1) cannot escape making a judgment of motivation, and (2) will opt for the latter political judgment. Those historians who have made the realistic and what I hold to be the correct judgment have often been condemned as “materialists”, “economic determinists”, or even “Marxists”, but I contend that what they have simply done was to use their common sense, their correct apprehension of reality.

In some matters, where the causal chain of economic interest to action is simple and direct, almost no one denies the overriding motive of economic interest. Thus, when the steel industry lobbies for a tariff or an import quota, and despite the fact that their stated motivations will include every bit of blather about the “public interest” or the “national security” that they can think of (even “an act of love” if they thought they could get away with it), it would be a rash historian indeed who did not conclude that the prime motivation of the steel industry was to gain higher profits and restrict foreign competition. Similarly with Nelson’s “loving” largesse. There will be few charges of “Marxism” hurled in these situations. The problem comes when the actions involve longer and more complex causal chains: when, for example, we contemplate the reasons for the adoption of the American Constitution, or the Marshall Plan, or entry into World War I. It is in these matters that the focus on economic motives becomes somehow unpatriotic and disreputable.

And yet, the methodology in both sets of cases is the same. In each case, the actor himself tries his best to hide his economic motive and to trumpet his more abstract and ideological concerns. And, in each case, it is precisely because of the attempted cover-up (which, of course, is more successful in the longer causal chains) that the responsibility of the historian is to unearth the hidden motivations. There is no problem, for example, for the historian of the Marshall Plan to discover such ideological motivations as aid to the starving people of Europe or defense against Communism; these were trumpeted everywhere. But the goal of subsidizing American export industries was kept under wraps, and therefore requires more work by the historian in digging it up and spreading it on the record.

Neither is the Mises point that men are guided not by their economic interests but by ideas very helpful in discussing this problem: for the real question is what ideas are guiding them—ideas about their economic interests or ideas about religion, morality, or whatever? Ideas need not be a highly abstract level; it did not take profound familiarity with philosophy, for example, for the export manufacturers to realize that foreign aid would provide them a fat subsidy out of the pockets of the American taxpayer.

No “economic determinist” worth his salt, however, has ever held that economic motives are the sole or even always the dominant wellsprings of human action. Thus, no one who has ever studied the early Calvinists could ever deny that fiery devotion to their new religious creed was the overriding motivation for their conversion and even for their secular activities. Although even in the case of the Reformation, we cannot overlook the economic motivation, for example, for the German princes in siding with Luther or for Henry VIII’s confiscation of the wealth of the Roman Catholic monasteries. The point is in each case to give the economic motivation its due.

Can we, however, provide ourselves with a criterion, with a guide with which we can equip ourselves in at least our preliminary hypotheses about the weights of motivation? In short, can we formulate a theoretical guide which will indicate in advance whether or not an historical action will be predominantly for economic, or for ideological, motives? I think we can, although as far as I know we will be breaking new and untried ground.

Some years ago, an article in the Journal of the History of Ideas, in an attempt to score some points against the great “economic determinist” historian Charles A. Beard, charged that for Beard it was only his historical “bad guys” who were economically determined, whereas his “good guys” were governed largely by ideology. To the author, Beard’s supposed “inconsistency” in this matter was enough to demolish the Beardian method. But my contention here is that in a sense, Beard wasn’t so far wrong; and that, in fact, from the libertarian if not from the Beardian perspective, it is indeed true in a profound sense that the “bad guys” in history are largely economically motivated, and the “good guys” ideologically motivated. Note that the operative term here, of course, is “largely” rather than “exclusively”.

Let us see why this should be so. The essence of the State through history is that a minority of the population, who constitute a “ruling class”, govern, live off of, and exploit the majority, or the “ruled.” Since a majority cannot live parasitically off a minority without the economy and the system breaking down very quickly, and since the majority can never act permanently by itself but must always be governed by an oligarchy, every State will persist by plundering the majority on behalf of a ruling minority. A further or corollary reason for the inevitability of minority rule is the pervasive fact of the division of labor; the majority of the public must spend most of its time about the business of making a daily living. Hence the actual rule of the State must be left to full-time professionals who are necessarily a minority of the society.

Throughout history, then, the State has consisted of a minority plundering and tyrannizing over a majority. This brings us to the great question, the great mystery if you will, of political philosophy: the mystery of civil obedience. From Etienne de La Boetie to David Hume to Ludwig von Mises, political philosophers have shown that no State—no minority—can continue long in power unless supported, even if passively, by the majority. Why then do the majority continue to accept or support the State when they are clearly acquiescing in their own exploitation and subjection? Why do the majority continue to obey the minority?

Here we arrive at the age-old role of the intellectuals, the opinion-moulding groups in society. The ruling class—be they warlords, nobles, feudal landlords, or monopoly merchants, or a coalition of several of these groups—must employ intellectuals to convince the majority of the public that their rule is beneficent, inevitable, necessary, and even divine. The dominant role of the intellectual through history is that of the Court Intellectual, who in return for a share, a junior partnership, in the power and pelf offered by the rest of the ruling class, spins the apologias for State rule with which to convince a deluded public. This is the age-old alliance of Church and State, of Throne and Altar, with the Church in modern times being largely replaced by “scientific” technocrats.

When the “bad guys” act, then, when they form a State or a centralizing Constitution, when they go to war or create a Marshall Plan or use and increase State power in any way, their primary motivation is economic: to increase their plunder at the expense of the subject and taxpayer. The ideology that they profess and that is formulated and spread through society by the Court Intellectuals is merely an elaborate rationalization for their venal economic interests. The ideology is the smokescreen for their loot, the fictitious clothes spun by the intellectuals to hide the naked plunder of the Emperor. The task of the historian, then, is to penetrate to the essence of the transaction, to strip the ideological garb from the Emperor State and to reveal the economic motive at the heart of the issue.

What then of the actions of the “good guys”, i.e., those unfortunately infrequent but vital situations in history when the subjects rise up to diminish, or whittle away, or abolish State power? What, in short, of such historical events as the American Revolution or the classical liberal movements of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries? It goes without saying, of course, that the economic motive for diminishing or throwing off State power is a “good” one from the libertarian point of view, in contrast to the “bad” economic motives of the statists. Thus, a move by the ruling class on behalf of higher taxation is a bad economic motive, a motive to increase their confiscation of the property of the producers, whereas the economic motive against taxation is the good one of defending private property against such unjust depredations. That is true, but that is not the major point I am trying to make here. My contention is that, in the nature of the case, the major motive of the opposition, or the revolutionaries, will be ideological rather than economic.

The basic reason is that the ruling class, being small and largely specialized, is motivated to think about its economic interests twenty-four hours a day. The steel manufacturers seeking a tariff, the bankers seeking taxes to repay their government bonds, the rulers seeking a strong state from which to obtain subsidies, the bureaucrats wishing to expand their empire, are all professionals in statism. They are constantly at work trying to preserve and expand their privileges. Hence the primacy of the economic motive in their pernicious actions. But the majority has allowed itself to be deluded largely because its immediate interests are diffuse and hard to observe, and because they are not professional “anti-statists” but people going about their business of daily living. What can the average person know of the arcane processes of subsidy or taxation or bond issue? Generally he is too wrapped up in his daily life, too habituated to his lot after centuries of State-guided propaganda, to give any thought to his unfortunate fate. Hence, an opposition or revolutionary movement, or indeed any mass movement from below, cannot be primarily guided by ordinary economic motives. For such a mass movement to form, the masses must be fired up, must be aroused to a rare and uncommon pitch of fervor against the existing system. But the only way for that to happen is for the masses to be fired up by ideology. It is only ideology, guided either by a new religious conversion, or by a passion for justice, that can arouse the interest of the masses (in the current jargon to “raise their consciousness”) and lead them out of their morass of daily habit into an uncommon and militant activity in opposition to the State. This is not to say that an economic motive, a defense for example of their property, does not play an important role. But to form a mass movement in opposition means that they must shake off the habits, the daily mundane concerns of several lifetimes, and become politically aroused and determined as never before in their lives. Only a common and passionately believed in ideology can perform that role. Hence our strong hypothesis that such a mass movement as the American Revolution (or even in its sphere the Calvinist movement) must have been centrally motivated by a newly adopted and commonly shared ideology.

The turn now to the insight of such disparate political theorists as Marx and Mises, how do the masses of subjects acquire this guiding and determining ideology? By the very nature of the masses, it is impossible for them to arrive at such a revolutionary or opposition ideology on their own. Habituated as they are to their narrow and daily rounds, uninterested in ideology as they normally are, concerned with daily living, it is impossible for the masses to lift themselves up by their own bootstraps to hammer out an ideological movement in opposition to the existing State. Here we arrive at the vital role of the intellectuals. It is only intellectuals, the full-time professionals in ideas, who can have either the time, the ability, or the inclination to formulate the opposition ideology and then to spread the word to the mass of the subjects. In contrast to the statist Court Intellectual, whose role is a junior partner in rationalizing the economic interests of the ruling class, the radical or opposition intellectual’s role is the centrally guiding one of formulating the opposition or revolutionary ideology and then to spread the ideology to the masses, thereby welding them into a revolutionary movement.

An important corollary point: in weighing the motivations of the intellectuals themselves or even of the masses, it is generally true that setting oneself up in opposition to an existing State is a lonely, thorny, and often dangerous road. It would usually be to the direct economic interests of the radical intellectuals to allow themselves to “sell out”, to be coopted by the ruling State apparatus. Those intellectuals who choose the radical opposition path, then, can scarcely be dominated by economic motives; on the contrary, only a fiercely held ideology, centering on a passion for justice, can keep the intellectual to the rigorous path of truth. Hence, again, the inevitability of a dominant role for ideology in an opposition movement.

Thus, though perhaps not for Beardian reasons, it turns out to be true that the “bad guys”, the statists, are governed by economic motivation with ideology serving as a smokescreen for such motives, whereas the “good guys”, the libertarians or anti-statists, are ruled principally and centrally by ideology, with economic defense playing a subordinate role. Through this dichotomy we can at last resolve the age-old historiographical dispute over whether ideology or economic interests play the dominant role in historical motivation.

If it is the shame of the intellectuals that the Court Intellectual has been their dominant role over the course of world history, it is also the glory of the intellectuals that they played the central role in forming and guiding the mass movements of the modern world in opposition to the State: from the Calvinist upsurge of the Reformation to the classical liberal and radical movements of the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries.

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Let us now apply our framework to an analysis of the historiography of the American Revolution. In the long-standing controversy over the Beard-Becker economic determinist school of American history dominant in the 1920’s and 30’s, it has generally been assumed that one must either accept or reject this basic outlook wholesale, for each and every period of American history. Yet our framework explains why the Beard-Becker approach, so fruitful and penetrating when applied to the statist drive for power which brought about the U.S. Constitution, fails signally when applied to the great anti-statist events of the American Revolution.

The Beard-Becker approach sought to apply an economic determinist framework to the American Revolution, and specifically a framework of inherent conflict between various major economic classes. The vital flaws in the Beard-Becker model were twofold. First, they did not understand the primary role of ideas in guiding any revolutionary or opposition movement. Second, and this is an issue we have not had time to deal with, they did not understand that there are no inherent economic conflicts on the free market; without government intrusion, there is no reason for merchants, farmers, landlords, et al. to be at loggerheads. Conflict is only created between those classes which rule the State as against those which are exploited by the State. Not understanding this crucial point, the Beard-Becker historians framed their analysis in terms of the allegedly conflicting class interests of, in particular, merchants and farmers. Since the merchants clearly led the way in revolutionary agitation, the Beard-Becker approach was bound to conclude that the merchants, in agitating for revolution, were aggressively pushing their class interests at the expense of the deluded farmers.

But now the economic determinists were confronted with a basic problem: if indeed the revolution was against the class interests of the mass of the farmers, how come that the latter supported the revolutionary movement? To this key question, the determinists had two answers. One was the common view—based on a misreading of a letter by John Adams—that the Revolution was indeed supported by only a minority of the population; in the famous formulation, one-third of the populace was supposed to have supported the revolution, one-third opposed, and one-third were neutral. This view flies in the face of our analysis of opposition movements; for, it should be clear that any revolution, battling as it does the professional vested interest of the State, and needing to lift the mass of the people out of their accustomed inertia, must have the active support of a large majority of the population in order to succeed. As confirmation, it was one of the positive contributions of the later “consensus” school of American history of such scholars as John Alden and Edmund Morgan, to demonstrate conclusively that the Revolution had the active support of a large majority of the American public.

The Beard-Becker school had another answer to the puzzle of majority support of the Revolution: namely that the farmers were deluded into such support by the “propaganda” beamed at them by the upper classes. In effect, these historians transferred the analysis of the role of ideology as a rationalization of class interests from its proper use to explain State action to a fallacious use in trying to understand mass movements. In this approach, they relied on the jejune theory of “propaganda” common in the 1920’s and 1930’s under the inspiration of Harold Lasswell: namely, that no one sincerely holds any ideas or ideology, and that therefore no ideological statements whatever can be taken at face value, but must be considered only as insincere rhetoric for the purposes of “propaganda.” Again, the Beard-Becker school was trapped by its failure to give any primary role to ideas in history.

The economic determinists were succeeded by the “consensus” school of American history, as part of the general “American celebration” among intellectuals after World War II. At its best, the consensus historians, notably Edmund Morgan and Bernhard Knollenberg, were able to show that the American Revolution was a genuine multi-class movement supported by the great majority of the American public. Furthermore, the economic determinists, in their eagerness to show the upper merchant class as duping the farmers into supporting the Revolution, emerged—in a curious kind of left-right alliance with the pro-British “Imperial” historians—as hostile to the American Revolution. The consensus historians restored the older view that the colonists were rebelling against genuine invasions of their liberties and property by the British Empire: that their grievances were real and compelling, and not simply a figment of upper class propaganda.

At its worst, however, and under the aegis of such major consensus theoreticians as the “neo-conservatives” Daniel Boorstin and Clinton Rossiter, the consensus school was moved to the truly absurd conclusion that the American Revolution, in contrast to all other revolutions in history, was not really a revolution at all, but a purely measured and the spell of the American celebration and of a Cold-War generated hostility to all modern revolutions, the consensus historians were constrained to deny any and all conflicts in American history, whether economic or ideological, and to absolve the American republic from the original sin of having been born via a revolution. Thus, the consensus historians were fully as hostile to ideology as a prime motive force in history as their enemies, the economic determinists. The difference is that where the determinists saw class conflict, the consensus school maintained that the genius of Americans has always been to be unfettered by abstract ideology, and that instead they have met every issue as ad hoc problem-solving pragmatists.

Thus, the consensus school, in its eagerness to deny the revolutionary nature of the American Revolution, failed to see that all revolutions against State power are necessarily radical and hence “revolutionary” acts, and further that they must be genuine mass movements guided by an informed and radical ideology. Furthermore, as Robert A. Nisbet has recently pointed out in his scintillating pamphlet, The Social Impact of the Revolution, the consensus view overlooks the truly revolutionary and libertarian consequences of the American Revolution in diminishing the role of government, in dismantling church establishments and winning religious freedom, in bringing about bills of rights for the individual’s liberty and property, and in dismantling feudal land tenure in the colonies.

Nisbet’s stress on the revolutionary and libertarian nature and consequences of the American Revolution brings us to the most recent and now dominant school of historiography on the Revolution: that of Professor Bernard Bailyn. Against the hostility of both of the older schools of historians, Bailyn has managed, in scarcely a decade, to win his way through to become the leading interpretation of the Revolution. Bailyn’s great contribution was to discover for the first time the truly dominant role of ideology among the revolutionaries, and to stress that not only was the Revolution a genuine revolutionary and multi-class mass movement among the colonists, but that it was guided and impelled above all by the ideology of radical libertarianism; hence what Bailyn happily calls “the transforming libertarian radicalism of the Revolution.” In a sense, Bailyn was harking back to an older generation of historians at the turn of the twentieth century, the so-called “Constitutionalists”, who had also stressed the dominant role of ideas in the revolutionary movement. But Bailyn correctly saw that the mistake of the Constitutionalists was in ascribing the central and guiding role to sober and measured legalistic arguments about the British Constitution, and, secondarily, to John Locke’s philosophy of natural rights and the right of revolution. Bailyn saw that the problem with this interpretation was to miss the major motive power of the Revolutionaries; Constitutional legalisms, as later critics pointed out, were dry-as-dust arguments that hardly stimulated the requisite revolutionary passions, and furthermore they neglected the important problem of economic depredations by Great Britain; while Locke’s philosophy, though ultimately important, was too abstract to generate the passions or to stimulate widespread reading by the bulk of the colonists. Something, Bailyn rightly felt, was missing: the intermediate-level ideology that could stimulate revolutionary passions.

Guided by the extensive research into English libertarian writers by Caroline Robbins, Bailyn found the missing and vital ingredient: in the transforming of Lockean natural rights theory into a radical and passionate, and explicitly political and libertarian framework. This task was accomplished by radical English journalists who, in contrast to Locke, were read very widely in the colonies: notably, the newspaper essays of Trenchard and Gordon written during the 1720’s. Trenchard and Gordon clearly and passionately set forth the libertarian theory of natural rights, went on to point out that government in general, and the British government specifically, was the great violator of such rights, and warned also that Power—government—stood ever ready to conspire to violate the liberties of the individual. To stop this crippling and destructive invasion of Liberty by Power, the people must be ever wary, ever vigilant, ever alert to the conspiracies by the rulers to expand their power and aggress against their subjects. It was this spirit that the American colonists eagerly imbibed, and which accounted for their “conspiracy view” of the English government. And while Bailyn himself, by concentrating solely on the ideology of the colonists, is ambivalent about whether such English conspiracies against liberty actually existed, the work of such historians as Bernhard Knollenberg has shown conclusively that the conspiracy was all too real, and that what some historians have derided as the “paranoia” of the colonists turned out to be an insightful apprehension of reality, an insight that was of course fueled by the colonists’ understanding of the very nature and essence of State power itself.

While Bernard Bailyn has not continued his studies beyond the Revolution, his students Gordon Wood and Pauline Maier have done so, with unfortunate results. For how can one apply the concept of a “transforming libertarian radicalism”, of a mass ideological hatred of the State and of the executive, to the movement for a Constitution which was the very antithesis of the libertarian and radical ideal? By trying to do so, Wood and Maier lose the idea of radical libertarianism altogether, and wind up in yet another form of consensus view of the Constitution. Yet the battle over the adoption of the Constitution was a fierce ideological and economic conflict; and in understanding that movement and that conflict we must turn to the neo-Beardian approach of such historians as Jackson Turner Main, E. James Ferguson, and Alfred Young, which stresses the economic and class interests behind this aggrandizement of a powerful central government. Furthermore, the Anti-Federalist resistance to the Constitution was fueled, not only by resistance to these economic depredations, but also and above all by the very ideology of Liberty versus Power that had sparked and guided the American Revolution. A glance at the eloquent speeches against the Constitution by Patrick Henry is enough to highlight the libertarian leitmotif of the anti-statist Revolution as well as the anti-statist resistance to the Constitution. Hence, the original insight of the Beardians was correct: that the Constitution was a reaction against the Revolution rather than its fulfillment.

The idea of economic motivation as the prime mover of statist actions through history, as contrasted to ideology as the major guide of anti-statist movements, is thus confirmed by analyzing the historiography of the American Revolution. Perhaps adoption of this basic framework will prove fruitful in the analysis of other important events and movements in human history.

^* A paper delivered at the Libertarian Scholars Conference, Oct. 28, in New York City.

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“All the extravagance and incompetence of our present Government is due, in the main, to lawyers, and, in part at least, to good ones. They are responsible for nine-tenths of the useless and vicious laws that now clutter the statute-books, and for all the evils that go with the vain attempt to enforce them. Every Federal judge is a lawyer. So are most Congressmen. Every invasion of the plain rights of the citizen has a lawyer behind it. If all lawyers were hanged tomorrow, and their bones sold to a mah jong factory, we’d all be freer and safer, and our taxes would be reduced by almost a half.”

— H. L. Mencken

Report From Europe

The two parts of your editor’s European trip this summer of interest to libertarians were: the biennial meeting of the Mont Pelerin Society at Brussels, and sizing up the state of the libertarian movement and of the general political situation in Great Britain.

Mont Pelerin.

The Mont Pelerin Society is an international organization of several hundred people ostensibly devoted to the free market economy. Begun just after World War II by several distinguished economists, led by F. A. Hayek, the Society rapidly expanded during the fifties and sixties, at the same time substantially losing its character as a free-market organization. Many of the hundreds of economists, businessmen, and writers among the members are no closer to libertarian or free-market principles than a simple opposition to Communism. Many of the industrialist members are in intimate partnership with their respective governments, and must be set down as State Monopoly Capitalists rather than advocates of the free market. At any rate, fortunately for all of us, the Society is not empowered to pass any resolutions or to make any statements; its sole function is to hold pleasant annual (regional) and biennial (international) meetings, which serve as a center for social contacts. The formal sessions have become dull as dishwater, with endless repetition of the same arguments hashed over to no conclusion over the last twenty years: e.g. Are Unions or the Money Supply Responsible for Inflation? What Form Should Anti-Monopoly Policy Take? Mired down in what have become ritualistic discussions, the Society has not displayed the will either to move on to broader philosophical topics or even to apply free-market principles to newly discovered problems (e.g. ecology, or the cultivation of the oceans).

The social structure of the Mont Pelerin Society is now approximately as follows: there are a host of elderly members from Western Europe, often statist in outlook. Yet the Western Europeans do not seem to have been able to generate new, younger members. Of the younger members, most are from the United States, which is therefore bound to serve in the future as the center of gravity of the organization. Of the younger American members, there is now competition among three groups to seed members into the Society: the Friedmanites, the anarcho-capitalists, and the Buckleyite young conservatives.

Perhaps as a result of rising pressure by younger members, a new and restive spirit was evident at this year’s Brussels meeting. More and more, discontent with the fusty old topics have pressured the organizers into allowing meetings from below that had not been part of the official schedule. Thus, pressure from admirers of Ludwig von Mises induced the organizers to add an affecting memorial session in tribute to Mises.

An early sign of rising libertarian sentiment occurred midway during the week-long sessions. One of the organizers of the meeting asked me why I had not spoken more at the sessions. The answer, of course, was that I had scarcely attended any, since the informal conversations in the corridors and at the bar were a lot more enjoyable and instructive than the same old stuff at the formal sessions. “Oh no, Murray, you should talk. Five, ten years ago everyone regarded you as a nut, but now there’s increasing interest in your position.” Taking that as a cue, I and a few others decided to organize, as one of the now allowed, informal sessions, a meeting on “Anarchism and Capitalism”, with myself as official chairman and Roger MacBride as moderator. The response was fantastic, for at the meeting over 130 members and guests appeared, and the response at the meeting was interested and generally favorable. At the session—the first, of course, in the history of Mont Pelerin, on anarcho-capitalism—I first gave a brief, overall sketch of the philosophy, showing how it is the logical extension of free-market principles. Then, we had Reports from the Movements in various countries, most of which we hadn’t known existed until finding each other at Brussels. These reports not only served to inform each group of the existence of the others, but also to impress the newcomers with the rising tide of the libertarian movement in the various countries.

Thus, we heard from Michiel van Notten, dynamic young Dutch businessman who is forming an anarcho-capitalist group in Holland, consisting of about nine persons. We found out that a thriving movement of lawyers, economists, and businessmen has developed in Madrid, consisting of a Misesian circle of about 40 people who meet regularly, of whom from five to nine are anarcho-capitalists known as the “Rothbardaneros.” The Spanish group regularly translates Austrian economics and libertarian works into Spanish. The attorney Luis Reig reported from this group. From England we heard from the dynamic and indefatigable Pauline Russell, who has sparked a rapid growth of anarchist and quasi-anarchist libertarians in that country. Pauline as well as most of the English movement maybe best described as teetering somewhere between limited government and anarcho-capitalism, with national defense and an emotional attachment to the monarchy still posing some problems. Then Roger MacBride wound up the reportage with a description of the growth of the Libertarian Party in the U.S. and Canada. All in all, it was a great breakthrough for anarcho-capitalism in a setting that no one would have predicted a few years ago could ever be in the slightest degree hospitable. Will we have our own Libertarian International in a few years?

The British Situation.

Great Britain is clearly in a total economic mess, ten (twenty?) years ahead of the United States down the road to gallopping inflation, crippling controls, and stifling taxation. Controls are causing the usual haphazard succession of shortages, and, when we were in England, sugar and bottles were disappearing from the market. No one, but no one, invests in the, English stock market, which makes ours seem a picture of health and prosperity. While many politicians understand the monetary cause of inflation, there is no will to stop the process because of the phobia about recession and unemployment (sound familiar?) At any fate, British society seems to be polarizing very rapidly, what with the ever-present threat of general strikes by powerful left-wing unions, countered by the emergence of two sets of private armies dedicated to keeping industry going: a right-wing group under General Walker and a centrist, “non-political” one under Colonel Stirling. It is scary to watch the BBC and see impeccable Englishmen with bland understatement quietly discussing whether or not civil war will break out in the not too distant future.

Amidst this turmoil, the most heartening sign is the rapid growth of libertarians and anarcho-capitalists in a country that only a few years ago had virtually no one even as “extreme” as Milton Friedman. The major libertarian group is centered around Pauline Russell, and includes businessmen, journalists, economists, and others ranging from anarcho-capitalists to neo-Randians to the Selsdon Group, the free-market ginger group within the Conservative Party. Most of this group is friendly with the notable Enoch Powell, who of all the politicians in England is the only one with both the knowledge and the will to stop the monetary inflation and to put through a free market program and an end to wage and price controls. Powell, himself, despite his Tory devotion to the monarchy (which is seconded even by many of the English anarcho-capitalists), has grown increasingly libertarian. The Powell forces were working on a gusty strategy for the then forthcoming October elections: voting Labour in order to smash the statist leadership of Edward Heath. This strategy has already helped bring about the recent Labour victory, and it looks very much as if Ted Heath will happily be sent to the showers. Whether or not the third step in the strategy—the accession of Enoch Powell to the Tory leadership—will follow is certainly problematical, at least for the short run. Of the Tories now in the running to succeed Heath, the most free-market oriented is Sir Keith Joseph, who however suffers from the familiar syndrome of politicians in being far more libertarian out of power than he is in power. At any rate, Powell has cleverly found a new political base among the Ulster Unionists and is now back in Parliament after refusing to run on the Tory platform in the previous election.

In some ways, the small but growing English movement is a microcosm of the American. Split off from the Pauline Russell group is a smaller group of “hard core anarcho-capitalist purists”, who scorn any form of political action, or indeed any truck with non-purists, as a sellout of libertarian principle. This youthful group is led by Mark Brady and Chris Tame. The Russell wing, in the meanwhile, took the first tentative steps in the October election toward the formation of a Libertarian Party of Great Britain (in Britain, it is relatively easy and inexpensive for a new party to get on the ballot.) The libertarian businesswoman Mrs. Theresa Moore Gorman ran for Parliament as an “Independent Freedom” candidate from her home constituency of Streatham, an outlying suburb of London. We have not yet been able to find out how Teresa fared at the balloting.

Finally, just before leaving for Europe, we found out that the small but growing libertarian movement in Australia has decided to form the Libertarian Party of Australia. For the first time, libertarianism is bidding fair to become a genuine international-movement.

Note To Our Readers

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