A Strategy for the Ward of Ideas; S. Petro

Sylvester Petro A STRATEGY FOR THE WAR OF IDEAS NEVER BEFORE have there been so many persons and institutions en gaged on the side of laissez-faire in the war of ideas over the proper role of government. And rarely before have socialism and interventionism enjoyed greater success in expand ing the role of government while diminishing personal autonomy. Can it be that as the forces favoring laissez-faire grow, the role of gov ernment tends necessarily to in crease? Such a conclusion is unacceptable, for to accept it would imply that the proper course of action for every libertarian is to abandon his liber tarianism. Dr. Petro has written The Labor Policy of the Free Society and numerous other scholarly books and articles. He Is Research Professor of Law, Baylor University, and Director of The Institute for Law and Policy Analysis, Winston-Salem, N.C. The more acceptable interpreta tion is that while the number of libertarians may have grown abso lutely, their influence has di minished relatively. This is the starting point of the present reflec tions on a strategy for spreading the truths of laissez-faire liber tarianism: that statism is winning the war of ideas because the truths of libertarianism have not been pub lished in sufficient quantity and quality to overcome the fallacies of statism.

Myths and Public Policy It is not hard to establish that statism has been gaining ground throughout the,20th century simply because ideas and factual assump tions favorable to it have prevailed during this period. Today, most be lieve that the market economy 323 324 THE FREEMAN June abused consumers and exploited workers in the Hbad old days." The free society will never have much of a chance as long as most people believe that it has been tried and has failed. It is no good saying that businessmen have learned to behave themsel ves better under the pres;; sure of interventionist legislation and union disciplines. For people correctly ask themselves: if the free market could not protect workers and consumers from the predations of business and if it could not pro vide security against health and old-age hazards without the inter vention of government before, why should it do so now?

Statism seems always to advance. Politicians and leftist ideologues daily blame businessmen and the market economy for the bad results of the treacherous villainy of gov ernment. Although inflation, un employment, energy shortages, and their even more wretched conse quences all trace to government in terventionism, the people believe it when they are told that business is to blame. Why are they so prone to believe the worst of the best public servants the world has ever had the business firms which feed, clothe, and otherwise provide for us so munificently while government only takes, and takes, and persons such as Ralph Nader have never succeeded in producing anything other than exploitation of the consumer in the name of n con sumerism"? People don't think very well of government, either, it is true. But this .fact serves only to emphasize how suspicious they are of the free market and of businessmen. Trust ing government very little, they trust business even less and are therefore prone to believe the worst of it. Why? Let us examine one area of public policy which may provide a clue to the answer.

The Law of Labor Relations Consider the law of labor rela tions. Scarcely a more destructive field of interventionist public policy exists. This policy, though dating back to the 1920s, rests on five still prevalent ideas: (1) that employers and employees are natural an tagonists; (2) that in this antagonis tic relationship the employers have all the advantages; (3) that in a market economy the employer is driven by competitive exigency to use his power-edge to abuse and exploit his employees; (4) that pro tection from such abuse lies in strong unionism and collective bar gaining which the government can promote only by giving worker organizations special legal priv ileges at the expense of the com mon-law rights of employers and anti-union employees; (5) that the common-law courts cannot be trust ed to administer such a regime 1979 A STRATEGY FOR 'rHE WAR OF IDEAS 325 of special union privileges, so they must be replaced by administrative tribunals (such as the National Labor Relations Board), agencies which can be relied upon to imple ment the pro-union policies and not to be bothered by what Felix Frankfurter called the ((pernicious abstractions" of liberty and property and the rule of law which tend to influence the decisions of the regu lar courts.

Widely Popularized Practically everyone accepts as unshakeable truth one or more of these commonly held beliefs: uni versity professors, preachers, high school and grammar school teach ers, businessmen, journalists, ((intel lectuals at large," novelists, comic strip creators, singers, dancers, ac tors, newspaper columnists, TV commentators. How then can the general public help taking these premises as gospel? And if they share the belief that the common law and the market economy, left unhampered, will abuse workers, how can they prefer free labor mar kets under the rule of common law? And if the general public does not want them, what response is to be expected from politicians, the turgid mirrors of muddy public opinion? The big unions are today no longer as popular as they used to be. Still, no one is seriously proposing that the special privileges which account for their destructive social ef fects be repealed. No government, even today, with union popularity at a low, seriously considers repealing the existing pro-union legislation.

The situation is even worse. In fact, the moves in Washington are for more special privileges for unions. Each year lately the great political battle has been between those who wish to mulct the public with still more favorable laws for unions and those who say ((thus far and no further." To repeat, proposals to repeal existing pro-union laws are rarely if ever made, and when made they are always ignored. Why is this so? Ruling Ideas There is an argument going on in libertarian circles between those who contend that ideas rule the political world and those who be lieve that interests rule. Probably the dispute here is basically a ter minological one. Interests and ideas are, as Mises might have said (if he thought the dispute worth noticing), congeneric and concentric. Decisions about what interests to pursue are shaped by values and ideas, and values and ideas are interacting phenomena. Much more important than this, while proposals may be made by interest groups largely out of base greed, with ideas secondary in their calculations, the big ques tion for them and for the country lies 326 THE FREEMAN June in whether the demands for special subsidy and privilege will be granted. Interests may propose; but the ruling ideas of the country dis pose.

So there can be only one answer. The five premises summarized above continue to prevail. These rul ing ideas preclude any possibility of repeal of the pro-union labor policies despite their pernicious effects. With the country at large en thralled by these premises, not even sound scholars of libertarian bent are totally immune. Fritz Machlup, for example, has written that ((there is no doubt that the use of the in junction against labor [sic] had been abused and it was in reaction to such abuse that the Federal Anti Injunction Act was passed in 1932, severely restricting the use of the injunction." [The Political Economy of Monopoly 325 (1952).] But the first exhaustive study ever made of the use of the injunction in labor disputes from 1880 to 1932, only recently published, 1 demonstrates beyond any reasonable doubt that during the period of so-called gov ernment by injunction the judges dealt with unions leniently and were already according them special pri vileges.

lInjunctions and Labor-Disputes 1880-1932: What the Courts Actually Did, and Why, available from The Institute for Law and Policy Analysis, Suite 305, First Center Bldg., Winston-Salem, N.C. 27104 ($6.00), 235 pp. Sources of the Myths A thoroughgoing, systematic pro cess instilled these great labor myths into the minds of Europeans and Americans. The process began early in the 19th century in Europe, came to America toward the middle of the 19th century, and has been burgeoning ever since. A young libertarian scholar, Dr. Howard Dickman, is at work today on an exhaustive study of the English, European, and American scholars responsible for the gradual descent into the chaos of trade-union syn dicalism which is threatening the survival of Great Britain and is tying the United States in knots. When Dickman's work is published we shall be able to fix with precision the sources of the ideas which now rule almost all Americans, as well as the British and the Europeans, about the relations between em ployer and employee.

But we already know how their infl uence has spread from their lec tures, articles, and books to our own university professors and from them to all the rest of us. Young Ameri can graduate. students in the 19th century went to England and to Europe to complete their education, and they came back with the inco herent mess of guild socialism, pure socialism, syndicalism, and com munism which has in most countries of the western world produced the atrocious paradoxes and incoheren1979 A STRATEGY FOR THE WAR OF IDEAS 327 cies which we know as the Hwelfare state." These young American scholars came back from Europe to become teachers and writers themselves, and, later, political activists-active in the service of syndicalism. Their students never quite knew what their teachers were for, because socialists and syndicalists tend to be confused and contradictory among themselves. But they all were equally and fervently convinced of one thing: the inhumanity and deg radation of unhampered free en terprise. On this all their teachers were as one. And their students emerged with at least one clear idea: capitalism is ugly and hateful and hurtful.

And these students spread across the land, spanning all occupations, and became vocal thought-leaders everywhere. Some became them selves university professors, thus heightening the multiplicative ef fects of their teachers. Others be came journalists, another social ist-multiplying activity. Many be came preachers-more multi pliers. And then there were those whose role it became to put the de structi ve ideas of syndicalism actu ally to work: lawyers, judges, legis lators and other politicians. One of the best examples was Felix Frankfurter, already men tioned as the author of the phrase, ~~the pernicious abstractions of liberty and property." Born an Aus trian and already when he emi grated to America imbued with the Austrian statism which Mises has described, Felix Frankfurter was educated in this country by the epigoni of the European socialist syndicalists. Moving to the Left Some have thought Frankfurter a kind of conservative, but the facts are different. While a professor at Harvard Law School he became na tionally known as an ardent suppor ter of leftist causes. For many years he published in the law journals articles decrying the common law and arguing for legislation granting unions special privileges. Not satis fied with mere· scholarship he was also active politically. His master work, The Labor Injunction (1930), supplied the intellectual ammuni tion, just as his personal efforts pro vided the political stimulus, for the Norris-LaGuardia (anti-injunction) Act, easily one of the most effec tively pernicious pieces of legisla tion ever passed.

During the New Deal, F. D. Roosevelt appointed Frankfurter to the United States Supreme Court. There Frankfurter completed the cycle from idea to action. His deci sions' especially in the field of labor law, pushed the Norris-LaGuardia Act to extremes of pro-union privilege which even his own previ328 THE FREEMAN June ous writing had disavowed. As a professor, he had written that the Norris Act did nothing more than prevent courts from enjoining ag gressi ve union acti vi ty. On the Court he was to say that the Norris Act made such activity lawful for all purposes, so that aggressive union strikes and boycotts were freed of all legal control-actions for damages and criminal prosecutions, as well as petitions for injunctions. Meanwhile the federal govern ment and its bureaucracies also felt the Frankfurterian influence in the form of numerous of his Harvard Law School students. But that is by no means all. Great as his personal efforts and influence were, they were not so great as the influence of his major written work, The Labor Injunction. In exploring this fact, we shall come to a conclusion of perhaps considerable value.

The study mentioned above goes far to demonstrate that Frankfur ter's book was thoroughly meretrici ous: massively, and pretentiously documented though it appeared, the book was actually all show and no substance. Despite its mountainous footnotes, charts, and appendixes, the book was full of untruths, half truths, and distortions; not withstanding its scholarly appear ance, in the end it was no more scholarly or cautious than the rabid editorials of the Communist Daily Worker or the CIO News. For exampIe, Frankfurter repeatedly charged employers and judges with anti union animus but never bothered to examine why such animus de veloped. He referred over and over again to the ((pernicious abstrac tions of liberty and property" but nowhere showed how those ideas had brought about vicious results. An Influential Book Yet, with all its faults, The Labor Injunction has quite possibly been the most influential law book ever written in this country. Its main charges practically duplicate the five ruling myths of current labor policy mentioned earlier. Frankfur ter said that in the antagonistic employer-employee relationship, employers were exploitative; unions were the only possible protective de vices for the abused employees; but the common law judges, fired with anti-union passion and victimized by ttpemicious abstractions," were making it impossible for the unions to do the great and good work that they alone could do.

If any person can be credited with a dominant role in fixing those ideas in the American mind, Felix Frankfurter. was that person, and his book, The Labor Injunction, was the means. Even before it was pub lished, courts cited it as authority for denying injunctions against vi cious union conduct, in cases in which the obvious victims of such 1979 A STRATEGY FOR THE WAR OF IDEAS 329 conduct were employees or members of rival unions. In the succeeding fifty years since it was first pub lished, The Labor Injunction has been cited as authority for noxiously pro-union decisions literally thousands of times. Its scholarly influence has been at least as great as its legal influence. I ha ve never read any significant work dealing with the labor injunction since 1930 which does not bow first to Frankfurter's book. When the author of such a work blithely declares that the courts abused· the labor-injunction in the ttbad old days," he does not bother to cite a case as an example; still less does to try to demonstrate that such and such a case represented an abuse of the injunctive process. He merely cites The Labor Injunc tion-and proceeds from there to the most astoundingly outrageous legal proposals, confident that his premise is invincible because The Labor Injunction is his ttauthority."

The influence of The Labor Injunction spreads on and on. Since all the labor law teachers (and all the teachers of related subjects in eco nomics, sociology, and politics) be lieve The Labor Injunction to be the gospel truth and say as much to their students, the students accept its wild accusations as gospel, too. They are in no position to check its accuracy. Till recently, they could find no fully and convincingly documented refutation on the li brary shelves. Hence The Labor Injunction was bound to fix their opin ions on the subjects it treated. If they dared write a term-paper on unionism and the law without citing The Labor Injunction as an author ity, doubtlessly their teachers would slash biting comments about ~~lack of standard authority" with their red marker pens across the offend ing pages. And if in Class a student were to challenge the fullness and fairness of the Frankfurterian re search, how could he defend his ex traordinary temerity? The instruc tor would cut him to bits, and the other students would munch placid ly at the pieces.

Write Books! It has taken me a long time fully to absorb the meaning and implica tions of Mises' frequent exhortation: ttwrite books!" A solid scholarly work· on an important subject has a much longer life and greater influ ence than any living person has. It is in some important ways better than speeches, better than panel discus sions, better than articles in popular journals, better than pamphlets, better than thin monographs, better than politicking, better than any other activity measured only in the average human life-span. The only thing that comes close to sharing the advantages of a solid scholarly book is a comprehensive and detailed ar330 THE FREEMAN June ticle published in a journal which is covered by one or more of the good periodical indexes. This is not to say that people should quit writing brief articles, giving speeches, or engaging in poli tics, if that is their desire. It is only to bring attention to some of the advantages of solid scholarly work in the eternal war of ideas.

Any decent scholarly work will be purchased by all the great univer sity and public libraries. If it is really good, it will find its way into smaller university, public, and pri vate libraries. Its presence will be signalled for ages to come in the library's card-catalogue, under au thor and subject and perhaps, if the cataloguer is good, under all the major topics it treats. Its silent and passive look on the shelves is decep tive, for no decent scholar will write a serious work without at least con sulting the library card-catalogues available to him. If really serious, he will travel far and wide to find addi tiona I works on his subject. When he finds a work which he believes rele vant, if he is honest he will bring it to life. It then no longer sits pas sively on the shelves, doing nothing. It enters his mind. It may have an electrifying impact. This has often happened to me. I first ran across Henry Hazlitt's writing in a card catalogue. I encountered Mises' Human Action by chance in another card-catalogue. Life has never been the same for me. Books are not pas sive.

The Need for Exhaustive Research The country and the world are in much worse shape than necessary. Since mankind is imperfect its con dition will always leave something to be desired. But even so, things could be better than they are, de spite our inherent limitations and flaws. The correctible aspects of mankind's condition trace to faulty facts or faulty theory or both. As already mentioned, these faulty facts and theories have a long his tory, a monumental literature, and an almost universal influence. Fortunately, since The Founda tion for Economic Education was es tablished in the 1940s (at about the same time as the Mont Pelerin Soci ety was formed), a large number of institutions committed to the ad vancement of freedom and of the market economy have come into existence. These institutions are variously engaged. Some are con ducting educational programs of an academic sort, some operate on the seminar or conference system, some publish journals, usually of a popu lar kind, some publish brief mono graphs and pamphlets, and some, es sentially philanthropic institutions, provide support to the foregoing, as well as to individual authors for work which is at times quite ambi1979 A STRATEGY FOR THE WAR OF IDEAS 331 tious from the scholarly point of view.

All these libertarian programs are good. Doubtlessly, libertarianism would enjoy more success, if each were expanded. But I believe that what libertarianism must have now, if it is still to exist after the next dark generation has passed, is an extensive literature of heavyweight, exhaustive, thoroughly documented books demonstrating the fallacies and the destructive consequences of the anticapitalist policies which are now ruling the world and which are likely to bring it very close to de struction in the generation ahead. For reasons stated above, semi nars, conferences, brief articles, pamphlets, and other such ephem era will not suffice. They serve to inspire greater efforts by those they reach; they may even postpone the social destruction already so well on its way. But they cannot extirpate the queer mix of syndicalism and socialism that is now sweeping all before it. They cannot do this for largely the same reasons that you can't sink a battleship with a pop gun. The policies which are daily increasing the inanity and ugliness and insecurity of life are the prod ucts of the mountainous literature which has implanted the kinds of deeply imbedded myths listed ear lier: the myths about the natural antagonisms between employer and employee, the abusive and exploita tive character of the unhampered market, the necessity of more and ever more government in order to correct the alleged inhumanity and the inequities built into free mar kets.

All you can do in a brief article or speech or seminar is call these things ((myths." You cannot defini tively expose their mythic charac ter, you cannot annihilate their cred ibility, you cannot strip them of every pretension-by anything less than exha usti ve and defini ti ve scholarly work. The myths are too deeply imbedded, too widely shared. Throwing pamphlets at the tower ing myths which rule our times is like trying to knock down the Em pire State Building with a slingshot. It's even less promising than that. It will take generations of sound scholarship and teaching to eradi cate the worst of the fallacies which now prevail. The only way to reach those generations is by planting on library shelves books that document definitively the theoretical blunders and the historical calamities as sociated with the syndicalist mess we are in. Let those powerful books sit on the shelves of libraries where scholars and students are bound to come across them.

The Truth Will Out-if Pushed Those who participate in the war of ideas are constrained by psychic necessity to believe either in truth as an ultimate value, worth a total 332 THE FREEMAN June commitment; or, in any event, that discovered truth, cogently pre sented, will ultimately triumph; or probably in both, in varying propor tions. Real engagement is otherwise unlikely, for there can be no such thing as sustained effort without strong conviction. We posit a situation, such as the present, when drastically false con ceptions of both theory and histori cal fact prevail. We posit also that education, particularly ((higher education" at the university level, is the dominating vehicle for the propaga tion of ideas, good and bad. Condensing a complex process to its essentials, we assert that educa tion propagates ideas either orally or by the written word. If we elimi nate that extremely rare person, th~ genuinely original teacher who con fines his propagation to the spoken word, never committing his discov eries to permanent written form, the ultimate vehicle of propagation is the written word. This has to be true because the total sum of ruling ideas in all fields of systematic knowledge has been produced in a proportion of at least 99:1 by persons now dead.

The expression ((there is nothing new under the sun" probably over states the case. But not by much. Oral Transmission Limited Many important ideas and factual assumptions are handed down across the generations by word of mouth. Still, one may doubt whether a single such idea or assumption is either confined to oral tradition or transmi tted mainly by word of mouth. Complex theories or factual beliefs are hard to convey exclu sively orally. The teacher commonly says at a certain point in every oral discussion: ((forfurther development of this complicated matter, see so and-so at chapter or pages so-and so." Thus even orally propagated ideas and assumptions are at least complemented by published litera ture. If there is in existence a substan tialliterature which controverts the theories or facts promulgated by a teacher, he ignores that literature at his peril. An enterprising student more than likely will run across the challenge and may take pleasure in embarrassing the teacher with the discovery. Or a colleague in the de partment or at another school will expose his violation of scholarly tra dition.

The situation is different if there is no substantial literature which controverts the prevailing or thodoxy. Recent history is instruc tive for the strategist in the war of ideas. We have learned that there is no such thing as a truth settled once and for all, at least not in the field of social policy. That the case for laissez-faire capitalism may have been completed in the 150 years between Hume and Bohm-Bawerk 1979 A STRATEGY FOR THE WAR OF IDEAS 333 obviously did not guarantee the dominance of laissez-faire in the 20th century. In the world of schol arship as in politics, apparently, the idea implied in the expression, ~tbut what have you done for me lately," prevails. Restate the Truth The conclusion seems clear: upset ting a fallacious orthodoxy cannot be left to the literature produced by past generations. This does not mean that everything written as of 1900 is no longer of any value. It means that truths stated in 1900 must be restated in 1979 if a con trary fallacy then prevails. It is not enough to say that Keynes is t~de_ molished by Say's Law." It is not even enough to say that Nader's consumerism was exposed as fal lacious much earlier in this century by Professor Hutt's description of free-market capitalism as the sys tem ruled by consumer sovereignty.

The strategic rule, then, seems -to be that current fallacy must be ex posed by current exposition of the truth. More than that, to overthrow a current fallacy requires a powerT. S. Eliot ful, thorough, exhaustive, definitive exposition of truth-for otherwise a strong and widespread orthodoxy finds it easy simply to ignore the truth. Think of how the works of Mises have been ignored, despite their compelling, diamond-like pre cision and lucidity. The war of ideas like the war between good and evil goes on and on. Nothing is permanently settled. Each new-born child, each new gen eration, comes naked into the world, as bereft of the moral and intellec tual virtues as it is of clothing. The child and its companions in each generation are endowed with a po tential and little or nothing more. Those who wish to see that potential flower in truth and goodness must work at it. If sound theory and accurate facts are to displace the ignorant non sense now prevailing in the field of public policy a mountain of current literature must be raised, a moun tain so high that even degenerate university teachers cannot risk ig noring it.

As Mises said ~~write books!"--or encourage others to do so. @ IDEAS ON UBERTY IF we take the widest and wisest view of a Cause, there is no such thing as a Lost Cause because there is no such thing as a Gained Cause. We fight for lost causes because we know that our defeat and dismay may be the preface to our successors' victory, though that victory itself will be temporary; we fight rather to keep something alive than in the expecta tion that anything will triumph.