SECTION 1: FASCISM & THE POLICE STATE 41. THE REALITY OF RED-STATE FASCISM December 2004

Year’s end is the time for big thoughts, so here are mine. The most significant socio-political shift in our time has gone almost completely unnoted, and even unnoticed. It is the dramatic shift of the red-state bourgeoisie from leave-us-alone libertarianism, manifested in the Congressional elections of 1994, to almost totalitarian statist nationalism. Whereas the conservative middle class once cheered the circumscribing of the federal government, it now celebrates power and adores the central state, particularly its military wing.

This huge shift has not been noticed among mainstream punditry, and hence there have been few attempts to explain it—much less have libertarians thought about what it implies. My own take is this: the Republican takeover of the presidency combined with an unrelenting state of war, has supplied all the levers necessary to convert a burgeoning libertarian movement into a statist one.

The remaining ideological justification was left to, and accomplished by, Washington’s kept think tanks, who have approved the turn at every crucial step. What this implies for libertarians is a crying need to draw a clear separation between what we believe and what conservatives believe. It also requires that we face the reality of the current threat forthrightly by extending more rhetorical tolerance leftward and less right-ward.

Let us start from 1994 and work forward. In a stunningly prescient memo, Murray N. Rothbard described the 1994 revolution against the Democrats as follows:

a massive and unprecedented public repudiation of President Clinton, his person, his personnel, his ideologies and programs, and all of his works; plus a repudiation of Clinton’s Democrat Party; and, most fundamentally, a rejection of the designs, current and proposed, of the Leviathan he heads... what is being rejected is big government in general (its taxing, mandating, regulating, gun grabbing, and even its spending) and, in particular, its arrogant ambition to control the entire society from the political center. Voters and taxpayers are no longer persuaded of a supposed rationale for American-style central planning. ...On the positive side, the public is vigorously and fervently affirming its desire to re-limit and de-centralize government; to increase individual and community liberty; to reduce taxes, mandates, and government intrusion; to return to the cultural and social mores of pre-1960s America, and perhaps much earlier than that.

This memo also cautioned against unrelieved optimism, because, Rothbard said, two errors rear their head in most every revolution. First, the reformers do not move fast enough; instead they often experience a crisis of faith and become overwhelmed by demands that they govern “responsibly” rather than tear down the established order. Second, the reformers leave too much in place that can be used by their successors to rebuild the state they worked so hard to dismantle. This permits gains to be reversed as soon as another party takes control.

Rothbard urged dramatic cuts in spending, taxing, and regulation, and not just in the domestic area but also in the military and in foreign policy. He saw that this was crucial to any smallgovernment program. He also urged a dismantling of the federal judiciary on grounds that it represents a clear and present danger to American liberty. He urged the young radicals who were just elected to reject gimmicks like the balanced-budget amendment and the line-item veto, in favor of genuine change. None of this happened of course. In fact, the Republican leadership and pundit class began to warn against “kamikaze missions” and speak not of bringing liberty, but rather of governing better than others.

Foreshadowing what was to come, Rothbard pointed out:

Unfortunately, the conservative public is all too often taken in by mere rhetoric and fails to weigh the actual deeds of their political icons. So the danger is that Gingrich will succeed not only in betraying, but in conning the revolutionary public into thinking that they have already won and can shut up shop and go home.

The only way to prevent this, he wrote, was to educate the public, businessmen, students, academics, journalists, and politicians about the true nature of what is going on, and about the vicious nature of the bipartisan ruling elites.

The 1994 revolution failed of course, in part because the antigovernment opposition was intimidated into silence by the Oklahoma City bombing of April 1995. The establishment somehow managed to pin the violent act of an ex-military man on the right-wing libertarianism of the American bourgeoisie. It was said by every important public official at that time that to be antigovernment was to give aid and support to militias, secessionists, and other domestic terrorists. It was a classic intimidation campaign but, combined with a GOP leadership that never had any intention to change DC, it worked to shut down the opposition.

In the last years of the 1990s, the GOP-voting middle class refocused its anger away from government and leviathan and toward the person of Bill Clinton. It was said that he represented some kind of unique moral evil despoiling the White House. That ridiculous Monica scandal culminated in a pathetic and pretentious campaign to impeach Clinton. Impeaching presidents is a great idea, but impeaching them for fibbing about personal peccadilloes is probably the least justifiable ground. It’s almost as if that entire campaign was designed to discredit the great institution of impeachment.

In any case, this event crystallized the partisanship of the bourgeoisie, driving home the message that the real problem was Clinton and not government; the immorality of the chief executive, not his power; the libertinism of the left-liberals and not their views toward government. The much heralded “leave us alone” coalition had been thoroughly transformed into a pure anti-Clinton movement. The right in this country began to define itself not as pro-freedom, as it had in 1994, but simply as antileftist, as it does today.

There are many good reasons to be antileftist, but let us revisit what Mises said in 1956 concerning the antisocialists of his day. He pointed out that many of these people had a purely negative agenda, to crush the leftists and their bohemian ways and their intellectual pretension. He warned that this is not a program for freedom. It was a program of hatred that can only degenerate into statism.

The moral corruption, the licentiousness and the intellectual sterility of a class of lewd would-be authors and artists is the ransom mankind must pay lest the creative pioneers be prevented from accomplishing their work. Freedom must be granted to all, even to base people, lest the few who can use it for the benefit of mankind be hindered. The license which the shabby characters of the quartier Latin enjoyed was one of the conditions that made possible the ascendance of a few great writers, painters and sculptors. The first thing a genius needs is to breathe free air.

He goes on to urge that antileftists work to educate themselves about economics, so that they can have a positive agenda to displace their purely negative one. A positive agenda of liberty is the only way we might have been spared the blizzard of government controls that were fastened on this country after Bush used the events of 9-11 to increase central planning, invade Afghanistan and Iraq, and otherwise bring a form of statism to America that makes Clinton look laissez-faire by comparison. The Bush administration has not only faced no resistance from the bourgeoisie. It has received cheers. And they are not only cheering Bush’s re-election; they have embraced tyrannical control of society as a means toward accomplishing their antileftist ends.

After September 11, even those whose ostensible purpose in life is to advocate less government changed their minds. Even after it was clear that 9-11 would be used as the biggest pretense for the expansion of government since the stock market crash of 1929, the Cato Institute said that libertarianism had to change its entire focus:

Libertarians usually enter public debates to call for restrictions on government activity. In the wake of September 11, we have all been reminded of the real purpose of government: to protect our life, liberty, and property from violence. This would be a good time for the federal government to do its job with vigor and determination.

The vigor and determination of the Bush administration have brought about a profound cultural change, so that the very people who once proclaimed hatred of government now advocate its use against dissidents of all sorts, especially against those who would dare call for curbs in the totalitarian bureaucracy of the military, or suggest that Bush is something less than infallible in his foreign-policy decisions. The lesson here is that it is always a mistake to advocate government action, for there is no way you can fully anticipate how government will be used. Nor can you ever count on a slice of the population to be moral in its advocacy of the uses of the police power.

Editor & Publisher, for example, posted a small note the other day about a column written by Al Neuharth, the founder of USA Today, in which he mildly suggested that the troops be brought home from Iraq “sooner rather than later.” The editor of E&P was just blown away by the letters that poured in, filled with venom and hate and calling for Neuharth to be tried and locked away as a traitor. The letters compared him with pro-Hitler journalists, and suggested that he was objectively proterrorist, choosing to support the Muslim jihad over the US military. Other letters called for Neuharth to get the death penalty for daring to take issue with the Christian leaders of this great Christian nation.

I’m actually not surprised at this. It has been building for some time. If you follow hate-filled websites such as FreeRepublic.com, you know that the populist right in this country has been advocating nuclear holocaust and mass bloodshed for more than a year now. The militarism and nationalism dwarfs anything I saw at any point during the Cold War. It celebrates the shedding of blood, and exhibits a maniacal love of the state. The new ideology of the red-state bourgeoisie seems to actually believe that the United States is God marching on earth—not just godlike, but really serving as a proxy for God Himself.

Along with this goes a kind of worship of the presidency, and a celebration of all things public sector, including egregious laws like the Patriot Act, egregious bureaucracies like the Department of Homeland Security, and egregious centrally imposed regimentation like the No Child Left Behind Act. It longs for the state to throw its weight behind institutions like the two-parent heterosexual family, the Christian charity, the homogeneous community of native-born patriots.

In 1994, the central state was seen by the bourgeoisie as the main threat to the family; in 2004 it is seen as the main tool for keeping the family together and ensuring its ascendancy. In 1994, the state was seen as the enemy of education; today, the same people view the state as the means of raising standards and purging education of its left-wing influences. In 1994, Christians widely saw that Leviathan was the main enemy of the faith; today, they see Leviathan as the tool by which they will guarantee that their faith will have an impact on the country and the world.

Paul Craig Roberts is right:

In the ranks of the new conservatives, however, I see and experience much hate. It comes to me in violently worded, ignorant and irrational emails from self-professed conservatives who literally worship George Bush. Even Christians have fallen into idolatry. There appears to be a large number of Americans who are prepared to kill anyone for George Bush.

Again:

Like Brownshirts, the new conservatives take personally any criticism of their leader and his policies. To be a critic is to be an enemy.

In short, what we have alive in the United States is an updated and Americanized fascism. Why fascist? Because it is not leftist in the sense of egalitarian or redistributionist. It has no real beef with business. It doesn’t sympathize with the downtrodden, labor, or the poor. It is for all the core institutions of bourgeois life in America: family, faith, and flag. But it sees the state as the central organizing principle of society, views public institutions as the most essential means by which all these institutions are protected and advanced, and adores the head of state as a godlike figure who knows better than anyone else what the country and world needs, and has a special connection to the Creator that permits him to discern the best means to bring it about.

The American Right today has managed to be solidly anti-leftist while adopting an ideology—even without knowing it or being entirely conscious of the change—that is also frighteningly antiliberty.

This reality turns out to be very difficult for libertarians to understand or accept. For a long time, we’ve tended to see the primary threat to liberty as coming from the left, from the socialists who sought to control the economy from the center. But we must also remember that the sweep of history shows that there are two main dangers to liberty, one that comes from the left and the other that comes from the right. Europe and Latin America have long faced the latter threat, but its reality is only now hitting us fully.

What is the most pressing and urgent threat to freedom that we face in our time? It is not from the left. If anything, the left has been solid on civil liberties and has been crucial in drawing attention to the lies and abuses of the Bush administration.

No, today, the clear and present danger to freedom comes from the right side of the ideological spectrum, those people who are pleased to preserve most of free enterprise but favor top-down management of society, culture, family, and school, and seek to use a messianic and belligerent nationalism to impose their vision of politics on the world.

There is no need to advance the view that the enemy of my enemy is my friend. However, it is time to recognize that the left today does represent a counterweight to the right, just as it did in the 1950s when the right began to adopt anticommunist militarism as its credo. In a time when the term patriotism means supporting the nation’s wars and statism, a libertarian patriotism has more in common with that advanced by The Nation magazine:

The other company of patriots does not march to military time. It prefers the gentle strains of America the Beautiful to the strident cadences of Hail to the Chief and The Stars and Stripes Forever. This patriotism is rooted in the love of one’s own land and people, love too of the best ideals of one’s own culture and tradition. This company of patriots finds no glory in puffing their country up by pulling others’ down. This patriotism is profoundly municipal, even domestic. Its pleasures are quiet, its services steady and unpretentious. This patriotism too has deep roots and long continuity in our history.

Ten years ago, these were “right wing” sentiments; today the right regards them as treasonous.

What should this teach us? It shows that those who saw the interests of liberty as being well served by the politicized proxies of free enterprise alone, family alone, Christianity alone, law and order alone, were profoundly mistaken. There is no proxy for liberty, no cause that serves as a viable substitute, and no movement by any name whose success can yield freedom in our time other than the movement of freedom itself. We need to embrace liberty and liberty only, and not be fooled by groups or parties or movements that only desire a temporary liberty to advance their pet interests.

As Rothbard said in 1965:

The doctrine of liberty contains elements corresponding with both contemporary left and right. This means in no sense that we are middle-of-the-roaders, eclectically trying to combine, or step between, both poles; but rather that a consistent view of liberty includes concepts that have also become part of the rhetoric or program of right and of left. Hence a creative approach to liberty must transcend the confines of contemporary political shibboleths.

There has never in my lifetime been a more urgent need for the party of liberty to completely secede from conventional thought and established institutions, especially those associated with all aspects of government, and undertake radical intellectual action on behalf of a third way that rejects the socialism of the left and the fascism of the right.

Indeed, the current times can be seen as a training period for all true friends of liberty. We need to learn to recognize the many different guises in which tyranny appears. Power is protean because it must suppress that impulse toward liberty that exists in the hearts of all people. The impulse is there, tacitly waiting for the consciousness to dawn. When it does, power doesn’t stand a chance.

42.
WHICH WAY FOR LIBERTY?
December 2004

An interview request from a famed center-left publication allowed me to put together some further thoughts on the rise of red-state fascism in America, and the libertarian response. So here are my notes on the topic, prior to publication.

Our times are much like the 1930s, when it was widely assumed that there are only two viable ideological positions: communism or fascism. Liberalism of the old school was considered to be a failure, and not even worth considering.

Why does libertarianism never entirely disappear, despite every attempt to kill it? In part, because a strain of American ideology from the colonial period to the present supports it. Murray N. Rothbard’s 4-volume Conceived in Liberty demonstrates that the theory and practice of radical libertarian thinking can even be thought of as the very core of American political values.

Just to cite one case, the preachers and religious leaders who spoke out prior to the American Revolution were knowledgeable of and friendly toward the liberal tradition. They cited Locke as freely as they cited the Bible. Americans of all classes resented the smallest intrusions on liberty and property as tyranny itself. After the revolution, we enjoyed some 10 blissful years of near-anarchy under the Articles of Confederation.

This is our heritage. It is also why every president appeals to libertarian ideals to gain public backing. Clinton did, and Bush does as well. They all invoke Jeffersonian rhetoric. The problem is that the middle class continues to be bamboozled by this rhetoric, even as the power elite continues to conspire for ever more money and power.

The interests of all classes, not just the middle class, are for liberty. The heartland bourgeoisie is the most supportive of libertarian economics, but it is also the most easily distracted by nationalist and cultural appeals. These days, they tend to back the Republicans. For this reason, they don’t notice that the Republicans are actually worse than the Democrats when it comes to expanding government power and shredding all sorts of liberties, including the economic ones.

RETHINKING THE LEFT, FOR NOW

The extent to which the Bush regime owns the conservative middle class is a wonder to behold. Again, it is probably for cultural and nationalist reasons, and not because the typical American household is for slaughtering foreigners, suppressing free speech, and bankrupting the country.

These days you are far more likely to find libertarian sentiments expressed on the left side of the political spectrum: outrage about what’s happened to civil liberties, truth-telling about the war, and even disgust at the spending and regulating machine of the Bush regime.

Some of the strongest resistance to American fascism right now comes from black Americans, who have suffered disproportionately in this war. Polls from a year ago show black support for the war dipping below 20 percent. Today it must be even lower. Defense Department studies have expressed alarm that 41 percent fewer blacks are willing to sign up to be fodder, which is why the Army is behind in its recruiting goals.

Women too provide strong resistance to war fever. As more women are drawn to the expectation of a full-time professional life, women voters are also going to increasingly develop a commercial-class consciousness concerning taxes and regulations. The victim mentality that agitates for privilege in the workplace could give way to a free-market feminism. If this is united to a consistent anti-war view, resistance against the state could increase among women.

Also, libertarians increasingly find themselves in sympathy with a range of interest groups they would otherwise oppose.

Many people find themselves in circumstances, for whatever reasons—whether personal difficulties, life choices, or other factors—that bring about associations that fall outside the Bush-approved bourgeois family arrangements. No libertarian can support federal penalties against such people. Freedom of association is a first principle of civilization, and it is a disgrace to see that principle attacked in the name of family values.

Also, the Bush administration wants to feed tax dollars to private schools, religious charities, and handpicked mutual fund companies. Even if the teachers unions, the Religious Left, and the AARP oppose these plans for different reasons, we can’t but cheer them on.

I used to complain about the universities and their indoctrination of students in leftist theory. But these days, one has to be grateful that there are at least some pockets of resistance remaining.

It is no accident that both parties make an appeal to libertarian notions about the dangers of power. Love of liberty is what unites us as Americans. Our most important job right now is to work to show how nationalist warmongering, cultural agitprop, and government belligerence of all sorts work at cross purposes with libertarian ideals.

Also, the left needs to learn a lesson from the Bush regime: the answer to fascism is not socialism but freedom itself. They need to lose whatever romantic attachments to power they still have.

COOPERATING WITH THE STATE

I’ve been asked many times about the role of a leading DC libertarian think tank and its unfortunate cooperation with the Bush administration. I’ve always declined to comment, but this interviewer convinced me that it can’t be ignored.

The problem is this: In the hours and days after 9-11, the cause of liberty cried out for defenders to stand up and say, “This crime is not a license for government to grab power.”

Instead, and notoriously, this libertarian think tank went the other direction and backed the wholly unwarranted invasion of Afghanistan and otherwise offered only utilitarian cautions about the creation of massive new bureaucracies.

To some extent, I can understand the fear factor. In those days, sedition trials didn’t seem out of the question. One wrong word and you risked destroying every relationship with government you had worked to achieve for 25 years. But even then, was it really necessary, two months later, for a think-tank spokesman to say that increased public support for the federal government “makes sense” since it is “concentrating on protecting individual rights”?

This was one of many such pronouncements in which this think tank made it clear that it would not stand in the way of what the Bush administration planned. In the meantime, of course, they have further speeded the revolving door between their offices and the government. This is hardly unusual for DC think tanks, but it is especially injurious given the source.

People look for libertarians to provide a principled alternative. When they do not, the perception is that there are no legitimate reasons to resist the state. What’s more, the state knows that if the libertarians are not making trouble, the regime can pretty well do what it pleases.

It is in the state’s interest to keep a tame libertarian wing alive and thriving for precisely these times. It is for the same reason the state has always courted the church: it needs moral cover from a credible source.

Logrolling with the state also does intellectual damage and harms recruitment among students. It is as if some libertarians want to live up to the leftist caricature of capitalist intellectuals in league with the state, cheering on war and imperialism, and taking money from Wall Street to back corporate boondoggles such as Social Security privatization.

LIBERTARIANS CONTRA FASCISM

It is as important for libertarians to be anti-fascist as it is for them to be antisocialist. But first we need to recognize that fascism is a reality, not just a smear term.

What began as expedience in the Bush administration has turned, over time, into a full-blown program. Militarism, of course, is an old Republican standby, useful, for example, during the Cold War to keep the masses distracted from noticing what was happening to their liberty. What makes it different today is how it is united to an overarching ideology, a distinctly right-wing form of central planning, which takes careful thought to understand.

The ideology of the Bush regime is nationalist and culturally conservative. It is consistently antileftist in the sense that it rejects egalitarianism, cultural toleration, free speech, and overt appeals to socialist envy. It is religious and Christian in rhetoric. It makes an appeal for family, country, patriotism, and traditional American values. It is pro-business. It is anti-intellectual. It backs middle-class welfare to the hilt.

Behind the rhetoric you find the iron fist of the state, forcing conformism and regimentation. Bush-style fascism has created a kind of cult of personality too, in which the public is led to believe through hints and nudges that the president has a direct line to God. More than any president in my living memory, he peppers his speeches with personal pronouns: “I will defend America.”

What the Bush regime has taught us is that there is a difference between being antileftist and being pro-liberty. They have demonstrated that the threats to liberty emanate not only from leftist thought but also rightist thought in which the state is used to impose a particular view of the good at home and abroad. I don’t think the United States has ever had a left-wing president as convinced as the Bush administration is of the ability of government to work miracles.

The confluence of these ideological factors and their success in appealing to the middle class can only prompt us to look at history to find its predecessors. Where do we find right-wing central planning, right-wing warmongering, right-wing justifications for cracking skulls on a global scale? The twentieth century offers many examples of dictatorial anti-left regimes. It is not a stretch to call these fascist or national socialist.

Just as socialism is different in every country, so too is fascism. We don’t see the appeal to racial solidarity of the Nazis at work here. The Italian and Spanish cases of interwar right-wing dictatorship come to mind, but there are differences there too. In the case of Chile or pre-Castro Cuba, you had business working with government to monopolize the economy.

So while the Bush case borrows from all of these, it is its own unique variety of fascism: evangelical Christianity and a global crusade, with anti-leftist but pro-statist policies that show complete contempt for individual liberty at home and abroad.

THE BAD SEED ON THE RIGHT

How did conservative intellectuals and activists go from hating big government in the 1990s to loving it and celebrating it today? There is a bad seed in the ideology of American conservatism that spawns power worship. If you can get a group of people to pledge the government flag and sing the murderous Battle Hymn of the Republic in their churches, and to take a position on war that is Mark Twain’s War Prayer come to life, the rest is just a mop-up operation. The Germans too were a very religious and conservative people.

There is also an American precedent. Reagan played the war card to great effect, and Nixon manipulated the cultural issues to his advantage. FDR, Wilson, and Lincoln demonstrated that presidents can ignore the Bill of Rights in wartime, and historians have faithfully celebrated their legacies. Bush invokes this American tradition and thereby taps into the form of patriotism inherent in conservative ideology. It is as cynical as it is effective.

We will have to wait to see what follows the Bush regime to discover the closest historical analogy. Is he a Nicholas II who will inspire a bloody backlash of left-wing dictatorship? Will his successor be even worse? Or is he a Pinochet who inspires revulsion against militarism and dictatorship of all sorts, so that his rule will be eventually followed by normalcy, liberalism, and peaceful commercialism?

THE ROLE OF THE NEOCONSERVATIVES

I’m actually of the opinion that the “neo” part of conservatism has been overplayed. The problem is really just plain old conservatism. But speaking as a matter of history, the neoconservatives made two unique contributions to conservative ideology. They convinced conservatives and Republicans to make their peace with the domestic welfare and regulatory state. And they convinced the same groups that democracy represents a political ideal that can and should be imposed on the world.

American fascism doesn’t need these two additives to exist and thrive, but the inclusion of them helped round out the ideology, and helped it become particularly dangerous for the world.

More and more, I fear that the Bush administration is doing terrible ideological damage, demolishing what remained of the old liberal impulse in the middle class and shoring up support for imperialist practices in the post-Cold War world.

The allure of Bush has corrupted evangelicals, homeschoolers, the pro-family movement, the pro-life movement, the tax-cut lobbies, the gun lobbies—all these groups that hated Washington only the day before yesterday are suddenly the storm troopers of the regime. Every day that goes by, the resistance to power on the right weakens, even as it strengthens only marginally on the left.

FUTURE PROSPECTS

The libertarian tradition stretches from the ancient world through the Middle Ages to our own day. But I do think we are living through a high point in intellectual development and recruitment. The body of theoretical work is vast and the intellectuals are hardened and ready for battle. The web and blogosphere give us the means to compete in the world of ideas as never before.

There is no sure blueprint for success other than for libertarians to do what each individually does best, whether that means teaching students, organizing anti-war rallies, writing large books on technical economic topics, or tirelessly managing a compelling blog.

I’m wary of all formal alliances but I do think libertarians need to be strategically flexible and entrepreneurial in finding intellectual allies, even if it means admitting that far better arguments are being made by CounterPunch than by National Review.

What desperately needs to be rethought is this tendency of libertarians to avert their eyes from the reality of what’s going on at places like National Review. Their main dishes consist of calling for ever more war, approving the killing of civilians, backing the surveillance state, and even torture. Libertarians have traditionally provided the side dishes that call for petty deregulatory measures and tax cuts. This really must stop.

The libertarian revolution will come when we least expect it, and it will unfold in a way we cannot fully anticipate. In the mid 1980s, everyone assumed that the Soviet empire would last forever. Five years later, it was gone without a trace. So too, the expectation of eternal world rule by Washington, DC, could evaporate very quickly.

43.
SLOUCHING TOWARD STATISM
January 1997

Which is a greater cause of cultural and moral decline: the private sector or the government? Asked another way, which is doing more to promote a return to civilized social norms: the market or the central state? The answer highlights a dividing line between left and right.

Robert Bork’s book Slouching Towards Gomorrah provokes this query. He chronicles a dizzy array of depressing cultural data that even left-liberals can’t ignore. His thesis is that civilization is slipping through our fingers, and he’s probably right. However, his suggestions for change require new forms of government intervention, a grave error that dooms his analysis.

Bork has confused the cause with the cure. It’s government policy, not the private sector, that has caused social collapse by politicizing culture in the first place. Whether it’s fostering welfarism, backing ugly art and music, punishing society’s natural elites with income and inheritance taxes, or shortening time horizons through persistent inflation, the government has debased tastes, subsidized moral squalor, and dumbed down social norms.

Before we put government in charge of cultural uplift, consider that prototype of government social and cultural hegemony: the military base. Once seen as model communities of discipline and moral high standards, bases have recently been rocked by revelations of widespread sexual impropriety. This hardly surprises anyone who’s spent time in or around the military.

Young people are put in distant places where they face no supervision from family or an organic community. They have little work to do and an abundance of discretionary income. Their housing, food, medical care, and clothing are provided at no charge by the government. Nobody need plan, for example, to come up with next month’s rent.

The grayness and regimentation of the military base mask a deep debasement. Illegal drug use is rampant, on and off the base, and has long involved more than half of the enlisted men (recent declines in reported drug use measure only a rise in dishonesty). Alcoholism is more than double civilian levels. Tattooing is normal, gambling is rampant, and in its discount stores, the US military is the biggest purveyor of pornography in the world.

Go to any military base in the country and look at the kinds of outlying enterprises taxpayers unwittingly support. Oncenice communities have been turned into magnets for nude dancing, prostitution, and every manner of sexual profiteering.

Look at Georgia’s Fort Benning. Apart from the military, the area is populated by traditional people with traditional morals. Yet along the main drag, you pass dozens of brightly lit sex parlors, an alarming sight in the Deep South. The military here is a cultural cancer that lives off the taxpayer. It’s no surprise that the military is riddled with sexual abuse: in their off-hours, these guys are feeding our tax dollars to naked performers. It reflects the absence of chivalry inherent in all government operations.

Other businesses popular around military bases are pawn shops and the sort of car dealers that cater to people who don’t pay their debts. That reflects another dirty secret of the military: live-for-the-moment attitudes and bad credit are typical, as in any welfare culture.

Relieved of the burdens of making themselves productive, exercising economic choices, or managing finances, the troops in these bases tend to collapse into a state-of-nature barbarism, despite the best efforts of a few officers.

Conservatives like Bork, who complain about the culture, should take notice of this, but as avid supporters of the warfare state, they carefully avert their eyes.

Now consider the other side of the question: can the private sector rescue us from a Borkian fate? Left-liberals like to cite Disney to show that free enterprise is also a social menace. They say Disney preys on kids’ voracious material appetites, wrecks and trivializes classic literature, and erects enormous monuments to the indulgence of pleasure.

There’s no need to defend Disney’s more recent animated movies (let alone those released under subsidiary labels). For example, the pagan environmentalism and anti-European propaganda of Pocahontas are unbearable for anyone who knows economics or history. Nobody claimed the private sector produces only what is beautiful and true.

However tacky some of Disney’s products are, remember this: the company has no power of its own. It only profits when it succeeds in persuading the buying public to purchase its products. The tastes of the consuming public are the driving force behind every product the company produces, and not the reverse. If people decided not to buy, Disney’s market power would instantly collapse.

Moreover, the real triumph of Disney has nothing to do with its movies. This corporation, founded by a hard-core believer in free markets, and a cultural reactionary to boot, has demonstrated new frontiers of private-property creativity. It has erected entire communities of perfect order and freedom organized on the principles of free enterprise.

Disney World is 45 square miles, an area the size of San Francisco. The rides are the least interesting part. Disney World contains upwards of 300 retail stores, plus nature preserves, streams and lakes, nature trails, recreation areas, yacht clubs, resorts, beach clubs, golf courses, office space, and campsites. There are 12,000 rooms available for rent, and total employment is 35,000, most of them young people who behave themselves because they have to.

Infrastructure like roads and bridges are entirely private, as are police services, fire protection, sewage, and trash disposal. Despite having no taxes or mandates, and being entirely free from outside zoning, this massive park is arguably the best “governed” place on earth. There is no crime, no vandalism, and no sexual profiteering. There are no gangs, no slums, no homeless bums, no panhandlers, and no loiterers. Because it is private, every inch is cared for.

If you’re looking to restore the old days of charming architecture and safe, clean streets, look to the Disney-created town of Celebration, Florida. Again, it is entirely private. Ten minutes south of the Magic Kingdom, it is a bustling place that will soon be home to 20,000 people. New houses are grabbed up instantly, as are spots in the new private school. There’s no cultural rot here. How interesting that it’s become the target of left-wing attacks for “artificiality.”

The economics literature is always fretting about “public goods” that markets supposedly can’t produce, including police protection and infrastructure. Nonsense, said Disney, and proceeded to demonstrate how orderly a micro-society can be when there’s no government to push property owners around.

Indeed, Disney World points the way toward solving most of our social and cultural troubles: put more property in private hands. It has even shown us how the immigration problem can be handled. Disney World attracts 30 million visitors per year without disruption.

As economist Fred Foldvary points out, Disney shows that the less government intervenes, the more private enterprise can satisfy human wants; supposed “public goods” are no exception.

The stark contrast between the ordered liberty of Disney World and the deep corruption of the military base is no accident. These two communities demonstrate, in contrasting microcosms, the difference between the market’s means of social organization and the government’s.

Yet micro-secessionism isn’t the only way the market overcomes cultural disintegration. Wal-Mart is hated by the left, but it too has become a source of cultural uplift. As the nation’s largest distributor of compact discs, it supervises everything that appears on its shelves. Producers must take out degrading lyrics, electronically mask dirty words, and supply clean cover art. This approach is not for everyone. But Wal-Mart saw a market niche and filled it. Only capitalism allows that.

Our society may be slouching toward Gomorrah, but government is the least likely institution to reverse the trend. The free market not only gives us prosperity, it can also make us better people by requiring and rewarding old-fashioned virtues like thrift, prudence, courage, and stewardship. Government, which has made us so much poorer by its invasions of private property, has also wrecked the culture.

44.
ECONOMIC IGNORANCE
October 1990

The essence of the economic order is the price system. Without it, as Ludwig von Mises demonstrated in 1920, society is doomed to mass starvation.

Even the KGB and the Gulag couldn’t entirely wipe out the price system, so the USSR managed to stagger along, but only through suffering and bloodshed.

Our own Gosplan, the US Congress, hasn’t been as extreme, thanks to the American people and our traditions of liberty. But it’s still the biggest collection of economic meddlers and ignoramuses west of Moscow.

When the price system functions freely, it brings supply and demand into rough equality, ensuring that resources are put to their most-valued uses. To the extent that government meddles with prices, it creates waste, hampers entrepreneurship, and makes people poorer. That’s true with energy and natural resources; perverting the price system even makes our drug problems worse.

If tomatoes—for whatever reason—become scarcer, their price goes up, which tells consumers to eat less. If more tomatoes come on the market, their price goes down, telling consumers they can eat more. Prices thus constitute a system of resource conservation.

But Congressmen pretend—exactly like Soviet central planners—to know economic values without prices, as we can see in the recent frenzy over oil prices. They denounced “price gouging” while planning tax gouging, including new energy taxes designed to raise the price of gasoline!

The recent hysteria over African elephant tusks was another problem of prices and property rights. If people were allowed to raise elephants and sell their tusks—as even the socialist government of Zimbabwe pointed out—there would be no more and no fewer elephant tusks than there should be. The same principle applies to all other resources. If left in common ownership, there will be misuse. If put in private hands, we will have the right amount: supply will meet demand.

An example of market response in the animal market was the Cayman Turtle Farm in the British West Indies. The green sea turtle was considered endangered, thanks to overharvesting due to common ownership. The farm was able to hatch eggs and bring the hatchlings to maturity at a far higher rate than in nature. Its stock grew to 80,000 green turtles. But the environmentalists hated the Cayman Turtle Farm, since in their view it is morally wrong to profit from wildlife, and they drove the farm out of business. The green turtle is again on the endangered species list.

Left-liberals justify government intervention in the price system because of “public goods” and “externalities.”

A public good is supposed to be something we all want, but can’t get unless government provides it. Environmentalists claim everyone wants national parks, for example, but the market won’t provide them, so the government must. But how can we know, independent of the market, that everyone does want these expensive parks? Or how many parks of what sort?

We could take a survey, but that doesn’t tell us the intensity of demand. More important, it’s not enough to know that people want, for example, diamonds; we would have to know if they are willing to give up other things to obtain them, and we can only know that by watching their actions in a free market.

If we realize that only the market can give us economic information, the alleged problem of public goods disappears. Absent government prohibitions and subsidies, or competition from “free” parks, the market will ensure that we have exactly the number and type of parks that the American people want, and are willing to pay for.

An externality is a side effect. Your neighbors’ attractive new garden is a positive externality; their barking dog is a negative one. One is a blessing, the other an irritant, but you voluntarily purchase neither.

Environmentalists claim, for example, that trash is a negative externality of consuming, so they advocate government suppression of “wasteful” consumption. Yet the free market handles this justly and efficiently through property rights. Privatize everything and the externalities are “internalized;” that is, those who ought to bear the costs do.

Making a product such as drugs illegal hampers this process. Given the incentives, there are no measures severe enough to suppress the trade. Even within the federal prisons, where the criminals are all in cages, there’s a lucrative drug market.

Government drug warriors regularly announce the goal of raising the price of illegal street drugs. This is supposed to be a sign that they are winning their unwinnable war on drugs. But what do higher drug prices mean? Higher profits for the drug dealers.

Simple economics teaches that if the price of drugs is driven higher, and the costs of production and consumer demand remain the same, drug producers and distributors can pocket the difference. In economic jargon, the marginal revenue of drug sales already outstrips the marginal cost of production by an artificially huge margin. Profit differentials reach 2,000 percent in some drug markets!

Higher prices also mean that users will steal more money to buy their drugs—more robbings, beatings, killings, and breakins in cities across America. Last year drug users stole more than $7 billion from innocent Americans. Higher prices will guarantee an increase in that figure.

The high murder rate in the inner cities is also a direct result of drug laws that make the peaceful settlement of disputes impossible. Drug laws have insured the continuance of a market that relies on violence and the threat of violence.

Tougher law enforcement is not a sufficient deterrent. Pushers already face the prospect of imminent death when they step out onto the streets to sell their goods. As long as a ghetto kid can earn $4,000 a week selling drugs, he will continue to take the risk.

That leaves decriminalization, which would subject the drug industry to full market discipline. Drug prices would plummet, profits would crash, and street crime would drop—by 75 percent according to some estimates.

This wouldn’t create a utopia, but that is not one of our options. Once the violence stops, we can focus our energies and resources on private treatment for those who want to stop, and private antidrug education for the young.

But we should not spend any public money on treatment or education. Some left-liberal legalizers want to redirect the billions now spent on enforcement into government-run clinics instead. About 80 percent of treated addicts return to drugs within a year, however, showing that the problem is not lack of treatment.

Some people are natural addicts, who will harm themselves with drugs. There’s nothing the rest of us can do about it, except prevent them—through decriminalization—from spreading their misery to the rest of society.

It would be nice to have another choice, but the laws of economics do not allow us one.

45.
DRUG WAR DEATH TOLL
April 2001

Give it up, drug warriors. You will never stop the production and consumption of marijuana, cocaine, or any other substance that people want to grow and repackage for others who want to buy. The attempt to do so vastly increases the price and thereby benefits some producers at the expense of others, breeds crime and corruption in public agencies, and violates people’s civil liberties.

The drug war leads people to believe that the federal government, not the people who can actually do something about drug use, is taking care of the problem. It breeds parental dereliction of duty. Meanwhile, the government’s constant message of “Say No to Drugs” has the opposite effect on young people always willing to bite the forbidden fruit that government doesn’t want them to touch.

For bureaucratic reasons, the drug warriors are unwilling to make distinctions about the severity of drugs, so that pot and heroin are considered equally bad. This is so absurd that it discredits the entire message. Meanwhile, other forms of drugs such as alcohol and tobacco enjoy legal approval, even as the government has programs to make drugs by prescription as cheap as possible.

The hypocrisy is flagrant and outrageous, and the effects are deeply corrupting of the culture and the political process. The drug warriors first federalized drug control, on grounds that state-level interdiction had too many leaks. Then the federal government, always glad for more power, made it a foreign-policy issue, brow-beating governments all over the world to run roughshod over their citizens in an attempt to stamp out drugs.

Today, Veronica Bowers and her 7-month-old adopted daughter Charity are dead. They were killed by military bullets raining in on a small civilian aircraft flying to bring the Gospel of Jesus Christ to the Indians of Peru. The CIA and the Peruvian military mistook a plane of missionaries for drug dealers. There were no warning shots.

Drug lords, for all their malice, are careful to keep noncombatants out of the line of fire. Governments don’t care. We are all in the line of fire so far as they are concerned, so the blood of civilian missionaries is the price we pay for keeping cocaine away from those who will find some way to get it anyway.

It was a mistake, the US government says. Sorry. But where is the accountability? Who is going to fry for this murderous act? The sub commander whose irresponsible behavior led to the death of Japanese high-school students was “punished” with an early retirement so he can continue to live off the taxpayers while doing nothing.

Does anyone believe that those responsible for the death of the missionaries will receive any worse treatment? So far no one has been willing to accept responsibility. Who investigates the investigators? Who prosecutes the prosecutors? Isn’t it time the Christian Right begins to rethink the drug war, which has now taken two of their own?

In a drug war, the government treats us all as suspects. Our bank accounts are investigated, we are harassed at the airport, and we are spied on at every turn. Recreational users, who pose no threat to anyone but themselves, are treated as worse than felons and given mandatory sentences that ruin their lives. Meanwhile, murderers can’t be kept in prison because prisons are overcrowded with small-time tokers.

After decades of experience, we know the drug war can’t work. Anyone who says otherwise is a liar or a fool. We also know that the costs are huge, to our liberty and our tax dollars. The drug lords don’t entirely mind; they will continue to earn monopoly profits so long as their competition is kept at bay. It is the rest of us who should protest.

But can we really make drugs legal at the federal level? There is no constitutional basis for doing otherwise. Nothing in that founding document permits government bureaucrats to control what we smoke, inhale, or inject. By letting them attempt to do so, we invite every form of tyranny. And no amount of increased power by the feds will do the job. Consider that one of the worst drug problems exists in federal prisons. Prisons can’t keep them out! A free society shouldn’t even try.

If we make illicit drugs legal, people warn, they will be available for anyone who wants them. But that is precisely the situation we are in now. Can it get worse?

What happens if people take more drugs after legalization than before?

So be it.

People do lots of things that are bad for them. They eat too many cheeseburgers and they skydive. They watch tacky movies and listen to rap. They wear sloppy clothes and forget to floss their teeth. They get too fat and pick their noses. And they ingest, sniff, and smoke mind-altering drugs. A free society deals with these problems at the level of the family, the church, and community norms, not through the leviathan state.

Ludwig von Mises, in 1949, said:

The problems involved in direct government interference with consumption are not catallactic problems. They go far beyond the scope of catallactics and concern the fundamental issues of human life and social organization. If it is true that government derives its authority from God and is entrusted by Providence to act as the guardian of the ignorant and stupid populace, then it is certainly its task to regiment every aspect of the subject’s conduct. The God-sent ruler knows better what is good for his wards than they do themselves. It is his duty to guard them against the harm they would inflict upon themselves if left alone.

Self-styled “realistic” people fail to recognize the immense importance of the principles implied. They contend that they do not want to deal with the matter from what, they say, is a philosophic and academic point of view. Their approach is, they argue, exclusively guided by practical considerations. It is a fact, they say, that some people harm themselves and their innocent families by consuming narcotic drugs. Only doctrinaires could be so dogmatic as to object to the government’s regulation of the drug traffic. Its beneficent effects cannot be contested.

However, the case is not so simple as that. Opium and morphine are certainly dangerous, habit-forming drugs. But once the principle is admitted that it is the duty of government to protect the individual against his own foolishness, no serious objections can be advanced against further encroachments. A good case could be made out in favor of the prohibition of alcohol and nicotine. And why limit the government’s benevolent providence to the protection of the individual’s body only? Is not the harm a man can inflict on his mind and soul even more disastrous than any bodily evils? Why not prevent him from reading bad books and seeing bad plays, from looking at bad paintings and statues and from hearing bad music? The mischief done by bad ideologies, surely, is much more pernicious, both for the individual and for the whole society, than that done by narcotic drugs.

These fears are not merely imaginary specters terrifying secluded doctrinaires. It is a fact that no paternal government, whether ancient or modern, ever shrank from regimenting its subjects’ minds, beliefs, and opinions. If one abolishes man’s freedom to determine his own consumption, one takes all freedoms away. The naive advocates of government interference with consumption delude themselves when they neglect what they disdainfully call the philosophical aspect of the problem. They unwittingly support the case of censorship, inquisition, religious intolerance, and the persecution of dissenters.

46.
PRISON NATION
April 2008

Americans, perhaps like all people, have a remarkable capacity for tuning out unpleasantries that do not directly affect them. I’m thinking here of wars on foreign lands, but also the astonishing fact that the United States has become the world’s most jail-loving country, with well over 1 in 100 adults living as slaves in prison. Building and managing prisons, and locking people up, has become a major facet of government power in our time, and it is long past time for those who love liberty to start to care.

Before we get to the reasons why, look at the facts as reported by the New York Times. The United States leads the world in prisoner production. There are 2.3 million people behind bars. China, with four times as many people, has 1.6 million in prison.

In terms of population, the United States has 751 people in prison for every 100,000, while the closest competitor in this regard is Russia with 627. I’m struck by this figure: 531 in Cuba. The median global rate is 125.

What’s amazing is that most of this imprisoning trend is recent, dating really from the 1980s, and most of the change is due to drug laws. From 1925 to 1975, the rate of imprisonment was stable at 110, lower than the international average, which is what you might expect in a country that purports to value freedom. But then it suddenly shot up in the 1980s. There were 30,000 people in jail for drugs in 1980, while today there are half a million.

Other factors include the criminalization of nearly everything these days, even passing bad checks or the pettiest of thefts. And judges are under all sorts of minimum-sentencing requirements.

Before we move to causes, please consider what jail means. The people inside are slaves of the state. They are captured and held and regarded by their captors as nothing other than biological beings that take up space. The delivery of all services to them is contingent on the whims of their masters, who have no stake in the outcome at all.

Now, you might say that this is necessary for some people, but be aware that it is the ultimate assault on human dignity. They are “paying the price” for their actions, but no one is in a position to benefit from the price paid. They aren’t working off debts or compensating victims or struggling to overcome anything. They are just “doing time,” costing taxpayers almost $25,000 a year per person. That’s all these people are to society: a cost, and they are treated as such.

The communities in which they exist in these prisons consist of other unvalued people, and they become socialized into this mentality that is utterly contrary to every notion of civilization. Then there is the relentless threat and reality of violence, the unspeakable noise, the pervasiveness of every moral perversity.

In short, prisons are Hell. It can be no wonder that they rehabilitate no one. As George Barnard Shaw said, “imprisonment is as irrevocable as death.”

What’s more, everything we know about government applies to this ultimate government program. It is expensive (the states alone spend $44 billion on prisons every year), inefficient, brutal, and irrational. The modern prison system is also a relatively new phenomenon in history, one that is used to enforce political priorities (the drug war) rather than punish real crimes. It is also manipulated by political passions rather than a genuine concern for justice. The results of the drug war are not to reduce consumption but rather the opposite: illegal drugs are now a $100 billion industry in the United States, while the drug war itself cost taxpayers $19 billion, even as the costs of running the justice system are skyrocketing (up 418 percent in 25 years).

People say that crime is down, so this must be working. Well, that depends on what you mean by crime. Drug use and distribution are associated with violence solely because they are illegal. They are crimes because the state says they are crimes, but they do not fit within the usual definition we find in the history of political philosophy, which centers on the violation of person or property.

What’s more, the “crime” of drug use and distribution hasn’t really been kept down; it has only gone further underground. In a major irony and commentary on the workability of prisons, drug markets are very active there.

Now to causes. Some social scientists give the predictable explanation that all this is due to the lack of a “social safety net” in the United States. In the first place, the United States has had such a net for a hundred years, and yet these people seem not to have noticed. No such net is big enough for some people. Moreover, it is more likely that the very presence of such a net—which creates a moral hazard so that people do not learn to be responsible for their own well-being—contributes to criminal behavior (all else being equal).

There are those on all sides who attribute the increase to racial factors, given that the imprisoned population is disproportionately black and Hispanic, and noting the disparity in crime rates in such places as Minnesota with low levels of minority populations. But this factor too could be illusory, especially with regard to drug use, since it is far more likely that a state system will catch and punish people with less influence and social standing than those whom the state regards as significant.

A more telling point comes to us from political analysts, who observe the politicization of judicial appointments in the United States. Judges run on their “tough on crime” records, or are appointed for them, and so have every incentive to lock people up more than justice truly demands.

One factor that hasn’t been mentioned so far in the discussion is the lobbying power of the prison industry itself. The old rule is that if you subsidize something, you get more of it. And so it is with prisons and the prison-industrial complex. I’ve yet to find any viable figures on how large this industry is, but consider that it includes construction firms, managers of private prisons, wardens, food service providers, counselors, security services, and 100 other kinds of companies to build and manage these miniature societies. What kind of political influence do they have? Speculation here, but it must be substantial.

As for public concern, remember that every law on the books, every regulation, every line in the government code-book, is ultimately enforced by prison. The jail cell is the symbol and ultimate end of statism itself. It would be nice if we thought of the interests of those who are prisoners in society and those who will become so. But even if you are not likely to be among them, consider the loss of privacy, the loss of liberty, the loss of independence, the loss of all that used to be considered truly American in the course of building prison nation.

47.
OUR KIND OF CENTRAL PLANNING
April 2007

During the 1990s, many of us complained bitterly about rule by the left. We were outraged at how the Clinton administration had so much faith in government’s ability to bring about universal fairness and equality. Government, we were told, would make right all relations between groups, equalize access to health care, curb every corporate abuse, and stop all forms of exploitation of man against man, and man against nature.

Except that behind every regulation, every bill, and every central plan, no matter how humane it appeared on the outside, an informed person could discern the iron fist of the state, which the Clinton administration freely used against its enemies. Clinton himself was perhaps never as convinced of the cure of power as the worst Clintonites, but it remained and remains his default worldview.

What was wrong with the leftists’ worldview in the 1990s and today? Essentially it is this: they see society as unworkable by itself. They believe it has fundamental flaws and deep-rooted conflicts that keep it in some sort of structural imbalance. All these conflicts and disequilibria cry out for government fixes, for leftists are certain that there is no social problem that a good dose of power can’t solve.

If the conflicts they want are not there, they make them up. They look at what appears to be a happy suburban subdivision and see pathology. They see an apparently happy marriage and imagine that it is a mask for abuse. They see a thriving church and think the people inside are being manipulated by a cynical and corrupt pastor. Their view of the economic system is the same. They figure that prices don’t reflect reality but instead are set by large players. There is a power imbalance at the heart of every exchange. The labor contract is a mere veneer that covers exploitation.

To the brooding leftist, it is inconceivable that people can work out their own problems, that trade can be to people’s mutual advantage, that society can be essentially self-managing, or that attempts to use government power to reshape and manage people might backfire. Their faith in government knows few limits; their faith in people is thin or nonexistent. This is why they are a danger to liberty. We knew this in the 1990s, and we know it today.

The remarkable fact about the conflict theory of society held by the left is that it ends up creating more of the very pathology that they believe has been there from the beginning. The surest way to drive a wedge between labor and capital is to regulate the labor markets to the point that people cannot make voluntary trades. Both sides begin to fear each other. It is the same with relations between races, sexes, the able and the physically and mentally challenged, and any other groups you can name. The best path to creating conflict where none need exist is to put a government bureaucracy in charge.

And yet the left is hardly alone in holding this essential assumption about the way the world works. We have lived through six years of a Republican president. The regime is dominated by a different philosophical orientation. And we have thereby been reminded that there are many flavors of tyranny. Bush’s spending record is far worse than Clinton’s. After promising a humble foreign policy, war and war spending define our era. We’re told that every problem with war can be solved through more force; that there is nothing necessarily wrong with imprisoning people without cause and without legal representation; that torture can be a legitimate wartime tactic; that some countries have to be destroyed in order to be made free; and that we can have all the warfare and welfare we desire at virtually no cost, thanks to the miracle of debt-driven economic growth.

Traveling on airplanes reminds us how much freedom we’ve lost and how we have become accustomed to it. Government bureaucrats presume the right to search us and all our property. We are interrogated at every step. The slightest bit of resistance could lead to arrest. We mill around airports while the loudspeakers demand that we report all suspicious behavior. Sometimes it seems like we are living in a dystopian novel.

Some people say that the real problem with the Bush administration is that it is too far left, and that a genuine right-wing government would be better. I’m disinclined to believe that, for I detect in the Bush administration a particular philosophy of governance that departs from that of the Clinton regime in many ways, except in its unlimited faith in government, that is, force and the threat of force.

I would go so far as to say that the most imminent threat that we face is not from the left but from the conservative right. I would like to defend the idea that rule by the right is as dangerous as rule by the left. Elsewhere, I’ve referred to members of political groups that support the conservative right as “red-state fascists,” and I don’t use that phrase merely for rhetorical purposes. There was and is such as thing as fascism as a nonleftist form of social theory that puts unlimited faith in the state to correct the flaws in society.

In the American postwar tradition, the political right has been a mix of genuine libertarian elements together with some very dangerous tendencies. Mises wrote in Omnipotent Government that there is a breed of warmonger who sees war not as an evil to be avoided as much as possible, but rather a productive and wonderful event that gives life meaning. To these people—and Mises of course was speaking of Nazis—war and all its destruction is a high achievement, something necessary to bring out the best in man and society, something wonderful and necessary to push history and culture forward.

Reading Mises’s claim in peacetime makes it seem implausible. Who could possibly believe such things about war? And yet I think we know now. There have been hundreds of articles in the conservative press in the last six years that have made the precise claims we see above. Even in the religious world, we see the shift taking place, with new emphasis on the God of War over the Prince of Peace.

During the New Deal and before the Cold War, the libertarian tendencies of the American Right prevailed. But after the Cold War began, the mix became unstable, with the militarists and statists gaining an upper hand. It was during this period that we first heard the term “conservative” applied to people who believe in free enterprise and human liberty—a ridiculous moniker if there ever was one. Frank Chodorov was so fed up with it that he once said: “anyone who calls me a conservative gets a punch in the nose.” Neither did Hayek or Mises, much less Rothbard, permit that term to be applied to their world-view.

Nonetheless, it stuck, and the bad habits of mind along with it. It would be impossible to say what policy of the current-day right constitutes the biggest danger to liberty. For now, I would like to leave aside the most commonly talked about issues of the Bush administration, such as its ahistorical view of the power of the executive branch and its post 9-11 violations of civil liberties, which are very real indeed. Instead let’s look at the grimmest aspect of the state: its enforcement arm.

LOCK’EM UP

The American Right has long held a casual view toward the police power, viewing it as the thin blue line that stands between freedom and chaos. And while it is true that law itself is critical to freedom, and police can defend rights of life and property, it does not follow that any tax-paid fellow bearing official arms and sporting jackboots is on the side of good. Every government regulation and tax is ultimately backed by the police power, so free-market advocates have every reason to be as suspicious of socialist-style police power as anyone on the left.

Uncritical attitudes toward the police lead, in the end, to the support of the police state. And to those who doubt that, I would invite a look at the US-backed regime in Iraq, which has been enforcing martial law since the invasion, even while most conservatives have been glad to believe that these methods constitute steps toward freedom.

The problem of police power is hitting Americans very close to home. It is the police, much militarized and federalized, that are charged with enforcing the on-again-off-again states of emergency that characterize American civilian life. It is the police that confiscated guns from New Orleans residents during the flood, kept residents away from their homes, refused to let the kids go home in the Alabama tornado last month, and will be the enforcers of the curfews, checkpoints, and speech controls that the politicians want during the next national emergency. If we want to see the way the police power could treat US citizens, look carefully at how the US troops in Iraq are treating the civilians there, or how prisoners in Guantanamo Bay are treated.

A related problem with the conservative view toward law and justice concerns the issue of prisons. The United States now incarcerates 730 people per 100,000, which means that the US leads the world in the number of people it keeps in jails. We have vaulted ahead of Russia in this regard. Building and maintaining jails is a leading expense by government at all levels. We lock up citizens at rates as high as eight times the rest of the industrialized world. Is it because we have more crime? No. You are more likely to be burglarized in London and Sydney than in New York or Los Angeles. Is this precisely because we jail so many people? Apparently not. Crime explains about 12 percent of the prison rise, while changes in sentencing practices, mostly for drug-related offenses, account for 88 percent.

Overall, spending on prisons, police, and other items related to justice is completely out of control. According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, in the twenty years ending in 2003, prison spending has soared 423 percent, judicial spending is up 321 percent, and police spending shot up 241 percent. When current data become available, I think we will all be in for a shock, with total spending around a quarter of a trillion dollars per year. And what do we get for it? More justice, more safety, better protection? No, we are buying the chains of our own slavery.

We might think of prisons as miniature socialist societies, where government is in full control. For that reason, they are a complete failure for everyone but those who get the contracts to build the jails and those who work in them. Many inmates are there for drug offenses, supposedly being punished for their behavior, but meanwhile drug markets thrive in prison. If that isn’t the very definition of failure, I don’t know what is. In prison, nothing takes place outside the government’s purview. The people therein are wholly and completely controlled by state managers, which means that they have no value. And yet it is a place of monstrous chaos, abuse, and corruption. Is it any wonder that people coming out of prison are no better off than before they went in, and are often worse, and scarred for life?

In the US prison and justice system, there is no emphasis at all on the idea of restitution, which is not only an important part of the idea of justice but, truly, its very essence. What justice is achieved by robbing the victim again to pay for the victimizer’s total dehumanization? As Rothbard writes:

The victim not only loses his money, but pays more money besides for the dubious thrill of catching, convicting, and then supporting the criminal; and the criminal is still enslaved, but not to the good purpose of recompensing his victim.

Free-market advocates have long put up with jails on grounds that the state needs to maintain a monopoly on justice. But where in the world is the justice here? And how many jails are too many? How many prisoners must there be before the government has overreached? We hear virtually nothing about this problem from conservatives. Far from it, we hear only the celebration of the expansion of prison socialism, as if the application of ever more force were capable of solving any social problem.

KILL’EM ALL

This ideology of power is particularly clear when it comes to war. In the 1970s, there developed a myth on the right that the real problem with Vietnam was not the intervention itself, but the failure to carry it out to a more grim and ruthless end. This seems to be the only lesson that the Bush administration garnered from the experience. So the solution to every problem in Iraq—at least, I can’t think of an exception to the rule—has been to apply more force through more troops, more bombs, more tanks, more guns, more curfews, more patrols, more checkpoints, and more controls of all sorts. It’s as if the administration were on an intellectual trajectory that it cannot escape.

Why the lack of any critical thinking here? How is it that the war planners and their vast numbers of supporters do not question the underlying assumption that government is capable of achieving all its aims, provided that it is given enough time and firepower? It’s as if they are unable to apply the logic behind their support of free enterprise in any other area of politics.

What’s more, it is not even clear that American conservatives are temperamentally inclined to support free enterprise. Let us never forget that it was the Nixon administration that finally destroyed the gold standard and gave us price and wage controls, and it was the Reagan administration that set the world record on government spending and debt, before it was broken by the current Republican administration. There is no doubt in my mind that under the right conditions, the Bush administration would institute wage and price controls in the same way that it has pursued an intermittently protectionist program, regulated business, erected new bureaucracies, and failed to seriously cut taxes.

Why is it the case that American conservatives cannot be trusted with the defense of liberty? Here is where we have to penetrate more deeply into the philosophical infrastructure of American conservatism. I wish I could say it is derived from the Republicanism of Madison, or the libertarianism of Jefferson, or the aristocratic old-style liberalism of Edmund Burke, or the rabble-rousing faith in freedom exhibited by that American original Patrick Henry. Sadly, this is not the case. Nor do the conservatives show evidence of having been influenced by the thinkers discussed in Russell Kirk’s book The Conservative Mind, such as John C. Calhoun, John Randolph of Roanoke, John Adams, much less the eccentric Orestes Brownson.

Conservatives have become addicted to entertainment radio and television as the source of their news, and the underlying philosophy seems not to have any connection to history in any way. But because we are all intellectually indebted to some body of ideas, we have to ask: which one is it that informs modern-day conservatism?

LAW-KEEPER, LAW-BREAKERS

What we have at work here is a crude form of Hobbesianism, the political philosophy hammered out by the seventeenth-century Englishman Thomas Hobbes. His book Leviathan was published in 1651 during the English Civil War in order to justify a tyrannical central government as the price of peace. The natural state of society, he said, was war of all against all. In this world, life is “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” Conflict was the way of human engagement. Society is rife with it, and it cannot be otherwise.

What is striking here is the context of this book. Conflict was indeed ubiquitous. But what was the conflict about? It was over who would control the state and how that state would operate. This was not a state of nature but a society under Leviathan’s control. It was precisely the Leviathan that bred that very conflict that Hobbes was addressing, and he proposed a cure that was essentially identical to the disease.

In fact, the result of the Civil War was the brutal and ghastly dictatorship of Oliver Cromwell, who ruled under democratic slogans. This was a foreshadowing of some of the worst political violence of the twentieth century. It was Nazism, Fascism, and Communism that transformed formerly peaceful societies into violent communities in which life did indeed become “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” Leviathan didn’t fix the problem; it bred it—and fastened it on society as a permanent condition.

What is striking about Hobbes is that he thought not at all about economic problems. The problem of human material well-being was not part of his intellectual apparatus. He could not have imagined what England would become only a century to a century and a half later: a bastion of freedom and rising prosperity for everyone.

He wrote at the tail end of an epoch before the rise of old-style liberalism. At the time that Hobbes was writing, the liberal idea had not yet become part of public consciousness in England. In this respect, England was behind the Continent, where intellectuals in Spain and France had already come to understand the core insights of the liberal idea. But in England, John Locke’s Two Treatises on Government would not be written for another thirty years, a book that would supply the essential framework of the Declaration of Independence and lead to the formation of the freest and most prosperous society in the history of the world.

Because Hobbes didn’t think about economic issues, the essential liberal insight was not part of his thinking. And what is that insight? It is summed up in Frédéric Bastiat’s claim that “the great social tendencies are harmonious.”

WE CAN GET ALONG

What he means by this is that society contains within itself the capacity to resolve conflicts and create and sustain institutions that further social cooperation. By pursuing their individual self-interest, people can come to mutual agreement and engage in exchange to their mutual benefit. A critical insight here, one that needs to be taught to every generation, relates to the law of association.

The law of association points out that people of radically different abilities, backgrounds, religions, races, and capacities can successfully cooperate to achieve ever-higher levels of social welfare through negotiation and trade. The law of association is what explains the method by which humans were able to move out of caves, away from isolated production, beyond the hunter-gatherer stage, and into what we call civilization. This law makes it possible for people to stop stealing from each other, stop killing each other, and begin to cooperate. It is the basis of society.

Note that the law of association does not suppose that everyone in society is smart, enlightened, talented, or educated. It presumes radical inequality and points to the paradox that the world’s smartest, most talented person still has every reason to trade with his polar opposite because scarcity requires that the tasks of production be divided between people. Under the division of labor, everyone plays an essential role. It is the basis of families, communities, firms, and international trade. Another fact that needs to be understood is this: the law of association is a fact of human existence whether or not there is a state. Indeed, the foundation of civilization itself precedes the existence of the state.

What the law of association addresses is the core problem of freedom itself. If all people were equal, if everyone had the same skill level, if there were racial, sexual, and religious homogeneity in society, if people did not have differences of opinion, there would be few if any problems in society to overcome because it would not be a human society. It would be an ant heap, or a series of machine parts that had no volition. The essential problem of social and economic organization, aside from scarcity, is precisely how to deal with the facts of inequality and free will. It is here that freedom excels.

Let us be clear. Bastiat was not saying that there are no such things as criminals. He was saying that society can deal with malevolence through the exchange economy, and in precisely the way we see today: private security companies, private production of locks and guns, private arbitration, and private insurance. The free market can organize protection better than the state. Private enterprise can and does provide the police function better than the state. As Hayek argued, the state is wildly overrated as a mechanism of order-keeping. The state is and has been in history a source of disorder and chaos.

This essential insight of liberalism is what led the founding fathers to take such a radical step as throwing off the rule of Britain. They had to be firmly convinced that chaos would not ensue, that the American people could manage their own affairs without overarching leviathan control. They believed that the source of any conflict in their society was the central state, and that society itself could be self-regulating. In place of control by the king, they put the Articles of Confederation, which was a type of government that more closely approximated anarchy than any system in the modern period. The government was barely in existence, and had essentially no power.

Why did anyone believe it could work? It was the new science of liberty that led to this conviction. The American consensus was precisely that Hobbes was wrong. In the state of nature, life is not nasty and brutish, or, rather if it is, there is nothing that a nasty and brutish state can do to improve it. The only way a society can advance out of barbarism is from within by means of the division of labor.

This logic has been forgotten by the American Right. Instead they have bought into the view that society is fundamentally unstable and rife with a conflict that only the state can solve. That root conflict is between those who adhere to the law and those who are inclined to break it. These they define as good guys and bad guys, but it is not always true, since the law these days is not that written by God on our hearts, but rather the orders handed down by our political masters.

This seemingly important point is completely lost on the Republican mind, since they believe that without the state as lawmaker, all of society and all of the world would collapse into a muddle of chaos and darkness. Society, they believe, is a wreck without Leviathan. This is why they celebrate the police and the military more than merchants and entrepreneurs, and why they think that war deserves more credit than trade for world prosperity.

ONE FAITH PER SOCIETY

The conviction that society, no matter how orderly it appears, is really nothing more than a gloss on deep-rooted conflict, expresses itself in the romantic attachment to the police power and war. But it also affects the right’s attitude toward religion. Many people are convinced that, in the end, it is not possible that society can be religiously heterogeneous. In particular, these days, most conservatives believe that the United States cannot abide the presence of Muslims and other religious minorities.

Now, on this question, we can grant that the existence of the universal franchise does create problems with religious heterogeneity. But this is a problem created by the state itself. In conditions of freedom, there is no reason why all religions cannot peacefully coexist.

The current-day view of conservatives that we are in an intractable war against Islam also stems from the conflict-based view of society. In the absence of the state, people find ways to get along, each preserving their own identities. Religious heterogeneity presents no problems that freedom cannot solve.

And yet conservatives today are disinclined to accept this view. They seem to have some intellectual need to identify huge struggles at work in history that give them a sense of meaning and purpose. Whereas the founding generation of old liberals was thrilled by the existence of peace and the slow and meticulous development of bourgeois civilization, the right today is on the lookout for grand morality plays into which they can throw themselves as a means of making some mark in history. And somehow they have come to believe that the state is the right means to fight this battle.

In short, their meta-understanding of politics bypassed the liberal revolution of the eighteenth century and embraced the antiliberal elements of the Enlightenment. Up with Hobbes, down with Locke: that is their implied creed. Liberty is fine but order, order, is much more important, and order comes from the state. They can’t even fathom the truth that liberty is the mother, not the daughter, of order. That thought is too complex for the mind that believes that the law alone, legislated or by executive fiat, is what separates barbarism from civilization. Freedom, to them, is not a right but something conferred as a reward for good behavior. The absence of good behavior justifies any level of crackdown.

I once heard a leading Republican intellectual, a respected figure with lots of books on everyone’s shelves, express profound regret when the Soviet Union was falling apart. The problem, from this person’s perspective, is that this led to disorder, and order—meaning control even by the Soviet state—is the fundamental conservative value. That about sums it up. Even Communism is to be tolerated so long as it keeps away what they dread more than death: people within their rights doing whatever they want.

At the end of the Cold War, many conservatives panicked that there would be no more great causes into which the state could enlist itself. There were about 10 years of books that sought to demonize someone, somewhere, in the hope of creating a new enemy. Maybe it would be China. Maybe it would be the culture war. Maybe it should be drugs. At last, from their point of view, 9-11 presented the opportunity they needed, and thus began the newest unwinnable war in the tradition of LBJ: The War on Terror.

So must government rule every aspect of life until every last terrorist is wiped off the face of the earth? Must we surrender all our liberty and property to this cause, as the regime and its apologists suggest?

This view of society is certainly not sustainable in these times or in the future. Ever more of daily life consists in seceding from the state and its apparatus of edicts and regulations. In the online world, billions of deals are made every day that require virtually no government law to enforce. The technology that is pushing the world forward is not created by the state but by private enterprise. The places we shop and the communities in which we live are being created by private developers. Most businesses prefer to deal with private courts. We depend on insurance companies, not police, to reduce the risks in life. We secure our homes and workplaces through private firms.

What’s more, these days we see all around us how liberty generates order and how this order is self-sustaining. We benefit daily, hourly, minute-by-minute, from an order that is not imposed from without but rather generated from within, by that remarkable capacity we have for pursuing self-interest while benefiting the whole. Here is the great mystery and majesty of social order, expressed so well in the act of economic exchange.

Many Republicans by contrast live intellectually in a world long past, a world of warring states and societies made up of fixed classes that fought over ever-dwindling resources, a world unleavened by enterprise and individual initiative. They imagine themselves to be the class of rulers, the aristocrats, the philosopher kings, the high clerics, the landowners, and to keep that power, they gladly fuel the basest of human instincts: nationalism, jingoism, and hate. Keeping them at bay means keeping the world of their imaginations at bay, and that is a very good and important thing for the sake of civilization.

THE ROTHBARD REVIVAL

Having said all of this about the modern-day right, I do want to draw your attention again to the forgotten tradition of the Old Right of the 1930s and ’40s. These were times when Garet Garrett was celebrating free enterprise against New Deal planning, John T. Flynn was exposing the warfare state as a tool of socialism, Albert Jay Nock was heralding the capacity of private education to create literacy and artistry, and when politicians on the right were advocating peace and trade. This period came to an end in the 1950s with the emergence of the first neoconservatives attached to National Review.

Very few people today know anything about this aspect of American intellectual history. But in a few months, this period of ignorance is going to come to an end. The Mises Institute is publishing a remarkable document. It is Murray Rothbard’s unpublished history of the postwar American Right. The name of the book is The Betrayal of the American Right. It chronicles both his life and the life and death of a movement. Ultimately his outlook is hopeful, just as mine is hopeful.

The manuscript has circulated privately for 30 years. It will soon see the light of day. He names names. He spares no enemy of freedom. Many people will cheer. Many others will weep. It will be a great day. The Mises Institute is the powerhouse for publishing and educating in the libertarian tradition. The young are listening and we are having a great effect in bringing to life the vision of society that animated the American Revolution and, indeed, gave rise to civilization as we know it.

I’ve spoken about the problem of those who look at society and see nothing but conflict and no prospect for cooperation. It is a view shared by the left and the right. But truly there is an actual conflict at the root of history—but it is not the one most people understand or see. It is the great struggle between freedom and despotism, between the individual and the state, between the voluntary means and coercion. The party of freedom knows where it stands.