$theTitle=wp_title(" - ", false); if($theTitle != "") { ?>
This old essay by columnist Joe Sobran is remarkably close to my own view of government, as is the process by which he arrived at his conclusions (I added the bold below).
…I became a philosophical conservative, with a strong libertarian streak. I believed in government, but it had to be “limited” government — confined to a few legitimate purposes, such as defense abroad and policing at home. These functions, and hardly any others, I accepted, under the influence of writers like Ayn Rand and Henry Hazlitt, whose books I read in my college years.
During the Reagan years, which I expected to find exciting, I found myself bored to death by supply-side economics, enterprise zones, “privatizing” welfare programs, and similar principle-dodging gimmickry. I failed to see that “movement” conservatives were less interested in principles than in Republican victories….
Now I began to be critical of the U.S. Government, though not very. I saw that the welfare state, chiefly the legacy of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, violated the principles of limited government and would eventually have to go. But I agreed with other conservatives that in the meantime the urgent global threat of Communism had to be stopped. Since I viewed “defense” as one of the proper tasks of government, I thought of the Cold War as a necessity, the overhead, so to speak, of freedom. If the Soviet threat ever ceased (the prospect seemed remote), we could afford to slash the military budget and get back to the job of dismantling the welfare state….
Gradually I came to see that the conservative challenge to liberalism’s jurisprudence of “loose construction” was far too narrow. Nearly everything liberals wanted the Federal Government to do was unconstitutional. The key to it all, I thought, was the Tenth Amendment, which forbids the Federal Government to exercise any powers not specifically assigned to it in the Constitution. But the Tenth Amendment had been comatose since the New Deal, when Roosevelt’s Court virtually excised it….
In a way I had transferred my patriotism from America as it then was to America as it had been when it still honored the Constitution. And when had it crossed the line? At first I thought the great corruption had occurred when Franklin Roosevelt subverted the Federal judiciary; later I came to see that the decisive event had been the Civil War, which had effectively destroyed the right of the states to secede from the Union. But this was very much a minority view among conservatives, particularly at National Review, where I was the only one who held it….
In the late 1980s I began mixing with Rothbardian libertarians — they called themselves by the unprepossessing label “anarcho-capitalists” — and even met Rothbard himself. They were a brilliant, combative lot, full of challenging ideas and surprising arguments. Rothbard himself combined a profound theoretical intelligence with a deep knowledge of history. His magnum opus, Man, Economy, and State, had received the most unqualified praise of the usually reserved Henry Hazlitt — in National Review!
Murray’s view of politics was shockingly blunt: the state was nothing but a criminal gang writ large. Much as I agreed with him in general, and fascinating though I found his arguments, I resisted this conclusion. I still wanted to believe in constitutional government.
Murray would have none of this. He insisted that the Philadelphia convention at which the Constitution had been drafted was nothing but a “coup d’etat,” centralizing power and destroying the far more tolerable arrangements of the Articles of Confederation. This was a direct denial of everything I’d been taught. I’d never heard anyone suggest that the Articles had been preferable to the Constitution! But Murray didn’t care what anyone thought — or what everyone thought. (He’d been too radical for Ayn Rand.)
Murray died a few years ago without quite having made an anarchist of me. It was left to his brilliant disciple, Hans-Hermann Hoppe, to finish my conversion. Hans argued that no constitution could restrain the state. Once its monopoly of force was granted legitimacy, constitutional limits became mere fictions it could disregard; nobody could have the legal standing to enforce those limits. The state itself would decide, by force, what the constitution “meant,” steadily ruling in its own favor and increasing its own power. This was true a priori, and American history bore it out.
What if the Federal Government grossly violated the Constitution? Could states withdraw from the Union? Lincoln said no…. The United States, plural, were really a single enormous state, as witness the new habit of speaking of “it” rather than “them.”
So the people are bound to obey the government even when the rulers betray their oath to uphold the Constitution. The door to escape is barred. Lincoln in effect claimed that it is not our rights but the state that is “unalienable.” And he made it stick by force of arms. No transgression of the Constitution can impair the Union’s inherited legitimacy. Once established on specific and limited terms, the U.S. Government is forever, even if it refuses to abide by those terms.
As Hoppe argues, this is the flaw in thinking the state can be controlled by a constitution. Once granted, state power naturally becomes absolute. Obedience is a one-way street. Notionally, “We the People” create a government and specify the powers it is allowed to exercise over us; our rulers swear before God that they will respect the limits we impose on them; but when they trample down those limits, our duty to obey them remains.
We may challenge the government in the courts… its courts.
…Franklin Roosevelt and his Supreme Court interpreted the Commerce Clause so broadly as to authorize virtually any Federal claim, and the Tenth Amendment so narrowly as to deprive it of any inhibiting force. Today these heresies are so firmly entrenched that Congress rarely even asks itself whether a proposed law is authorized or forbidden by the Constitution.
In short, the U.S. Constitution is a dead letter. It was mortally wounded in 1865. The corpse can’t be revived…
Other things have helped change my mind. R.J. Rummel of the University of Hawaii calculates that in the twentieth century alone, states murdered about 162,000,000 million of their own subjects. This figure doesn’t include the tens of millions of foreigners they killed in war. How, then, can we speak of states “protecting” their people? …As for warfare, Paul Fussell’s book Wartime portrays battle with such horrifying vividness that, although this wasn’t its intention, I came to doubt whether any war could be justified….
…For most people, anarchy is a disturbing word, suggesting chaos, violence, antinomianism — things they hope the state can control or prevent. The term state, despite its bloody history, doesn’t disturb them. Yet it’s the state that is truly chaotic, because it means the rule of the strong and cunning. They imagine that anarchy would naturally terminate in the rule of thugs. But mere thugs can’t assert a plausible right to rule. Only the state, with its propaganda apparatus, can do that. This is what legitimacy means. Anarchists obviously need a more seductive label.
“But what would you replace the state with?” The question reveals an inability to imagine human society without the state. Yet it would seem that an institution that can take 200,000,000 lives within a century hardly needs to be “replaced.”
-
Anarchy naturally gives rise to capitalism, as people save and invest the fruits of their labor. Unfortunately, and without much lag, it also seems to give rise to states. Cunning individuals, as well as lazy, short-sighted or naive ones all desire to formalize the use of force to control capital.
To read some of Rothbard’s work, click here.
For Hoppe, here.
seaterk
January 20th, 2010 at 4:36 pm
I would agree with you up to the point of advocating anarchy, mainly because I don’t believe that anarchy is a stable state. Even in Somalia there really isn’t anarchy but rather a state that has devolved into several mini-tribally based states. True anarchy can’t exist for very long because there’s always some a**hole that wants to be king and has the support/resources to impose his will. The best we can hope for is to keep our head down and try to live whatever sort of life we can with as little state intervention as possible. Of course a well armed populous, while not an effective answer to a modern army, can keep the king nervous enough that he doesn’t push the limits too hard.
Mike
January 20th, 2010 at 5:26 pm
Yes, that is the problem — anarchy doesn’t last, nor does good government. Human nature just doesn’t allow it, and Machiavellians tend to find success in the end.
I agree also that the best we as individuals can do is to structure our lives for minimal involvement with the state, and to just learn to live with those predations that are inevitable. If your goal is a harmonious and healthy life, you can’t fight history too hard. Writing anonymously is about all I’m willing to do — that and writing checks to Ron Paul and the Mises Institute.
charles
January 20th, 2010 at 9:19 pm
Most of the time, I agree with you that fighting history is a lost cause (like buying out of the money puts !). Nevertheless, there are some times where it is best to go all in and “pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes, and our sacred Honor” for the sake of a constitution that will, at least temporarily, make life better. Most freemen of today are reaping the reward of a wild bet taken more than 200 years ago.
Mike
January 21st, 2010 at 5:06 am
Yes, but by ‘76 there was a huge movement with very good odds, and I’d like to think that I’d have given it my all. But remember, the declaration didn’t come out of nowhere. There was a lot of editorializing and pamphletering to build the groundswell for the revolution. Eventually, the country was ready - today, I don’t see it - too much D vs R and a mentality of dependence.
Aki_Izayoi
January 21st, 2010 at 6:18 am
Mike, I think another reason why anarchy is an impossibility because it is impossible to maintain “societies” with “decent” living standards that have too few people to maintain it. The “wet dreams” of Hayek about “spontaneous order” are not possible when a degree of organization that involves a number of people above “Dunbar’s number” is involved. “Dunbar’s number” refers to the number of people that an individual can maintain stable social relationships with; one possible reason for the rapid expansion of cognitive capacity from the schism of chimpanzees and the future descendants of Homo sapiens (using cranial capacity as a proxy for cognitive capacity H. sapiens has a cranial capacity of around 1200-1400 cc while Australopithecus afarensis around 400 cc about 3.5 million years ago ). Dunbar’s number is estimated to be about 150 for humans while chimpanzees live in groups of about 50, and presumably above that number, an exogenous force such as the state is needed to organize a group of people above that number. In such as case, “society” is a meaningful concept contrary to Margaret Thatcher’s aphorism that there is not such thing as society, only individuals and families.
I am not presenting these ideas as unequivocal fact, but offering them as tentative hypotheses. If someone has a better explanation (or an equally appealing alternative hypothesis) for why human cranial capacity expanded, then I am open to such suggestions.
I am going to repost this about my criticism against libertarianism. To say concisely, libertarianism does not have much to offer: it does not offer an infeasible utopian vision, nor does it even attempt to solve any real problems and alleviate human suffering in a pragmatic fashion. For example, look as Mish’s blog: a major theme is that he is against “high wage employment” because it does not reflect its “value” in the free market. Since most people deem low wages, foreign competition, and unemployment as problems, Mish’s libertarian ethos would not appeal to most people nor does it solve any real problems on a time horizon where most people would see a significant benefit.
Mike
January 21st, 2010 at 6:41 am
So are you saying that without the use of force, organizations with greater than 150 people are unstable, simply because all of the individuals do not know one another?
If that what you are saying, I have to say that I completely disagree. What about large companies? Just voluntary action there. And because society is hierarchical, we don’t all need to know one another - the management of an auto company doesn’t need a relationship with the laborers in a steel company that supplies them, just with its management.
I do agree with you here, however: “I do not see how a “libertarian” government is sustainable even if we do fervently agree to the ends of libertarianism; it is inevitable that it would be hijacked by special interests for personal gain by using their market power (even if acquired justly in a Nozickian way) to convert their economic power into political power.”
That is always the problem with any government — economic power or the power of numbers leads to unjust use of the government’s monopoly on force.
I do think that a constitutional republic based on non-intervention and self-responsibility is the best government. Charles is right — though it was never perfect and has been under attack from the start, the US truly is one of history’s success stories.
Graphite
January 21st, 2010 at 6:18 pm
it does not offer an infeasible utopian vision, nor does it even attempt to solve any real problems and alleviate human suffering in a pragmatic fashion
Libertarianism and anarchism are more about the recognition that political engineering of “pragmatic” solutions to alleviate human suffering is just what you mentioned: a utopian vision. Unfortunately other ideologies are given WAY too much credit for simply “attempting” this without actually achieving results.
Whether particular ideas “appeal” to vast numbers of people or not is not very interesting to me. I’m more interested in whether the ideas are true and accord with principles of justice, human dignity, and individual rights.
As far as time horizons go, we are living in Keynes’ disastrous “long run” which the refusal to consider long-term consequences eventually produces. And I don’t agree that people will always and inevitably gravitate to ideologies promising short-term comfort. If no one had ever been willing to suffer short-term pain for the sake of long-term benefit, human beings would still be scraping out a meager existence on the African savanna.
Aki_Izayoi
January 21st, 2010 at 8:46 pm
I said one reason why libertarianism isn’t appealing because it does not offer utopian visions. One example is in Catholicism where those who died in Christ without mortal sin experience the beatific vision. I am not liking utopian fantasies with reality, but sometimes these fantasies can be appealing and motivate people; regarding the example of Catholicism, people go to Mass and perform penance for their sins to shorten their duration in purgatory/avoid hell to enjoy the beatific vision. Another example is my past attraction to transhumanism, but I became somewhat discouraged when I came to realize that Kurzweil’s predictions are extremely optimistic, unrealistic, and biased by his extraordinary desire to defeat death (without religion). Furthermore, I became very pessimistic about the future progression of technological progress; as some may recall, I cited Peter Thiel’s thesis that the credit crisis is actually a technology crisis on this blog (and Half Sigma’s blog). These criticism does not assail libertarianism’s soundness as moral/political philosophy, but it merely notes its lack of allure.
My second criticism of libertarianism is still valid and hasn’t been confuted to my satisfaction. Although criticism can apply to applied to other political philosophies too so it isn’t specific to libertarianism; for instance, I (and “we” would also be an appropriate pronoun) doubt that the political parties in the US are even aware of our “problems” and that they have the proper incentives or capabilities to address them.
I use a number of pseudonyms on blogs and I never enthusiastically endorse “Keynesianism” although I do believe in state interventionism. Regarding time horizons, many people are not capable of having a long term time horizon even for events constrained to the near future. The personal benefits for long term thinking are naturally constrained to a person’s expected lifetime although this can be extended to the lifetime of their first or second generation posterity since most people are interested in passing on their genes to the next generation. I cited the “Maes-Garreau Law” before when discussing optimism and time horizons. To rephrase this objection using some hyperbole: does the libertarianism offer profoundly exceptional event like a “technological singularity” within our lifetimes or just lower taxes?
I doubt our moral philosophies are even congruent since my objections are delivered from a consequentialist utilitarian perspective while the majority of commentors and Mike seem to be natural rights libertarians.
“I became a philosophical conservative, with a strong libertarian streak.”
As for me, I run a social democratic main deck with a paleoconservative (I am sympathetic to paleocons such as Paul Craig Roberts, Pat Buchanan, and Kevin MacDonald) side deck
Bridget
January 21st, 2010 at 9:39 pm
EEEK!!! You can get a good look at anarchy up close and personal in Haiti right now. Thanks, but no thanks.