SECTION 2: WAR 48. FALSE GLORY May 2005

Why does the bourgeoisie support war? Why the state goes to war is not a mystery—at least the general reasons are not mysterious. War is an excuse for the state to spend our money on its friends. It can punish enemies that are not going with the program. It intimidates other states tempted to go their own way. It can pave the way for politically privileged commercial interests. The regime that makes and wins a war gets written up in the history books. The reasons for war are the same now as in the ancient world: power, money, glory.

Why the bourgeoisie back war is another matter. It is selfevidently not in their interest. The government gains power at their expense. It spends their money and runs up debt that is paid out of taxes and inflation. It fosters the creation of permanent enemies abroad who then work to diminish our security at home. It leads to the violation of privacy and civil liberty. War is incompatible with a government that leaves people alone to develop their lives in an atmosphere of freedom.

Nonetheless, war with moral themes—we are the good guys working for God, and they are the bad guys doing the devil’s work—tends to attract a massive amount of middle-class support. People believe the lies, and once the lies are exposed, they defend the state’s right to have lied in the first place. People who are otherwise outraged by murder find themselves celebrating it on a mass industrial scale. People who harbor no hatred toward foreigners find themselves attaching ghastly monikers to whole classes of foreign peoples. Regular middle-class people, who otherwise struggle to eke out a flourishing life in this vale of tears, feel hatred well up within them and confuse it for honor, bravery, courage, and valor.

Why? Nationalism is one answer. To be at war is to feel at one with something much larger than oneself, to be a part of a grand historical project. They have absorbed the civic religion from childhood—Boston tea, cherry trees, log cabins, Chevrolet—but it mostly has no living presence in their minds until the state pushes the war button, and then all the nationalist emotions well up within them.

American nationalism is usually associated with attachment to a particular set of state managers that you think can somehow lead the country in a particular direction of which you approve. So the nationalism of the Iraq war, for instance, was mostly a Republican Party phenomenon. All Democrats are suspected as being insufficiently loyal, of feeling sympathy for The Enemy, or defending such ideas as civil liberty at a time when the nation needs unity more than ever.

You could tell a Republican nationalist during this last war because the words peace and liberty were always said with a sneer, as if they didn’t matter at all. Even the Constitution came in for a pounding from these people. Bush did all he could to consolidate decision-making power unto himself, and even strongly suggested that he was acting on God’s orders as Commander in Chief, and his religious constitutionalist supporters went right along with it. They were willing to break as many eggs as necessary to make the war omelet. I’ve got an archive of a thousand hate mails to prove it.

But nationalism is not the only basis for bourgeois support of war. Longtime war correspondent Chris Hedges, in his great book War Is a Force that Gives Us Meaning (First Anchor, 2003), argues that war operates as a kind of canvas on which every member of the middle and working class can paint his or her own picture. Whatever personal frustrations exist in your life, however powerless you feel, war works as a kind of narcotic. It provides a means for people to feel temporarily powerful and important, as if they are part of some big episode in history. War then becomes for people a kind of lurching attempt to taste immortality. War gives their lives meaning.

If you know something about the sociology of religion, you can recognize what he is describing: the sacraments. In Christian theology they are derived from periodic ceremonies in the Jewish tradition that cultivate the favor of God, who grants our lives transcendent importance. We receive sacraments as a means of gaining propitiation for our sins, an eternal blessing on worldly choices, or the very means of eternal life.

War is the devil’s sacrament. It promises to bind us not with God but with the nation-state. It grants not life but death. It provides not liberty but slavery. It lives not on truth but on lies, and these lies are themselves said to be worthy of defense. It exalts evil and condemns the good. It is promiscuous in encouraging an orgy of sin, not self-restraint and thought. It is irrational and bloody and vicious and appalling. And it claims to be the highest achievement of man.

It is worse than mass insanity. It is mass wallowing in evil.

And then it is over. People oddly forget what took place. The bloom on the rose of war fades, leaving only the thorns—the awful reality, the dashed hopes, the expense, the lame, the limbless, the widows, the orphans, the death on all sides, and the resulting instability.

The rose wilts, and the thorns grow, but people go on with their lives. War no longer inspires. War news becomes uninteresting. All those arguments with friends and family—what were they about anyway? All that killing and expense and death—let’s just avert our eyes from it all. Maybe in a few years, once the war is out of the news forever and the country we smashed recovers some modicum of civilization, we can revisit the event and proclaim it glorious. But for now, let’s just say it never happened.

People have long accused the great liberal tradition of a dogmatic attachment to peace. It would appear that this is precisely what is needed to preserve the freedom to find true meaning in our lives.

Do we reject war and all its works? We do reject them.

49.
MY SPEECH AT THE ANTIWAR RALLY
September 2005

I was invited to speak at a peace march and rally in Birmingham, Alabama, sponsored by the Alabama Peace and Justice Coalition, and gladly accepted the offer to speak against the war in Iraq.

Yes, as you might guess, the program was dominated by leftists who rightly oppose the war but want big government to run the economy. I accepted for the same reason I would accept an engagement to speak against taxes even if sponsored by a right-wing group that also favored the war and militarism.

The opportunity to make a difference in favor of freedom should not be passed up, even if one’s associates have a mixed-up ideology. After all, most ideologies these days are mixed up, and have been for the better part of a century.

Those who want free markets domestically typically want central planning and socialism when it comes to war and peace, while those who see the merit of diplomacy and minding one’s own business in foreign policy can’t reconcile themselves to capitalism as the only economic system that lets people alone to live happy, prosperous lives.

Now, one might think that the old liberal view, the view of Jefferson and his school, might be more widely held: namely that the government ought not lord it over anything. But somehow everyone seems to have a stake in big government, whether to rule the world or expropriate the rich. So what can we do but encourage the good parts of what people believe and discourage the bad parts?

In any case, I was glad to speak before this group, and they were gracious to ask. The challenge was to put together a three-minute speech that summed up the libertarian case against the Iraq War—not easy to do.

I was aware that I was a token non-leftist speaking to a largely leftist audience.

Among the slogans of the day was that we should spend less on the war and more on social needs. Libertarians can agree in some way: give everyone back their money and let each individual spend on his or her social needs!

There are two potential failings in such a venue: kowtowing to the audience or, the opposite error, ungraciously rubbing their noses in their inconsistencies. It strikes me that the only way to proceed here is simply to tell what’s true as best as one is able, and to heck with rhetorical strategy.

The speech seemed well received. A minister from an African Methodist Episcopal church came up to me and said “you express my views exactly!” I had my doubts, but that’s great if true. Similarly, there was a young kid wearing a shirt that said: “War is the symptom; capitalism is the disease.” He was cheering very loudly, so who knows? Maybe I made him think.

What follows is my text. If you read it yourself, you will see that I went longer than three minutes. I might have just reduced it all to: “down with the warfare-welfare state, and up with peace and free trade.”

WAR AND MORALITY

By what ethical standard should we judge the state? One tradition, which we might call anti-liberal, asserts that there are special laws of morality that apply to the state alone. Another tradition, the liberal tradition, says that states must abide by the moral standards that apply to everyone in all times and all places.

The first view is the ancient one. It permitted and expected states to pillage and kill. The right and wrong of statecraft was dictated by the sword. The idea of universal moral laws and universal human rights did not find favor among the Caesars and Pharaohs, any more than this idea appealed to later dictators.

Yet the liberal tradition gradually abolished the idea of caste and special legal privilege. It asserted, more generally, that no group possesses a special license to lord it over others.

St. Augustine might have been the first to observe that the moral status of Alexander the Great’s conquests was more egregious than the pirate’s depredations. The pirate molests the sea, but the emperor molests the world.

The view that states can do wrong is the most powerful theory of politics in the history of the world. It led to the birth of the dream of universal freedom. Slavery, imperialism, colonialism, militarism, and authoritarianism all came to exist under a moral cloud.

At the same time, freedom and individualism unleashed human energies and, in the setting of free economies, created a prosperity beyond any ever known. This made possible the vast expansion of the world’s population, and human flourishing as never seen before.

Given this history, and the central role that the American Revolution had in furthering the liberal idea, we must ask the question: what does the US government not understand about the evil of imperialism, the immorality of enslaving a foreign people, the malice of colonialism, and the intolerable brutality of authoritarianism?

In fact, the theory of the modern American regime is a throwback to the ancient view that the United States operates under special rules.

The US government believes it can starve foreign countries such as Iraq by imposing killer sanctions that a high US official said were worth the lives of hundreds of thousands of children.

The US believes that it can use its weapons of mass destruction to threaten any country in the world on the very suspicion that it might be trying to defend itself. The US can then phony up intelligence, overthrow a leader, and install a regime of its choosing. Not to worry: its magical military Midas touch will transform that country into a paragon of democratic freedom—just as soon as all political opposition is silenced or destroyed.

In short, the US government believes that it operates under a different moral standard, not only from the moral standard that regular people apply to their own affairs, but even different from the moral standard that the US applies to other states.

And who pays the price for this moral hypocrisy? The victims of war.

Of all forms of collectivist central planning, war is the most egregious. It is generated by the coercive force of taxation and monetary depreciation. Its means are economic regimentation and the violation of the freedom to associate and trade. Its ends are destruction and killing—crime on a mass scale.

War leaves in its wake orphans, widows, parents without children, sickness, hatred, and spiritual and psychological trauma. It gives power to dictators on all sides. It is based on a lie that mass death can ever accord with justice. It attempts to silence those who tell the truth.

Indeed, war is a kind of totalitarianism. It is a policy without limit. It demands from us all that we have to give: our money, our children, our minds, even our souls. Too often people give it all. Too often, Americans give it all.

George Bush was brazen enough to make the doctrine explicit. If you are not for him, he says, you are for the terrorists.

He said it because the state fears the advocates of peace. It fears the truth, and those who tell the truth. It fears those who dare to judge the state by normal standards of morality.

The state fears you. Why? Because you hold the opinions that you do, and refuse to surrender your mind, your talents, your soul. By joining the resistance, you help thwart their plans. You help establish the basis for peace in the future. You help preserve and develop civilization, for the human family can only thrive in a setting of peace.

So I say to you: Keep making the sacrifice. Believe in peace. Proclaim peace. Stand up to the state. Be a dissident. Tell what is true. And do not fear the emperor-pirates. They, after all, fear you. For you help tilt the balance of history against their barbarism, and in favor of peace and freedom.

50.
ANYTHING FOR A BUCK
November 2002

When it comes to Wall Street scandals, the widely held assumption is that accountants, stock traders, investment bankers, CEOs, and CFOs will do anything for a buck. If a broker recommended a stock that sunk in price, the courts and media are ready to assume a financial scam. He was cheating his own clients to line his pockets!

If a stock was sold before bad news was announced, the assumption is that insider information was employed. If an audit report seems to bury the bad news, the assumption is that the CEO and CFO conspired to cook the books to enrich themselves. Hey, money makes the capitalist world go round!

But might these have been mistakes stemming from lack of knowledge of the future? Perhaps all decisions at any point in time seemed to be the best ones but only later turned out to be wrong? Never. To say that is to reveal a crazy pro-business bias and fail to understand that making money (not ethics or customer service or whatever else) is all these people care about. So we are told.

In general, then, when reporting and adjudicating matters that pertain to business, the widely held assumption is that these people will do anything for a buck, whether lie, cheat, or steal. The burden of proof that wrongdoing does not exist falls entirely on the capitalist or stock dealer. Reasonable people are free to see money grubbing as the secret and sole motivation behind every action. Who would be so naïve as to think otherwise?

Ah, but when it comes to foreign policy—even that of a presidential administration sitting on an oil fortune and heading a global crude empire—matters are entirely different. To think that Bush’s plans for Iraq are driven by the desire to control Iraq’s oil supplies is seen as unseemly, unsavory, base, and contrary to every norm of proper opinion holding. Woe to anyone who would suggest that something other than national interest is the driving force!

Thus does Nicholas Kristof of the New York Times tell us that he is against war but even more against a certain line of argument against war. “One can disagree with the calls for war, as I do,” he says,

but liberals discredit themselves when they claim that the only reasons Mr. Bush could be planning an invasion are finishing Daddy’s work, helping his oil buddies, or diverting voters from corporate scandals.

Liberals are discrediting themselves by saying what is true? How could this be? Because “If we’re to convince Americans of the perils of invasion, it’ll be by citing arguments rather than epithets.” But this is a false choice. To cite the real reasons for Bush’s war, and provide reasons why you think that the administration is lying, is to provide an argument, and that argument is that things are not always as they seem. With government, who is naïve enough to think otherwise?

With all the unrespectable, nonserious claims that the Iraq war is really about spilling blood for oil, the New York Times examined the issue of the oil motive at great length in its Sunday edition, and concluded the following: “No serious expert believes the charge made by Mr. Hussein that Washington’s one real goal is to seize his oil.”

How does one define a “serious expert”? In the case of Iraq, it means a person who does not believe that the war is all about oil. If you conclude that it is, you are de-listed from the ranks of serious experts.

In fact, this is generally true in public life: disagree fundamentally with the state and you are no longer considered a serious expert on anything. People in public life work their entire careers to make sure this does not happen, which is another way of saying that they work to stay within the bounds of opinions set by the ruling regime.

And yet the New York Times story goes on to point out that Iraq has five times more proven reserves of oil than the United States and the second largest supply of any country in the world (Saudi Arabia is number one). The story by Serge Schmemann grants that

112 billion barrels of proven reserves is also something nobody can overlook. So even if it’s not only about oil, or even mainly about oil, Iraq’s “ability to generate oil” is always somewhere on the table, even if not in so many words.

We might also say that bank robbers just like being mischievous, though the fact that banks have money is always somewhere on the table. In the same way, a rapist is just a violent guy, though sex is also somewhere on the table. Muggers are motivated by a general desire to harass, though getting people’s purses, watches, and wallets is always somewhere on the table.

Going beyond mere assertion, the Times explains why oil cannot be considered the primary motivation. To bring about a regime change to grab the oil is a gamble of enormous proportions because Iraq’s oil industry is in a “deplorable state,” the country needs to be rebuilt, and—this will shock you—there is “uncertainty over the future.” That’s it. That’s the whole argument, which we will now examine.

Uncertainty is a universal feature of the world, and it doesn’t somehow prevent risk taking. As for rebuilding the country, the Bush administration has already said that US taxpayers would be on the hook for these expenses (though the United States would also try to rope NATO in). The contracts for rebuilding will go, inevitably, to the likes of Schlumberg Ltd. and Halliburton Corp. (Cheney, former CEO). At the very least, their investments will be guaranteed, a fact that seriously diminishes the extent to which the expense of rebuilding reduces the intensity of the oil motive.

In the story, Youssef M. Ibrahim of the Council on Foreign Relations does raise one interesting point. He says that there are risks to bringing all the Iraqi oil on the market because if one opens all valves, the price of oil could plummet, which could dramatically reduce profits. We know that Cheney thinks it should be a matter of policy that oil never fall below a certain price floor (as he told Tim Russert on Meet The Press July 30, 2000). One can imagine that this prospect could prove a mitigating factor. And yet, if prices can be kept above $20 and demand increases, and Bush-connected companies are doing the selling, there are still plenty of profits to be had even if the oil price plummets.

More forthright is a side bar included in the Times article that concerns untapped oil reserves.

Some analysts speculate that Iraq’s reserves may be closer to 200 billion barrels. Others put the number close to 300 billion. ...Deeper and more western prospecting has yet to be done.

There’s more to add:

Even the known reserves, however, have yet to be fully developed. There are [as] many [as] 17 “giant” fields in Iraq—an oil-industry designation indicating reserves in excess of one billion barrels. Throw in a few “super-giants” and a couple dozen “large” fields and the potential is clear, regardless of who controls the country.

Can you imagine that some people might think that getting control of the oil is the primary motivation? Yet people who suggest such a thing are to be dismissed as cranks. In fact, it is far clearer that greed and profiteering are behind US foreign policy than the Wall Street scandals (notice that US foreign policy is never called a scandal).

At least in the private markets, greed must be channeled to public service in order to be realized. And regardless of what government regulators say, stock analysts face no incentive to deliberately cause their clients to experience losses. That’s because we are dealing with private money and freedom of choice, which builds in a kind of accountability. Both profits and losses are privatized.

But where is the accountability in US foreign policy? The decision makers have hundreds of billions of dollars of other people’s money at their disposal and all the potential gains are their own. In other words, the expenses are socialized and the profits are privatized—a perfect prescription for a scandal of immense proportions. As for the people who are killed, they are no one’s assets.

When it comes to foreign policy, it should be clear that the Bush administration will do anything for a buck.

51.
WAS LENIN RIGHT?
January 2003

The connection between the war on Iraq and the desire for oil raises an important ideological consideration. Millions of college students are taught the Leninist idea that capitalist economies are inherently imperialistic. This is supposedly because exploitation exhausts capital values in the domestic economy, and hence capital owners must relentlessly seek to replenish their funds through grabbing foreign resources. It takes war to avoid the final crisis of capitalism, in this view.

College students might be forgiven for thinking there is some basis for this in the real world. In American history up to the present day, the onset of war tends to track the onset of economic doldrums. Might war be just the ticket to revive a moribund capitalist class? Recall that it was then-secretary of state James Baker who said the first Iraq war was all about “jobs, jobs, jobs.” The line between the owners of capital and the warfare state has never been that clean in American history, and it has arguably never been as conspicuously blurred as it is today.

The view that sustaining capitalism requires aggressive war is usually said to originate with V.I. Lenin as a way of rescuing Marxism from a serious problem. The problem was that capitalism was not collapsing in the nineteenth century. It was growing more robust and more productive, and the workers were getting richer, not poorer—all facts that weighed heavily against the Marxist historical trajectory. The Leninist answer to the puzzle was that capitalism was surviving only thanks to its military aggression. The prosperity of the West originated in blood.

CAPITALIST IMPERIALISM

But was Lenin really the originator of the theory? Not at all. The capitalists beat him to it. As Murray N. Rothbard explains in his History of Money and Banking in the United States (2002), the idea began with a group of Republican Party theoreticians during the late Gilded Age, who were concerned that the falling rate of profits would end up crippling capitalism and that the only salvation was a forced opening of foreign markets to US exports. These were the brain-trusters of Theodore Roosevelt, who ended up heralding US aggression against Spain in 1898.

The fear of falling profits stemmed from David Ricardo’s mistaken theory that the rate of profit is determined by the stock of capital investment. In fact, the rate of profit, over the long run, is determined by the rate of time preference in society. All else being equal, as savings rise, profits fall, which doesn’t at all spell disaster for capitalism. It could in fact be an indication of a robust, competitive economy in which no business interest can count on a sure thing in the marketplace.

But the theorists of imperialism didn’t believe it. Economist Charles Conant developed the theory in a series of essays beginning in 1896, including “The Economic Basis of Imperialism,” which appeared in the North American Review in 1898. In this piece, Conant argued that advanced countries have too much savings, too much production, and not enough consumption, and that this was crowding out profitable investment opportunities for the largest corporations.

The best way to find new consumers and resources, he said, was to go abroad, using force, if necessary, to open up markets. He further said that the US industrial trusts then dominant on the landscape could be useful in promoting and waging war. This would further cartelize American industry and increase profits. Hence, said Conant, “concentration of power, in order to permit prompt and efficient action, will be an almost essential factor in the struggle for world empire.”

Yes, that sounds exactly like the version of reality given to us by Lenin, only the moral judgment is reversed. While Lenin condemned imperialism for profit, Conant found it praiseworthy, an inspiring plan of action. Indeed, many of his contemporaries did too. Boston’s US Investor argued that war is necessary to keep capital at work. An “enlarged field for its product must be discovered,” and the best source “is to be found among the semi-civilized and barbarian races.”

By the turn of the century, this view had largely caught on in the economics profession, with even the eminent theorist John Bates Clark of Columbia praising imperialism for providing American business “with an even larger and more permanent profit.”

TODAY’S PROFITS OF WAR

Today the same creed is captured in the pithy if chilling mantra of the New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman: “The hidden hand of the market will never work without a hidden fist” (The Lexus and the Olive Tree). Lenin himself couldn’t have said it better.

Joseph Nye of Harvard fleshes out the point: “To ignore the role of military security in an era of economic and information growth is like forgetting the importance of oxygen to our breathing.”

Brink Lindsey of the Cato Institute puts a different spin on the same line. His goal in Against the Dead Hand is to convince military imperialists that international trade can be an important ally in the fight for global dominance. Instead of seeing trade across borders as the extension of voluntary exchange among individuals, he sees global trade as a weapon to use against foreign states that do not conform to the DC ideal. In Lindsey’s view, foreign trade, managed by the US government through treaties and bureaucracies, is merely a way to wage the fight against terrorism “with maximum effectiveness.”

Historian Robert Kagan is even more brutally clear: “Good ideas and technologies also need a strong power that promotes those ideas by example and protects those ideas by winning on the battlefield.”

So there you have it: if you want to use a cell phone, you have to be willing to send your son to die for the US imperium in a war against Iraq! And if you do lose your son in battle, know that this was necessary in order to shore up US domination of the world economy. This is the creed of the neoconservatives who champion both military and economic globalization.

How far we’ve come from George Washington’s “great rule of conduct for us, in regard to foreign nations”: extend commercial relations but avoid political connections.

Harmony, liberal intercourse with all nations, are recommended by policy, humanity, and interest. But even our commercial policy should hold an equal and impartial hand; neither seeking nor granting exclusive favors or preferences; consulting the natural course of things; diffusing and diversifying by gentle means the streams of commerce, but forcing nothing.

PEACE AND FREEDOM

With the communists and capitalists agreeing that war and profit are mutually dependent, how is a believer in peace and freedom to respond? While war can result in profit for a few, a truly free economy is incompatible with wartime profiteering. Indeed, war comes at the expense of alternative uses of resources. To the extent that people are taxed to pay for armaments, property is diverted from its most valuable uses to purposes of destruction.

The idea that commerce and war are allies is a complete perversion of the old liberal tradition. The first theorists of commerce from the sixteenth century through the eighteenth century saw that a most meritorious aspect of commerce is its link to freedom and peace, that commerce made it possible for people to cooperate rather than fight. It made armaments and war less necessary, not more.

What about the need to open foreign markets? The expansion of markets and the division of labor are always wonderful things. The more people involved in the overarching business of economic life, the greater the prospects for wealth creation. But force is hardly the best means to promote the cooperative and peaceful activity of trade, any more than it is a good idea to steal your neighbor’s mower to improve lawn care on your block. Bitterness and acrimony are never good business, to say nothing of death and destruction.

In any case, the problem in Iraq is not that Iraq is somehow withholding its oil from the market. For years—even before the first war on Iraq—its oil supplies have been available to the world. In one of the great ironies of modern war history, the first Bush administration waged war, it said, to keep Iraq from withholding its oil resources from world markets. The US then proceeded to enforce a decade of sanctions that withheld most of Iraq’s oil reserves from the market (thereby increasing prices and profits for US firms).

We are somehow not permitted to say this, but the solution to Iraq is at hand. Repeal sanctions immediately. Trade with Iraq. Oil prices would fall dramatically. Hatred of the US would abate. The plight of Iraq could no longer be used as exhibit A in terrorist recruitment drives. The only downside, of course, is that US companies connected to the Bush administration would not be the owners of the oil fields, but instead would have to compete with other producers in supplying consumers with oil.

Well, so be it. The idea of free enterprise is that everyone gets a chance, and no one industry or group of producers enjoys special privileges. Through competition and cooperation, but never violence, the living standards of everyone rise and we all enjoy more of the life we want to live. It’s not hard to understand, except in the corridors of the Bush administration, where theorists have linked arms with Leninists in the belief that war is always good, and always necessary, for business.

52.
WAR AND THE ECONOMY
March 2003

The Mises Institute has worked relentlessly to call attention to the dangers of the recessionary environment (and the dangers of the bubble that preceded it), as well as the distraction and destruction of war. Bill Moyers, who has a show on PBS, found himself intrigued by this combination of being against the war but for a free and globally engaged commercial republic. I went on his show to talk about this, but his curiosity tells me that a primer on war and economy is needed.

Behind the current confusion of ideological categories is the longstanding canard that war is good for the economy. If what you care about is a prosperous economy, why wouldn’t it make sense to spend hundreds of billions of dollars on huge industrial products like military planes and tanks? Why not employ hundreds of thousands in a great public-works program like war? Why not destroy a country so that money can funnel to American companies in charge of rebuilding it? Doesn’t all of this help us out of the recession?

All these questions somehow come back to Bastiat’s “Broken Window” fallacy. In the story, a boy throws a rock through a window. Regrets for this act of destruction are all around. But then a confused intellectual pops up to explain that this is a good thing after all. The window will have to be fixed, which gives business to the glazier, who will use the money to buy a suit, helping the tailor, and so on. Where’s the fallacy? It comes down to focusing on the seen (the new spending) as versus the unseen (what might have been done with the resources had they not had to be diverted to window repair).

Let us never forget that the military is the largest single government bureaucracy. It produces nothing. It only consumes resources, which it takes from taxpayers by force. Making matters worse, all these resources are directed toward the building and maintenance of weapons of mass destruction and those who will operate them. The military machine is the boy with the rock writ large. It does not create wealth. It diverts it from more productive uses.

How big is the US military? It is by far the largest and most potentially destructive in the history of the world. The United States this year will spend in excess of $400 billion (not including much spy spending). The next largest spender is Russia, which spends only 14 percent of the US total. To equal US spending, the military budgets of the next 27 highest spenders have to be added together. If you consider this, and also consider the disparity of the US nuclear stockpile and the 120 countries in which the United States keeps its troops, you begin to see why the US is so widely regarded as an imperialist power and a threat to world peace.

This is very hard for Americans to understand. We tend to think of the American state as a mere extension of our own lives. We all work hard. We mind our own business. We tend to our families and involve ourselves in local civic activities. We love our history and are proud of our founding. We are pleased by our prosperity (even if we don’t know why it exists). We think most other Americans live the way we do. We think our government (if we think about it at all) is nothing but an extension of this way of life.

A deadly military empire? Don’t be ridiculous. The military is just defending the country. Bush is a potential tyrant? Get real! He’s a good man. Those crazy foreigners who resent the United States are really no better than those people who attacked us on September 11, 2001: they envy our wealth and hate us for our goodness. We are a godly people, which makes our enemies ungodly, even demonic. This is a short summary of a widely held view, one that those who seek a government-dominated society use to build their public-sector empire.

What most Americans refuse to face is that what the government does day to day, and in particular its military arm, is not an extension of the way the rest of us live. Government knows only one mode of operation: coercion. It does not cooperate; it coerces. Because it is constantly overriding human choices, it makes unrelenting errors, most often producing consequences opposite of the stated intention. This is no less true in its foreign operations than it is in its domestic ones.

Consider the most recent military action in Afghanistan. The Taliban was nothing but a reincarnation of the opposition tribes the US government supported when the country was being run by the Soviets in the 1980s. Back then we called them freedom fighters. When the Taliban fled the capital city last year, the US military knew where to look for them because it was the US military that assisted in building their hideouts during the last war.

What did the war do to the country? All hoopla aside, it is no freer, no more democratic, and no more prosperous. The warlords are running the country and women are still subject to fundamentalist Islamic dictate. How many civilians did the United States kill? Thousands, perhaps many thousands. During the war, every day brought news of a few dozen innocent dead, all verified by humanitarian organizations monitoring the situation. We don’t have a definitive final tabulation because US forces bombed radio and TV stations and worked to keep news of the dead from leaking.

The New York Times reports concerning the newest proposed war: “General [Richard] Myers gave a stark warning that the American attack would result in Iraqi civilian casualties despite the military’s best efforts to prevent them.” Americans don’t like to think about this, but it is a reality nonetheless. As for best efforts, one would have to turn a blind eye to the history of US warfare to believe it.

With regard to Iraq in particular, let us remember that the United States has waged unrelenting war on that country for 12 years, with bombings and sanctions that the United Nations says have killed millions. The entire fiasco began with the Iraqi invasion of its former province, Kuwait. Warned in advance by the Iraqi government, the US ambassador responded that the United States took no position on the border-oil dispute.

But let’s return to the economic costs associated with war. It does not stimulate productivity. It destroys capital, in the same sense that all government spending destroys capital. It removes resources from where they are productive—within the market economy—and places them in the hands of bureaucrats, who assign these resources to uses that have nothing to do with consumer or producer demand. All decisions made by government bureaucrats are economically arbitrary because the decision makers have no access to market signaling.

What’s interesting this time around is how the markets seem to have caught on. The prospect of war is inhibiting recovery. The stock market is now at 1998 levels, with five years of increased valuations wiped out. The recession itself, the longest in postwar history, may have been the inevitable response to the economic bubble that preceded it, but the drive to war is prolonging it. It could get worse and likely will. Consumer confidence is falling, as is consumer spending. Unemployment is rising. The dollar is falling. Commodity prices are rising. All signs point to a man-made economic calamity.

The deficit is completely out of control. The idea of tax cuts is fine, but let’s not pretend as if the bill for government spending doesn’t need to be paid by someone at some point. It will be paid either through inflation or higher taxes later. In the meantime, deficits crowd out private production because they need to be financed through bond holdings. War will only make the problem worse. From time immemorial, war has gone along with fiscal irresponsibility.

War also goes hand in hand with government control of the economy. Bush has increased spending upwards of 30 percent since he took the oath of office. He has imposed punishing tariffs on steel, hardwood, and wheat. He has created the largest new civilian bureaucracy erected since World War II. He has unleashed the federal police power against the American people in violation of the constitution. All of this amounts to a war on freedom, of which commercial freedom is an essential part. This is why no true partisan of free enterprise can support war.

But what about September 11? Doesn’t that event justify just about anything? Let us not forget that this was a multiple hijacking, of which there have been hundreds over the decades since commercial flight became popular. The difference this time was that the hijackers gave up their lives rather than surrender. It was a low-budget operation, and needed no international conspiracy to bring it about. It was easily prevented by permitting pilots to protect their planes and passengers by force of arms, but federal bureaucrats had a policy against this.

In any case, there is no evidence that Iraq had anything to do with 9-11. The Iraqi regime is liberal by Muslim standards and for that reason hated by Islamic fundamentalists. Unlike Saudi Arabia, it tolerates religious diversity, permits gun ownership, and allows drinking. It has a secular culture—complete with rock stars and symphony halls—that few other Muslim states have.

Yes it is a dictatorship, but there are a lot of these in the world. Many of them are US allies. The focus of the Bush administration on Iraq has more to do with personal vendettas and Iraqi oil. In waging war, the Bush administration proposes to spend twice the annual GDP of the entire Iraqi economy! The United States will spend $2 for every $1 it will destroy—the very definition of economic perversity. What’s more, an attack will only further destabilize the region and recruit more terrorists intent on harming us.

Meanwhile, the prospect of war has markets completely spooked. Is this a narrow economic concern? Not in any way. Prosperity is an essential partner in civilization itself. It is the basis of leisure, charity, and a hopeful outlook on life. It is the means for conquering poverty at the lowest rung of society, the basis on which children and the elderly are cared for, the foundation for the cultivation of arts and learning. Crush an economy and you crush civilization.

It is natural that liberty and peace go together. Liberty makes it possible for people from different religious traditions and cultural backgrounds to find common ground. Commerce is the great mechanism that permits cooperation amidst radical diversity. It is also the basis for the working out of the brotherhood of man. Trade is the key to peace. It allows us to think and act both locally and globally.

What makes no sense is the belief that big government can be cultivated at home without the same government becoming belligerent abroad. What also makes no sense is the belief that big-government wars and belligerent foreign policies can be supported without creating the conditions that allow for the thriving of big government at home. The libertarian view that peace and freedom go together may be the outlier in current public opinion. But it is a consistent view, the only one compatible with a true concern for human rights, and for social and global well-being.

53.
IRAQ AND THE DEMOCRATIC EMPIRE
February 2006

As all students today know, Iraq is the country that the US invaded with the attempt to convert the state and the people from enemy to friend. On the face of it, this sounds rather implausible, of course. Good fences make good neighbors. Friendship and peace are not usually the result of insults, sanctions, invasions, bombings, killings, puppet governments, censorship, economic controls, and occupations. If this generation learns anything from this period, that would be a good start.

Earlier students thought of Iraq as the country that was forever being denounced by the Clinton administration and by Bush’s father when he was president. Why? Iraq, it seems, had some crazy notion that the US might attempt an invasion at some point in the future, and thus thought it had better prepare by spending money on its military. Its weapons program, however, was quickly dismantled under pressure from the UN.

Doubtful that Iraq had really given up the idea of creating a viable national defense, the US cobbled together extreme sanctions against the country, preventing it from trading with the world. The standard of living plummeted. Middle class merchants suffered. The poor died without the essentials of life. The child mortality rate soared. The head of the US State Department told a reporter on national television that even if US sanctions had resulted in 500,000 child deaths, they were “worth it.”

Jumping back earlier, the US had waged another war on Iraq. Bush Senior saw it as the war to end all aggressions, in this case an aggression of Iraq against its neighbor called Kuwait, a name that has been strangely absent from the news for the better part of 10 years. What was strange was how the US had given the green light to Saddam to aggress against its neighbor, with the US ambassador having told Saddam Hussein that the US took no position on its long-running border dispute with its former province.

Now, if we jump back still further and consider the Reagan years, students would remember a long and boring but truly bloody conflict between Iraq and Iran. It lasted eight years, between 1980 and 1988. The US favored Iraq in this war. Saddam was a friend of the US, a man on the payroll. The weapons he used in this war on Iran were provided to him courtesy of the US taxpayer, as weapons inspectors in the 1990s were reminded when they went hunting for WMDs. There is a famous photo of one of Reagan’s weapons emissaries, Donald Rumsfeld, smiling broadly as he shakes hands with Saddam.

The war did not fully wreck Iraq, though many of its sons died. The country was secular and liberal by regional standards. There were private schools, symphonies, universities, and a complex and developing economy. Women had rights. They could drive and have bank accounts. They wore Western clothing. You could get a drink at a bar or buy liquor and have it at home. Christians were tolerated. They could worship as they pleased, and send their children to Christian schools. The electricity stayed on. You could buy gasoline. It was an old-fashioned dictatorship but it was, in regional terms, prosperous.

The war between Iran and Iraq was inconclusive. But today, we’ve come full circle. Iraq is a wreck. The Wall Street Journal ran a story the other day that documented how the prevailing political influence today in Iraq is Iran’s ruling Shiite political party, which hopes to add another country to those ruled by Islamic law. So, from the vantage point of 25 years, it appears that the winner has finally been decided in the great Iran-Iraq war. The side that the US favored lost.

This is increasingly the pattern in the post-Cold War world. The US spends money, invades countries, sheds blood, and becomes ever more powerful at home and unpopular abroad. In the end, no matter how powerful its weapons or how determined its leaders, it loses. It loses because people resist empire. It loses for the same reasons that socialism and its central plans always fail. Large-scale attempts to force people into predetermined molds founder on the inability of the state to allocate resources rationally and to anticipate change, as well as the ubiquitous and pesky phenomenon called human volition. Mankind was not meant to live in cages.

Why did the US win wars in the past? Because it fought far poorer governments. Today it loses because it fights populations—people acting on their own, forming their own associations, using their brains to outwit bureaucrats, and cobbling together resources from underground markets. The market always outruns the planners for the same reason that guerrilla armies usually win over regular armies. Decentralized and spontaneous associations of dedicated individuals are smarter and wiser and more committed than centralized and planned bureaucrats who follow their rule books.

This is a point well elaborated by the Austrian School of economics. The full critique of war would involve an elaboration on the work of F.A. Hayek and Murray Rothbard and their modern disciples. Time and space does not permit, so let me quickly draw your attention to the writings of Mises on this point.

In 1919, he wrote a book called Nation, State, and Economy. One of the many great discoveries of Guido Hülsmann was that Mises’s original title is better translated in one word: Imperialism. It is a relentless attack on the idea of democratic empire, and an investigation of the role of the democratic state in foreign policy matters.

In the old world that was then passing, Mises wrote, imperial monarchs had ruled over large-scale, multiethnic, multilingual, and sometimes multireligious territories with an eye to carefully balancing the relationships among groups and avoiding policies that set group against group. It was the only policy that made their rule viable. If they failed to do this, their rule was threatened. Royal families specialized in linguistic proficiency. They adopted an air of fairness, and tended over time to liberalize economic structures in the interest of harmonizing groups.

Mises welcomed the age of democracy because he believed that political democracy was the closest analogy to applying a market principle to the sphere of civic life. But he made an important proviso. Under a democratic regime, empires would have to come to end. There could be no rule over multiethnic, multilingual, multireligious populations. Every group would need to be permitted self-determination. Democracy meant, in Mises’s view, the right of groups and even individuals to chose their own state. There could be no rule over a people or part of a people without their consent.

Mises then observed a dangerous paradox. The onset of the age of democracy was also the age of the rise of socialism. Socialism requires control, not only over economic structures but also over all of civic life, including religions. The most extreme form of socialism was totalitarianism. Mises saw that socialism and democracy were based on incompatible principles. If people are given true choice in regimes, they can also choose the rules under which they live. But socialism is predicated on the supposition that people can be permitted no choice. They must live under a plan as crafted by a dictator.

Mises saw that the attempt to wed socialism and dictatorship would lead to unparalleled calamity, which indeed it did because Mises’s pathway out of this problem was ignored. He mapped out his solution in his great book Liberalism, which appeared in 1927. Here he said that the foundation of liberty is private property. If property were protected from invasion, all else in politics follows. The state cannot be imperialistic because it cannot raise the funds necessary to fund adventures in foreign lands. On the other hand, he wrote, the more the state is given control over private property, the more it will be tempted toward imposing its rule via arms and war.

Therefore, he said, war and socialism are both part of the same ideological apparatus. They both presume the primacy of power over property. In the same way, peace and free enterprise are cut from the same cloth. They are the result of a society with a regime that respects the privacy, property, associations, and wishes of the population. The liberal society trades with foreign countries rather than waging war on them. It respects the free movement of peoples. It does not intervene in the religious affairs of people but rather adopts a rule of perfect tolerance.

I don’t need to tell you that this is not the kind of regime under which we live in the United States. The state is an empire, a democratic empire. It is aggressive internally and externally. Indeed, it is the richest and most powerful government on earth and in all of human history. Along with this has come a cultural change. The founding fathers loathed and feared war. They said that nothing ruins a country quicker than the warlike spirit. It brings bankruptcy, corruption, and tyranny. George Washington warned against war, and called for trade and friendship with all nations.

The ideology of war has infected our rulers. Mises explained it in his book Liberalism. This is an ideology against which rational argument does not work. If you say war leads to suffering, pain, and death, they will say: so be it. Instead, writes Mises, the warmongers claim that

it is through war and war alone that mankind is able to make progress. War is the father of all things, said a Greek philosopher, and thousands have repeated it after him. Man degenerates in time of peace. Only war awakens in him slumbering talents and powers and imbues him with sublime ideals. If war were to be abolished, mankind would decay into indolence and stagnation.

I submit to you that this is precisely the ideology that reigns in such publications as National Review. This is the view propounded from the lecterns at Republican gatherings. Speaker after speaker at conservative conferences echoes this very view. I’ve heard it again and again in private conversations among diehard Republicans.

This view that war is good for us is sheer fantasy, a dangerous and violent fit of utter irrationality. But it persists. It infects. It kills.

What view should replace the ideology of war? Mises again:

It starts from the premise that not war, but peace, is the father of all things. What alone enables mankind to advance and distinguishes man from the animals is social cooperation. It is labor alone that is productive: it creates wealth and therewith lays the outward foundations for the inward flowering of man. War only destroys; it cannot create. War, carnage, destruction, and devastation we have in common with the predatory beasts of the jungle; constructive labor is our distinctively human characteristic. The liberal abhors war, not, like the humanitarian, in spite of the fact that it has beneficial consequences, but because it has only harmful ones....

Victorious war is an evil even for the victor... peace is always better than war.

The US has already lost the war on Iraq. It should pull out. When? Now. What will happen? I don’t know. No one knows. What will people do when you let them out of their cages? What will slaves do when you free them? What happens when you free those who are imprisoned unjustly? I don’t know the answer to these questions, and no one does. I will observe that other countries count the day that the US soldiers left as the beginning of a bright future.

I think of Somalia, which—after a Bush Senior invasion—Clinton wisely left in a lurch after violence against American soldiers. Today warlords still compete for control of the capital. The CIA factbook contains a sentence that might have pleased Thomas Jefferson: Somalia has “no permanent national government.” But the rest of the country has moved on. It has prospered.

Here is more from the latest CIA factbook:

Despite the seeming anarchy, Somalia’s service sector has managed to survive and grow. Telecommunication firms provide wireless services in most major cities and offer the lowest international call rates on the continent. In the absence of a formal banking sector, money exchange services have sprouted throughout the country, handling between $500 million and $1 billion in remittances annually. Mogadishu’s main market offers a variety of goods from food to the newest electronic gadgets. Hotels continue to operate, and militias provide security.

The CIA chooses the word “despite” the seeming anarchy. I would like to replace that with “because” of the seeming anarchy.

If the US leaves Iraq, a big cost will be borne by Americans. We have lost freedoms and rights. The military and spying sector has grown enormously. Big government abroad is incompatible with small government at home. To the extent we cheer war, we are cheering domestic socialism and our own eventual destruction as a civilization.

When you consider the full range of social, economic, and international planning on which it has embarked, you can know in advance that staying cannot work. Government is not God, nor are the men who run it impeccable or infallible, nor do they have a direct pipeline to the Almighty. Even if they were angels, they couldn’t do it. The method they have chosen to bring about security and order is destined toward failure. But they are not angels. Their power has corrupted them, and the more absolute the power they gain, the more damage they create.

Let me state plainly too that we should end the entire “War on Terrorism” because it cannot work and it is killing us instead of them. The pool of potential terrorists is unlimited, and it has been unleashed by the very means the state has employed. Bin Laden is still on the loose, and everyone knows that there are hundreds or thousands of additional Bin Ladens out there.

But can’t the state just kill more, employ ever more violence, perhaps even terrify the enemy into passivity? A bracing comment from Israeli military historian Martin Van Creveld: “The Americans in Vietnam tried it. They killed between two-and-a-half and three million Vietnamese. I don’t see that it helped them much.” Without admitting defeat, the Americans finally pulled out of Vietnam, which today has a thriving stock market.

Can the US just back out of its War on Terror? Wouldn’t that mean surrender? It would mean that the state surrenders its role, but not that everyone else does. Had the airlines been in charge of their own security, 9-11 would not have happened. In the same way that the free market provides for all our material needs, it can provide our security needs as well.

The War on Terror is impossible, not in the sense that it cannot cause immense amounts of bloodshed and destruction and loss of liberty, but in the sense that it cannot finally achieve what it is supposed to achieve, and will only end in creating more of the same conditions that led to its declaration in the first place.

In other words, it is a typical government program, costly and unworkable, like socialism, like the War on Poverty, like the War on Drugs, like every other attempt by the government to shape reality according to its own designs. You can see the results in the fatality figures. You and I paid for those flags on the caskets of the soldiers. We paid for the war that cost them their lives. We paid for the cheaper coffins of the far more numerous Iraqi dead. We didn’t do it voluntarily. The state forced us to do so, just as it is forcing Iraq to endure a dreadful occupation.

What is in the past is gone, a cost that is sunk and never to be regained. But we can control the future. Now is the time to end this ghastly undertaking in Iraq.

In American political culture, which is dominated by the competitive interest groups we call the two main political parties and their ideological compatriots, we are asked to choose between two false alternatives.

In the first, as that offered by the left and the Democrats, we are asked to think of the state as an expansive Good Samaritan who clothes, feeds, and heals people at home and abroad. They completely fail to notice that this Samaritan ends up not helping people but enslaving its clients and leaving the rest of us like the robbery victim on the street.

In the second, as offered by the right and the Republicans, we are asked to think of the state as an expansive Solomon with all power to right wrong and bring justice and faith to all peoples at home and abroad. They completely fail to notice that Solomon ends up behaving more like Caesar Augustus and his successors, sending all the world to be counted and taxed and then plotting to kill any competitive source of authority.

Are you independent minded? Reject these two false alternatives. Do you love freedom? Embrace peace. Do you love peace? Embrace private property. Do you love and defend civilization? Defend and protect it against all uses of Power, the evil against which we must proceed ever more boldly.

54.
EVEN CONSERVATIVES NEED THE ANTIWAR MOVEMENT
October 2001

American citizens who have doubts—any doubts—about the war have been subjected to an amazing barrage of hate and threats in recent days. But if you believe the polls that show 90 percent-plus support for this war, it seems oddly disproportionate to whip up hysteria against a handful of doubters.

Rather than defend the antiwar position itself, I want to make a different argument. If you believe in freedom at all, you should hope that there are at least some doubters and protesters, regardless of the merit of their case. Even if you think this war is a great and necessary thing to teach the terrorists a lesson in American resolve, the preservation of liberty at home is also an important value.

The existence of an opposition movement is evidence that some restraints on government still exist. The government, which is always looking for reasons to increase its power, needs to know that there will always be an opposition.

The view that wartime requires complete unanimity of public opinion is not an American one—it is a position more characteristic of Islamic or other totalitarian states, where differences of opinion are regarded as a threat to public order, and where the leadership demands 100 percent approval from the people. These are also states where the head of government requires that he be treated like a deity, that there be no questioning of his edicts, that he govern with unquestioned power.

This is the very definition of despotism. Unpopular government is dangerous enough; popular government far more so. When public officials believe that there are no limits to their power, no doubters about their pronouncements, no cynics who question their motives, they are capable of gross abuses. This is true both in wartime and peacetime. The most beloved governments are most prone to become the most abusive.

If you think that such despotism is not possible in the United States, you have not understood the American founding. Thomas Jefferson taught that American liberty depends on citizen willingness to be skeptical toward the claims of the central government. “Confidence is everywhere the parent of despotism,” he wrote in his draft of the Kentucky Resolves.

Free government is founded in jealousy, and not in confidence. It is jealousy and not confidence which prescribes limited constitutions, to bind down those whom we are obliged to trust with power.

“In questions of power,” he concluded, “let no more be heard of confidence in man, but bind him down from mischief by the chains of the Constitution.”

Wartime means that government is unleashing weapons of mass destruction against other human beings and their property. It is the most terrifying of all the powers of government. The war power, which means the power over life and death, can create in those who use it a feeling of omnipotence, the belief that they have absolute power, which gives rise to absolute corruption, as Lord Acton observed. This is true whether the war actions are popular or not.

Now, add to that reality an additional element: The population that supports the war power with its taxes is consumed in nationalistic fervor—to the point that nobody believes that government is capable of making a bad choice or of abusing its power. That is a sure prescription for abuse, and not only in wartime—the government enjoys this uncritical attitude, and will demand it in peacetime as well. Typically, in these cases, the abuse of peoples’ rights is not decried but celebrated.

We have seen this happen in American history. Writing in the Wall Street Journal, Jay Winik reminds us that wartime abuse of presidential power has a long history. Lincoln imprisoned antiwar activists, including newspaper editors, judges and attorneys, and otherwise suspended all civil liberties. Wilson made it a crime to voice dissent on any aspect of the war, including the way it was financed. The jails were overrun with independent-minded people. Franklin Roosevelt did the same, and even set up internment camps for American citizens of Japanese descent.

Incredibly, even ominously, Winik writes about this in defense of the emergency powers that wartime provides. This is why we need to trade liberty for security, he says, and he implies that the Bush administration needs to go much further to meet the (low) standards set by his predecessors.

Winik’s ultimate defense, however, involves a claim that is just plain wrong: “despite these previous and numerous extreme measures,” writes Winik,

there was little long-term or corrosive effect on society after the security threat had subsided. When the crisis ended, normalcy returned, and so too did civil liberties, invariably stronger than before.

It’s true that the despotism subsided after the wars ended, if only because government has a difficult time trying to maintain the level of public support it enjoys during wartime once peace has arrived. But does government really return to normalcy?

In fact, what changes is our definition of normalcy. In no case after a war did the government return to its prewar size. The postwar government is always bigger, more intrusive, more draconian, more expensive, than the prewar government. It feels smaller because the government is no longer arresting dissidents. But our standard of what constitutes freedom and despotism changes during wartime. Nothing has been as corrosive of American liberty as war.

Wartime tyranny also creates an historical precedent for future violations of liberty. Every president who desires more power cites his predecessors who enjoyed similar power, just as the bloody legacies of FDR, Wilson, and Lincoln are being invoked on behalf of Bush today (witness Winik’s own article).

Jefferson said in his first inaugural address:

If there be any among us who would wish to dissolve this Union or to change its republican form, let them stand undisturbed as monuments of the safety with which error of opinion may be tolerated where reason is left free to combat it.

If you hate the antiwar movement and want to see it suppressed, you are no friend to liberty, even in peacetime.

55.
THE PAULIAN FOREIGN POLICY DOCTRINE

[Introduction to Ron Paul, A Foreign Policy of Freedom, Lake Jackson, Texas: The Foundation for Rational Economics and Education, 2007.]

Ron Paul has always believed that foreign and domestic policy should be conducted according to the same principles. Government should be restrained from intervening at home or abroad because its actions fail to achieve their stated aims, create more harm than good, shrink the liberty of the people, and violate rights.

Does that proposition seem radical? Outlandish or far-flung? Once you hear it stated, it makes perfect sense that there is no sharp distinction between the principles of domestic and foreign policy. They are part of the same analytical fabric. What would be inconsistent would be to favor activist government at home but restraint abroad, or the reverse: restraint at home and activism abroad. Government unleashed behaves in its own interests, and will not restrict itself in any area of life. It must be curbed in all areas of life lest freedom suffer.

If you recognize the line of thinking in this set of beliefs, it might be because you have read the Federalist Papers, the writings of Thomas Jefferson or George Washington or James Madison, or examined the philosophical origins of the American Revolution. Or you might have followed the debates that took place in the presidential election of 1800, in which this view emerged triumphant. Or perhaps you read the writings of the free traders prior to the Civil War, or the opponents of the War on Spain, or those who warned of entering World War I.

Or perhaps you have read the speeches and books against FDR’s New Deal: the same group warned of the devastating consequences of World War II. Or maybe, in more recent history, you understood the animating principles behind the Republican takeover of Congress in 1994: a generation had turned away from all forms of foreign and domestic “nation building.”

Not only does this Paulian view have a precedent in American history; it sums up the very core of what is distinctive about the American contribution to political ideas. The proposition was and is that people are better able to manage their lives than government can manage them. Under conditions of liberty, the result is prosperity and orderly civilization. Under government control, the result is relative poverty and unpredictable chaos. The proof is in the news every day.

How unusual, how incredibly strange, that Ron Paul, who has stood for these principles his entire public life, is criticized by some as a radical, outside the mainstream, and influenced by experimental ideas that are marginal at best. And why is he treated this way? Because he takes the ideas of Washington and Jefferson seriously, just as seriously as he takes the idea of freedom itself, and he does so in times when faith in Leviathan remains the dominant political ideology.

Ideology is such a powerful force that it has propped up policy inconsistency for more than a century. The left has a massive agenda for the state at home, and yet complains bitterly, with shock and dismay, that the same tools are used to start wars and build imperial structures abroad. The right claims to want to restrain government at home (at least in some ways) while whooping it up for war and global reconstruction abroad.

It doesn’t take a game-theory genius to predict how this conflict works itself out in the long run. The left and the right agree to disagree on intellectual grounds but otherwise engage in a dangerous quid pro quo. They turn a blind eye to the government they don’t like so long as they get the government they do like.

It’s one thing for the left to grudgingly support international intervention. It makes some sense for a group that believes that government is omniscient enough to bring about fairness, justice, and equality at home to do the same for people abroad. In fact, I’ve never been able to make much sense out of left-wing antiwar activism, simply because it cuts so much against the idea of socialism, which itself can be summed up as perpetual war on the liberty and property of the people.

What strikes me as ridiculous is the right-wing view that the same government that is incompetent and dangerous domestically—at least in economic and social affairs—has some sort of Midas touch internationally such that it can bring freedom, democracy, and justice to any land its troops deign to invade. Not that the right wing is principled enough to pursue its domestic views, but I’m speaking here of its campaign rhetoric and higher-level critique of government that you find in their periodicals and books. The precise critique of government that they offer for the welfare state and regulatory measures—that they are expensive, counterproductive, and hobble human energies—applies many times over to international interventions.

But the right always seems to have an excuse for its inconsistency. In the early ’50s, many on the right said that the usual principle of nonintervention had to give way to the fight against communism because this was a uniquely evil threat facing the world. We have to put up with a “totalitarian bureaucracy” within our shores (words used by W.F. Buckley) for the duration in order to beat back the great threat abroad. And so Leviathan grew and grew, and never more than under Republican presidents. Then one day, communism went away, the regimes having collapsed from self-imposed deprivation and ideological change.

A few years went by after 1990 when the right was inching toward a Paulian consistency. Then 9-11 happened, and the great excuse for Leviathan again entered the picture. Never mind that, as Congressman Paul pointed out, the crime of 9-11 was motivated by retribution against 10 years of killer US sanctions against Iraq, US troops on Muslim holy lands, and US subsidies for Palestinian occupation. No, the American Right bought into the same farce that led them to support the Cold War: Islamic fanaticism is a unique evil unlike anything we’ve ever seen, so we have to put up with Leviathan (again!) for the duration.

Well, Ron Paul didn’t buy into it. He is unique in this respect, and this is especially notable since he has been under pressure from his own party at a time when his party has ruled the executive, judicial, and legislative branches. He stuck by his principles, and not merely as a pious gesture. His critique of the post 9-11 warfare state has been spot-on in speech after speech. He foresaw the failure of the US invasion of Afghanistan. He never believed the nonsense about how US bombs would transform Iraq into a modern democracy. He never went along with the propaganda lies about weapons of mass destruction. Nowadays, we often hear politicians say that they have changed their minds on the Iraq War and that if they had known then what they know now, they never would have gone along. Well, hindsight is child’s play in politics. What takes guts and insight is the ability to spot a hoax even as it is being perpetrated. In any case, they have no excuse for not knowing: Ron Paul told them!

The freedom to trade internationally is an essential principle. It means that consumers should not be penalized for buying from anyone, or selling to anyone, regardless of their residence. Nor should domestic suppliers be granted anything like a monopoly or subsidized treatment. Nor should trade be used as a weapon in the form of sanctions. Ron Paul has upheld these principles as well, which makes him an old-fashioned liberal in the manner of Cobden and Bright and the American Southern tradition. He has also rejected the mistake of many free traders who believe that a military arm is necessary to back the invisible hand of the marketplace. For Ron Paul, freedom is all of a piece.

Ron Paul’s singular voice on foreign affairs has done so much to keep the flame of a consistent liberty burning in times when it might otherwise have been extinguished. He has drawn public attention to the ideas of the founders. He has alerted people to the dangers of empire. He has linked domestic and foreign affairs through libertarian analytics, even when others have been bamboozled by the lies or too intimidated to contradict them. He has told the truth, always. For this, every American, every citizen of the world, is deeply in his debt. In fact, I’m willing to predict that a hundred years from now and more, when all the current office holders are all but forgotten, Ron Paul’s name will be remembered as a bright light in dark times.

We can’t but be deeply grateful that Ron Paul’s prophetic words have been collected in this book. May it be widely distributed. May its lessons be absorbed by this and future generations. May this treatise stand as an example of how to fight for what is right even when everyone else is silent. May it always be regarded as proof that there were men of courage alive in the first decade of the third millennium. May public and intellectual opinion someday rise to its level of intellectual sophistication and moral valor.