State Interferance

State Interferance by William Gramn Sumner

[Excerpted from "War and other Essays"]

I desire, in this paper, to give an explanation and justification of extreme prejudice against State interference, and I wish to begin with a statement from history of the effect upon the individual of various forms of the State.

It appears, from the best evidence we possess, according to the most reasonable interpretation which has been given to it, that the internal organization of society owes its cohesion and intensity to the necessity of meeting pressure from without. A band of persons, bound by ties of neighborhood or kin, clung together in order to maintain their common interests against a similar band of their neighbors. The social bond and the common interest were at war with individual interests. They exerted coercive power to crush individualism, to produce uni-fortuity, to proscribe dissent, to make private judgment a social offense, and to exercise drill and discipline.

In the Roman State the internal discipline gave victory in contests with neighbors. Each member of the Roman community was carried up by the success of the body of which he was a member to the position of a world-conqueror. Then the Roman community split up into factions to quarrel for the spoils of the world, until the only escape from chronic civil war and anarchy was a one-man power, which, however, proved only a mode of disintegration and decay, not a cure for it. It has often been remarked with astonishment how lightly men and women of rank at Rome in the first century of our era held their lives. They seem to have been ready to open their veins at a moment's notice, and to quit life upon trivial occasion. If we can realize what life must have been in such a State we can, perhaps, understand this. The Emperor was the State. He was a mortal who had been freed from all care for the rights of others, and his own passions had all been set free. Any man or woman in the civilized world was at the mercy of his caprices. Anyone who was great enough to attract his attention, especially by the possession of anything which mortals covet, held his life at the utmost peril. Since the Empire was the world, there was no escape save to get out of the world. Many seemed to hold escape cheap at that price.

At first under the Empire the obscure people were safe. They probably had little to complain of, and found the Empire gay and beneficent; but it gradually and steadily absorbed every rank and interest into its pitiless organization. At last industry and commerce as well as all civil and social duties took the form of State functions. The ideal which some of our modern social philosophers are preaching was realized. The State was an ethical person, in the strictest sense of the word, when it was one man and when every duty and interest of life was construed towards him. All relations were regulated according to the ethics of the time, which is, of course, all that ethical regulation ever can amount to. Every duty of life took the form and name of an “obse-quium”; that is, of a function in the State organism.

Now the most important relation of the citizen to the State is that of a soldier, and the next is that of a taxpayer, and when the former loses importance the latter becomes the chief. Accordingly the obsequia of the citizens in the later centuries were regulated in such a way that the citizen might contribute most to the fiscus. He was not only made part of a machine, but it was a tax-paying machine, and all his hopes, rights, interests, and human capabilities were merged in this purpose of his existence. Slavery, as we ordinarily understand the term, died out, but it gave way to a servitude of each to all, when each was locked tight in an immense and artificial organization of society. Such must ever be the effect of merging industry in the State. Every attempt of the Roman handicraftsmen to better themselves was a breach of the peace; disobedience was rebellion; resistance was treason; running away was desertion.

Here, then, we have a long history, in which the State power first served the national interest in contest with outside powers, and then itself became a burden and drew all the life out of the subject population.

In the Middle Ages a society which had been resolved into its simple elements had to re-form. The feudal form was imposed upon it by the conditions and elements of the case. It was as impossible for a man to stand alone as it had been on the hunting or pastoral stage of life or on the lower organizations of civilization. There was once more necessity to yield personal liberty in order to get protection against plunder from others, and in order to obtain this protection it was necessary to get into a group and to conform to its organization. Here again the same difficulty soon presented itself. Protection against outside aggression was won, but the protecting power itself became a plunderer.

This oppression brought about guild and other organizations for mutual defense. Sometimes these organizations themselves won civil power; sometimes they were under some political sovereign, but possessed its sanction. The system which grew up was one of complete regulation and control. The guilds were regulated in every function and right. The masters, journeymen, and apprentices were regulated in their relations and in all their rights and duties. The work of supplying a certain community with any of the necessaries of life was regarded as a privilege and was monopolized by a certain number. The mediaeval system, however, did not allow this monopoly to be exploited at the expense of consumers, according to the good will of the holders of it. The sovereign interfered constantly, and at all points, wherever its intervention was asked for. It fixed prices, but it also fixed wages, regulated kinds and prices of raw materials, prescribed the relation of one trade to another, forbade touting, advertising, rivalry; regulated buying and selling by merchants; protected consumers by inspection; limited importations, but might force production and force sales.

Here was plainly a complete system, which had a rational motive and a logical method. The object was to keep all the organs of society in their accepted relations to each other and to preserve all in activity in the measure of the social needs. The plan failed entirely. It was an impossible undertaking, even on the narrow arena of a medimval city. The ordinances of an authority which stood ready to interfere at any time and in any way were necessarily inconsistent and contradictory. Its effect upon those who could not get into the system — that is, upon the vagabondage of the period — has never, so far as I know, been studied carefully, although that is the place to look for its most distinct social effect. The most interesting fact about it, however, ig that the privilege of one age became the bondage of the next and that the organization which had grown up for the mutual defense of the artisans lost its original purpose and became a barrier to the rise of the artisan class. The organization was a fetter on individual enterprise and success.

The fact should not be overlooked here that, if we are to have the mediaeval system of regulation revived, we want it altogether. That system was not, in intention, unjust. According to its light it aimed at the welfare of all. It was not its motive to give privileges, but a system of partial interference is sure to be a system of favoritism and injustice. It is a system of charters to some to plunder others. A mediaeval sovereign would never interfere with railroads on behalf of shippers and stop there. He would fix the interest on bonds and other fixed charges. He would, upon appeal, regulate the wages of employees. He would fix the price of coal and other supplies. He would never admit that he was the guardian of one interest more than another, and he would interfere over and over again as often as stockholders, bondholders, employees, shippers, etc., could persuade him that they had a grievance. He would do mischief over and Over again but he would not do intentional injustice.

After the mediaeval system broke up and the great modern States formed, the royal power became the representative and champion of national interests in modern Europe, and it established itself in approximately absolute power by; the fact that the interest of the nations to maintain themselves in the rivalry of States seemed the paramount interest. Within a few months we have seen modern Germany discard every other interest in order to respond to the supposed necessity of military defense. Not very long ago, in our Civil War, we refused to take account of anything else until the military task was accomplished.

In all these cases the fact appears that the interest of the individual and the social interest have been at war with each other, while, again, the interests of the individual in and through the society of which he is a member are inseparable from those of the society. Such are the two aspects of the relation of the unit and the whole which go to make the life of the race. The individual has an interest to develop all the personal elements there are in him. He wants to live himself out. He does not want to be planed down to a type or pattern. It is the interest of society that all the original powers it contains should be brought out to their full value. But the social movement is coercive and uniformitarian. Organization and discipline are essential to effective common action, and they crush out individual enterprise and personal variety. There is only one klud of cooperation which escapes this evil, and that is cooperation which is voluntary and automatic, under common impulses and natural laws. State control, however, is always necessary for national action in the family of nations and to prevent plunder by others, and men have never yet succeeded in getting it without falling under the necessity of submitting to plunder at home from those on whom they rely for defense abroad.

Now, at the height of our civilization and with the best light that we can bring to bear on our social relations, the problem is: Can we get from the State security for individuals to pursue happiness in and under it, and yet not have the State itself become a new burden and hindrance only a little better than the evil which it wards off?

It is only in the most recent times, and in such measure as the exigencies of external defense have been diminished by the partial abandonment of motives of plunder and conquest, that there has been a chance for individualism to grow. In the latest times the struggle for a relaxation of political bonds on behalf of individual liberty has taken the form of breaking the royal power and forcing the king to take his hands off. Liberty has hardly yet come to be popularly understood as anything else but republicanism or anti-royalty.

The United States, starting on a new continent, with full chance to select the old-world traditions which they would adopt, have become the representatives and champions in modern times of all the principles of individualism and personal liberty. We have had no neighbors to fear. We have had no necessity for stringent State discipline. Each one of us has been able to pursue happiness in his own way, unhindered by the demands of a State which would have worn out our energies by expenditure simply in order to maintain the State. The State has existed of itself. The one great exception, the Civil War, only illustrates the point more completely per contra. The old Jeffersonian party rose to power and held it, because it conformed to the genius of the country and bore along the true destinies of a nation situated as this one was. It is the glory of the United States, and its calling in history, that it shows what the power of personal liberty is — what self-reliance, energy, enterprise, hard sense men can develop when they have room and liberty and when they are emancipated from the burden of traditions and faiths which are nothing but the accumulated follies and blunders of a hundred generations of “statesmen.”

It is, therefore, the highest product of political institutions so far that they have come to a point where, under favorable circumstances, individualism is, under their protection, to some extent possible. If political institutions can give security for the pursuit of happiness by each individual, according to his own notion of it, in his own way, and by his own means, they have reached their perfection. This fact, however, has two aspects. If no man can be held to serve another man's happiness, it follows that no man can call on another to serve his happiness. The different views of individualism depend on which of these aspects is under observation. What seems to be desired now is a combination of liberty for all with an obligation of each to all. That is one of the forms in which we are seeking a social philosopher's stone.

The reflex influence which American institutions have had on European institutions is well known. We have had to take as well as give. When the United States put upon their necks the yoke of a navigation and colonial system which they had just revolted against, they showed how little possible it is, after all, for men to rise above the current notions of their time, even when geographical and economic circumstances favor their emancipation. We have been borrowing old-world fashions and traditions all through our history, instead of standing firmly by the political and social philosophy of which we are the standard-bearers.

So long as a nation has not lost faith in itself it is possible for it to remodel its institutions to any extent. If it gives way to sentimentalism, or sensibility, or political mysticism, or adopts an affectation of radicalism, or any other ism, or molds its institutions so as to round out to a more complete fulfillment somebody's theory of the universe, it may fall into an era of revolution and political insecurity which will break off the continuity of its national life and make orderly and secure progress impossible. Now that the royal power is limited, and that the old military and police States are in the way of transition to jural States, we are promised a new advance to democracy. What is the disposition of the new State as regards the scope of its power? It unquestionably manifests a disposition to keep and use the whole arsenal of its predecessors. The great engine of political abuse has always been political mysticism. Formerly we were told of the divine origin of the State and the divine authority of rulers. The mystical contents of “'sovereignty” have always provided an inexhaustible source of dogma and inference for any extension of State power. The new democracy having inherited the power so long used against it, now shows every disposition to use that power as ruthlessly as any other governing organ ever has used it.

We are told that the State is an ethical person. This is the latest form of political mysticism. Now, it is true that the State is an ethical person in just the same sense as a business firm, a joint stock corporation, or a debating society. It is not a physical person, but it may be a metaphysical or legal person, and as such it has an entity and is an independent subject of rights and duties. Like the other ethical persons, however, the State is just good for what it can do to serve the interests of man, and no more. Such is far from being the meaning and utility of the dogma that the State is an ethical person. The dogma is needed as a source from which can be spun out again contents of phrases and deductions previously stowed away in it. It is only the most modern form of dogmatism devised to sacrifice the man to the institution which is not good for anything except so far as it can serve the man.

One of the newest names for the coming power is the “omnicracy.” Mankind has been trying for some thousands of years to find the right ocracy. None of those which have yet been tried have proved satisfactory. We want a new name on which to pin new hopes, for mankind “never is, but always to be blessed.” Omnicracy has this much sense in it, that no one of the great dogmas of the modem political creed is true if it is affirmed of anything less than the whole population, man, woman, child, and baby. When the propositions are enunciated in this sense they are philosophically grand and true. For instance, all the propositions about the “people” are grand and true if we mean by the people every soul in the community, with all the interests and powers which give them an aggregate will and power, with capacity to suffer or to work; but then, also, the propositions remain grand abstractions beyond the realm of practical utility. On the other hand, those propositions cannot be made practically available unless they are affirmed of some limited section of the population, for instance, a majority of the males over twenty-one; but then they are no longer true in philosophy or in fact.

Consequently, when the old-fashioned theories of State interference are applied to the new democratic State, they turn out to be simply a device for setting separate interests in a struggle against each other inside the society. It is plain on the face of all the great questions which are offered to us as political questions today, that they are simply struggles of interests for larger shares of the product of industry. One mode of dealing with this distribution would be to leave it to free contract under the play of natural laws. If we do not do this, and if the State interferes with the distribution, how can we stop short of the mediaeval plan of reiterated and endless interference, with constant diminution of the total product to be divided?

We have seen above what the tyranny was in the decay of the Roman Empire, when each was in servitude to all; but there is one form of that tyranny which may be still worse. That tyranny will'be realized when the same system of servitudes is established in a democratic state; when a man's neighbors are his masters; when the “ethical power of public opinion” bears down upon him at all hours and as to all matters; when his place is assigned to him and he is held in it, not by an emperor or his satellites, who cannot be everywhere all the time, but by the other members of the “village community” who can.

So long as the struggle for individual liberty took the form of a demand that the king or the privileged classes should take their hands off, it was popular and was believed to carry with it the cause of justice and civilization. Now that the governmental machine is brought within everyone's reach, the seduction of power is just as masterful over a democratic faction as ever it was over king or barons. No governing organ has yet abstained from any function because it acknowledged itself ignorant or incompetent. The new powers in the State show no disposition to do it. Nevertheless, the activity of the State, under the new democratic system, shows itself every year more at the mercy of clamorous factions, and legislators find themselves constantly under greater pressure to act, not by their deliberate judgment of what is expedient, but in such a way as to quell clamor, although against their judgment of public interests. It is rapidly becoming the chief art of the legislator to devise measures which shall sound as if they satisfied clamor while they only cheat it.

There are two things which are often treated as if they were identical, which are as far apart as any two things in the field of political philosophy can be: (1) That everyone should be left to do as he likes, so far as possible, without any other social restraints than such as are unavoidable for the peace and order of society. (2) That “the people” should be allowed to carry out their will without any restraint from constitutional institutions. The former means that each should have his own way with his own interests; the latter, that any faction which for the time is uppermost should have its own way with all the rest.

One result of all the new State interference is that the State is being superseded in vast domains of its proper work. While it is reaching out on one side to fields of socialistic enterprise, interfering in the interests of parties in the industrial organism, assuming knowledge of economic laws which nobody possesses, taking ground as to dogmatic notions of justice which are absurd, and acting because it does not know what to do, it is losing its power to give peace, order, and security. The extra-legal power and authority of leaders over voluntary orgenizations of men throughout a community who are banded together in order to press their interests at the expense of other interests, and who go to the utmost verge of the criminal law, if they do not claim immunity from it, while obeying an authority which acts in secret and without responsibility, is a phenomenon which shows the inadequacy of the existing State to guarantee rights and give security. The boycott and the plan of campaign are certainly not industrial instrumentalities, and it is not yet quite certain whether they am violent and criminal instrumentalities, by which some men coerce other men in matters of material interests. If we turn our minds to the victims of these devices, we see that they do not find in the modern State that security for their interests under the competition of life which it is the first and unquestioned duty of the State to provide. The boycotted man is deprived of the peaceful enjoyment of rights which the laws and institutions of his country allow him, and he has no redress. The State has forbidden all private war on the ground that it will give a remedy for wrongs, and that private redress would disturb the peaceful prosecution of their own interests by other members of the community who are not parties to the quarrel; but we have seen an industrial war paralyze a whole section for weeks, and it was treated almost as a right of the parties that they might fight it out, no matter at what cost to bystanders. We have seen representative bodies of various voluntary associations meet and organize by the side of the regular constitutional organs of the State, in order to deliberate on proposed measures and to transmit to the authorized representatives of the people their approval or disapproval of the propositions, and it scarcely caused a comment. The plutocracy invented the lobby, but the democracy here also seems determined to better the instruction. There are various opinions as to what the revolution is which is upon us, and as to what it is which is about to perish. I do not see anything else which is in as great peril as representative institutions or the constitutional State.

I therefore maintain that it is at the present time a matter of patriotism and civic duty to resist the extension of State interference. It is one of the proudest results of political growth that we have reached the point where individualism is possible. Nothing could better show the merit and value of the institutions which we have inherited than the fact that we can afford to play with all these socialistic and semi-socialistic absurdities. They have no great importance until the question arises: Will a generation which can be led away into this sort of frivolity be able to transmit intact institutions which were made only by men of sterling thought and power, and which can be maintained only by men of the same type? I am familiar with the irritation and impatience with which remonstrances on this matter are received. Those who know just how the world ought to be reconstructed are, of course, angry when they are pushed aside as busybodies. A group of people who assail the legislature with a plan for regulating their neighbor's mode of living are enraged at the “dogma” of non-interference. The publicist who has been struck by some of the superficial roughnesses in the collision of interests which must occur in any time of great industrial activity, and who has therefore determined to waive the objections to State interference, if he can see it brought to bear on his pet reform, will object to absolute principles.

For my part, I have never seen that public or private principles were good for anything except when there seemed to be a motive for breaking them. Anyone who has studied a question as to which the solution is yet wanting may despair of the power of free contract to solve it. I have examined a great many cases of proposed interference with free contract, and the only alternative to free contract which I can find is “heads I win, tails you lose” in favor of one party or the other. I am familiar with the criticisms which some writers claim to make upon individualism, but the worst individualism I can find in history is that of the Jacobins, and I believe that it is logically sound that the anti-social vices should be most developed whenever the attempt is made to put socialistic theories in practice. The only question at this point is: Which may we better trust, the play of free social forces or legislative and administrative interferenceP This question is as pertinent for those who expect to win by interference as for others, for whenever we try to get paternalized we only succeed in getting policed.

Agorist Class Theory

http://agorism.info/docs/AgoristClassTheory.pdf

The Effects of War on Liberty

by Anthony Gregory over at LewRockwell.com

Controversy on war and foreign policy still persists within some libertarian circles. The apparent difficulty seems to come with the assumption that the proper antiwar libertarian position is just too easy, just too simple – there has to be more to it than this. This assumption is implicit in such arguments for intervention as the ones seen in Randy Barnett’s widely criticized Wall Street Journal article from July.

Libertarians are accustomed, when arguing against domestic policies, to point to the practical as well as the moral issues involved. While many libertarians see themselves as primarily "consequentialist," on the one hand, or "moralist," on the other hand, all libertarians enjoy the benefit of a political philosophy with very strong arguments both practical and ethical. It is a beauty not just of libertarianism, but of human nature and the world around us, that what is moral is so very often what works. If slavery were actually economically efficient for society as a whole – which it isn’t – it would make for a sadder world and a harder time for libertarians. If property rights were efficient but ran counter to any consistently applicable ethical theory, it would also pose problems.

It is a wonder, then, that many who favor liberty, spontaneous order, voluntary human action, free trade and markets, and as little government as humanly and practically possible, do not see the full force of both the ethical and practical arguments against an interventionist foreign policy. In war, many friends of liberty have been tempted into siding with big government, with central planning, and with collectivist, rather than individualist, ethics. This exception to libertarian theory and ethics in the realm of foreign policy is a peculiar blind spot, and one that unfortunately has serious and negative implications for our work for liberty, since the warfare state has most likely been the biggest, most dangerous, most expansive and most disastrous government enterprise in modern American history.

Libertarian Ethics, War and Foreign Policy

Libertarians believe that individuals have a right to live their lives according to their own free will, so long as they do not initiate force on other individuals with the same right. From this moral first principle flows our entire social and legal theory – property rights; the right to self-defense; opposition to the modern leviathan state; and respect for civil liberties, due process and other checks on expansive government. Self-ownership and free self-determination form the ethical buttress of our case for free markets, free trade and personal liberty.

Because of our stern support for private property, libertarians view expropriation and trespass to be violations of human rights. Most people accept the basic premise that you should not steal from or trespass against your neighbor, but libertarians apply this ethic to the state. Taxation, being a coerced extraction of wealth, ultimately at the point of a gun, is a form of theft, and thus morally wrong from a libertarian standpoint.

Many government programs do not violate liberty in themselves – few people are forced, for example, to go to a public library or a government-funded university. However, even such relatively peaceful programs are funded coercively, through tax dollars. Libertarians oppose government spending on social programs, by virtue that it is government theft from individuals. We might even favor what a social program is attempting to achieve – a library is hardly objectionable to most people, in itself – but we must oppose the power of the state to forcibly seize the rightful property of some and give it to others. Even those of us who believe in a minimal government believe its taxing power should be shrunk as much as possible, with the ultimate ideal of eliminating it and replacing all taxation with voluntary financing.

War is typically an expensive government program. Estimates for how much the Iraq war alone will come to cost the American people range from about $400 billion to a trillion or more. According to economist Robert Higgs, the defense budget is even far larger than we might think, since so much of the warfare state’s costs are hidden as expenditures in other department budgets or "off-budget" items. Furthermore, Americans are still paying the debt for past warfare state spending. We are looking at more than a trillion dollars a year spent on the warfare state – almost 10% of the economy’s yearly output. At other times, the warfare state has cost much, much more as a percentage of the economy. During World War II, it was at about 40%.

By what moral principle can libertarians defend these enormous tax expenditures? More than $3,000 per American per year is being taken by force for the warfare state, no less than if that money were spent on libraries, food stamps or other public projects libertarians oppose. Every American taxpayer who opposes the war, for moral, religious, practical or whatever reasons, is being compelled to fund something against his conscience and judgment. This alone – the taxing side of the warfare state – presents huge problems for any libertarian who continues to attempt to reconcile his libertarian ethics and support for a large military establishment.

But when it comes to foreign policy, the moral issues go far, far beyond those of tax dollars. People – many innocents included – are killed in war. The government bombs neighborhoods knowing that it will kill hundreds or thousands of innocents. Infrastructure, private and public but in no case owned by the attacking government, is destroyed. Homes are invaded and blown to bits. Children are slaughtered. This isn’t all just what happens when particularly criminal soldiers commit atrocious individual crimes of rape, violence and torture – which also predictably happens to a grotesque degree during war. Most of the killing is just part of the policy. Bombing Baghdad or Belgrade has what legal theorists might call a "substantial certainty" of killing innocent people. Modern war is in fact in practically every case an example of mass murder. It must be opposed by the libertarian first and foremost for this reason. For not just Americans have individual rights to life, liberty and property; so too do all foreign non-aggressors, and so killing them, which is a predictable outcome of today’s typical military tactics, is gravely immoral according to libertarian ethics.

Some argue that when the fight is against a truly ghastly foreign regime, any innocents killed by the supposedly "good" government of the U.S. are "collateral damage." The true aggressor, according to this argument, is the enemy regime, not the U.S. government, which is acting in supposed defense of Americans.

One response is that historically, in most of its wars, the U.S. government has invaded or attacked a country that never attacked or credibly threatened to attack Americans on U.S. soil. Even by a collectivist analysis, whereby we look at nations, rather than individuals, when assigning guilt, the U.S. has more often than not been an aggressor.

However, to the libertarian, this is all of secondary importance. Libertarianism concerns individual rights and individual actions. States, nations, communities and so forth are abstractions and social constructs which do not act independently of the individuals they comprise. Only individuals act and only individuals have ethics or rights, and so it is a violation of an innocent person’s rights to bomb him, even if the government he lives under is aggressive and tyrannical. Certainly, the U.S. government was itself quite aggressive in the Middle East before 9/11, yet that in no way legitimized the 9/11 terrorist attacks, which killed innocent Americans for the crimes of their government. So, too, is it immoral to bomb a country with the substantial certainty that it will kill innocent foreigners, even if their government is aggressive.

Central Planning and War

Many will argue that these high moral principles are just impractical to the question of war, and that, furthermore, the U.S. government’s wars in particular have on balance protected more than violated the lives and liberty of a greater number of individuals, including foreigners "liberated" by U.S. wars. This is a collectivist ethical calculus and incompatible with libertarian ethics, but it also neglects the powerful practical libertarian arguments against government intervention and central planning. In fact, as experience and economic theory both show, the government is no more competent at centrally planning the protection of freedom and peace worldwide than it is at producing effective solutions to social problems in the domestic sphere.

Socialism fundamentally doesn’t work, as Ludwig von Mises revealed, because the state, as owner of the means of production, cannot make rational economic calculations. Without private ownership and exchange, there are no prices, and without prices there is no effective means to determine how and where to divert resources to their most urgent use. Mises also pointed out that one intervention in the economy often causes distortions that are later addressed by further interventions, causing yet more problems, and so forth.

The U.S. government’s attempts at collective security on the grand scale seen throughout the last century have amounted to a gigantic socialist experiment, and have revealed in foreign policy the failings of central planning that Mises identified as endemic in domestic intervention. The United States entered World War I and tilted the war toward the allies with great force, encouraging the harsh treatment of Germany after the war, leading to the backlash in Hitler’s rise to power and indeed the rise of fascism and communism – rather than a world safe for democracy – for the next decade. In World War II, the U.S. gave enormous support to its ally, the totalitarian Soviet Union, which ended up expanding and supposedly justifying the U.S. government’s horrifying actions in the Cold War. During the Cold War, the U.S. government supported anti-Communist strongmen regimes throughout the world, including dictators and future U.S. enemies, such as Saddam Hussein’s secular dictatorship, which became an enemy after the Cold War, and the Muhajadeen fighters in Afghanistan who became enemies after 9/11. The U.S. has found itself supporting Saddam against the Iranian theocrats, only later to oust Saddam to the benefit of the very same Iranian extremists. Now the U.S. is contemplating supporting Sunni thugs, once again, to counterbalance the Shiite threat. The madness goes on and on.

To believe that the U.S. government can bring about liberty and peace worldwide is to have a faith in government planning – in socialism – more impenetrable to individualist reasoning and historical experience than we can find even at the most leftwing college campuses in America. It is fitting, then, if still ironic, that conservatives and even some self-identified libertarians have defended the Iraq war on the basis of how many schools, hospitals and other civil infrastructure the U.S. government has helped construct in Iraq – after it destroyed what was there before, of course. People who oppose government intervention in the U.S. economy somehow believe in government intervention in the Iraqi economy, trusting that what the Iraqis need is more U.S. socialism. This adds up, insofar as buying into the warfare state leads one to inevitably have more faith in government planning per se.

Which raises another point. The advent of the warfare state means a reduction of economic liberty, an attack on free markets and a general move toward state power and away from freedom. With war come crushing taxes, business regulations, trade restrictions, new bureaucracies, myriad erosions of fundamental civil liberties, and even, at times, a nationalized, enslaved labor market in the form of the military draft.

The Effects of War on Liberty

The largest and most troubling expansions of government in America were mostly not the result of social programs. The Progressive Era and even the New Deal did not do as much as war to move America away from its relatively libertarian heritage of limited, checked and balanced government, free markets and individual liberty. The Civil War brought with it draconian censorship, a draft, inflation, the suspension of habeas corpus and a consolidated national government that signaled the end of true federalism. World War I introduced even wider censorship, conscription, deportations and spying. World War II gave us food rationing, conscription, citizen surveillance, censorship, and Japanese Internment. With the War on Terror, we have practically lost the Fourth Amendment and seen habeas corpus once again suspended. These are no light matters. The end of habeas corpus is itself a repudiation of a nearly millennium-long tradition in the Common Law. It was not terrorists who set the clock back to pre-Enlightenment times for American liberty – it was the warfare state.

In the economic world alone, war has been a terrible disaster for American liberty. The so-called "American System" of corporate subsidies and economic nationalism, championed by Hamiltonians in the early years of the republic, finally became implemented during the Civil War. World War I saw the advent of thousands of new federal bureaus and regulatory agencies, some important ones of which were resurrected for the domestic New Deal. The national public university system is largely an outgrowth of the post–World War II military industrial complex. Price controls, medical socialism, income tax, central banking and so many other economic evils made their debut during, or came around to stay largely due to war.

Aside from the violations of civil and economic liberties, war also brings about a moral debasement of the warring culture, which in turn weakens the people’s resistance to more government and more general incivility. As the moral standards become lowered as they usually do with war, utilitarianism takes hold and nearly anything is considered permissible so long as it is not as evil as the enemy, whose wickedness, for that matter, is often exaggerated.

Imperialism and war have done more than anything to propel the collectivist ideologies characteristic of the 20th century. Once a people come to tolerate torture and chemical warfare against a country that has never even attacked them, they will generally be less vigilant when it comes to other government and private evils.

In practice, U.S. war has been a plague on the lives, liberty and property of millions upon millions of Americans and foreigners. The inability of the state to centrally manage human affairs is no less prevalent in global crusades against evil or humanitarian nation-building adventures than it is in run-of-the-mill domestic matters. The failure of the Iraq war is not a consequence of bad management or unique incompetence in the Bush administration; it is representative of the expected failings of military socialism.

This all should make sense to the libertarian. The moral principles of individual liberty that are so obviously compromised by the vociferous taxing, regulating and mass killing of the warfare state are complemented by libertarian economic and practical arguments against war. Not only is war a violation of the rights of the individual – which we must always oppose on moral grounds – but on balance, it has failed to produce security, much less peace and liberty, for most people it has touched.

The libertarian bias, therefore, should always be against the next government war. History reveals a pattern of lies, deceit, abuse and tyranny surrounding virtually every U.S. war, yet many friends of liberty, who generally don’t trust politicians’ words or their power to do good in domestic affairs, for some reason trust them when it comes to war, the biggest and most corrupting of all government programs. Free-market theory explains why government projects usually fail to achieve their advertised goals, even when undertaken with good intentions. Libertarian morality tells us it is wrong to aggress against individuals, to trespass against their property rights or do them bodily harm if those individuals are not attacking us. The libertarian case against foreign intervention, the warfare state, and global governmental crusades for democracy or against evil is not, as some would have it, weaker than the libertarian argument against drug laws, the minimum wage or Social Security. Indeed, the libertarian case against war is clear, multifaceted and harmonious, internally consistent and reinforced by history. It is also the best case against war there is, which is why we must keep making it, in the name of peace and liberty.

The New Toryism

by Herbert Spencer
[Exerpted from "Man Versus the State" by Herbert Spencer, written in 1884]

Most of those who now pass as Liberals, are Tories of a new type. This is a paradox which I propose to justify. That I may justify it, I must first point out what the two political parties originally were; and I must then ask the reader to bear with me while I remind him of facts he is familiar with, that I may impress on him the intrinsic natures of Toryism and Liberalism properly so called.

Dating back to an earlier period than their names, the two political parties at first stood respectively for two opposed types of social organization, broadly distinguishable as the militant and the industrial—types which are characterized, the one by the régime of status, almost universal in ancient days, and the other by the régime of contract, which has become general in modern days, chiefly among the Western nations, and especially among ourselves and the Americans. If, instead of using the word "cooperation" in a limited sense, we use it in its widest sense, as signifying the combined activities of citizens under whatever system of regulation; then these two are definable as the system of compulsory cooperation and the system of voluntary cooperation. The typical structure of the one we see in an army formed of conscripts, in which the units in their several grades have to fulfil commands under pain of death, and receive food and clothing and pay, arbitrarily apportioned; while the typical structure of the other we see in a body of producers or distributors, who severally agree to specified payments in return for specified services, and may at will, after due notice, leave the organization if they do not like it.

During social evolution in England, the distinction between these two fundamentally-opposed forms of cooperation, made its appearance gradually; but long before the names Tory and Whig came into use, the parties were becoming traceable, and their connexions with militancy and industrialism respectively, were vaguely shown. The truth is familiar that, here as elsewhere, it was habitually by town-populations, formed of workers and traders accustomed to cooperate under contract, that resistances were made to that coercive rule which characterizes cooperation under status. While, conversely, cooperation under status, arising from, and adjusted to, chronic warfare, was supported in rural districts, originally peopled by military chiefs and their dependents, where the primitive ideas and traditions survived. Moreover, this contrast in political leanings, shown before Whig and Tory principles became clearly distinguished, continued to be shown afterwards. At the period of the Revolution, "while the villages and smaller towns were monopolized by Tories, the larger cities, the manufacturing districts, and the ports of commerce, formed the strongholds of the Whigs." And that, spite of exceptions, the like general relation still exists, needs no proving.

Such were the natures of the two parties as indicated by their origins. Observe, now, how their natures were indicated by their early doctrines and deeds. Whiggism began with resistance to Charles II and his cabal, in their efforts to re-establish unchecked monarchical power. The Whigs "regarded the monarchy as a civil institution, established by the nation for the benefit of all its members"; while with the Tories "the monarch was the delegate of heaven." And these doctrines involved the beliefs, the one that subjection of citizen to ruler was conditional, and the other that it was unconditional. Describing Whig and Tory as conceived at the end of the seventeenth century, some fifty years before he wrote his Dissertation on Parties, Bolingbroke says:

The power and majesty of the people, and original contract, the authority and independency of Parliaments, liberty, resistance, exclusion, abdication, deposition; these were ideas associated, at that time, to the idea of a Whig, and supposed by every Whig to be incommunicable, and inconsistent with the idea of a Tory.

Divine, hereditary, indefeasible right, lineal succession, passive obedience, prerogative, non-resistance, slavery, nay, and sometimes popery too, were associated in many minds to the idea of a Tory, and deemed incommunicable and inconsistent, in the same manner, with the idea of Whig.—Dissertation on Parties, p. 5.

And if we compare these descriptions, we see that in the one party there was a desire to resist and decrease the coercive power of the ruler over the subject, and in the other party to maintain or increase his coercive power. This distinction in their aims—a distinction which transcends in meaning and importance all other political distinctions—was displayed in their early doings. Whig principles were exemplified in the Habeas Corpus Act, and in the measure by which judges were made independent of the Crown; in defeat of the Non-Resisting Test Bill, which proposed for legislators and officials a compulsory oath that they would in no case resist the king by arms; and, later, they were exemplified in the Bill of Rights, framed to secure subjects against monarchical aggressions. These Acts had the same intrinsic nature. The principle of compulsory cooperation throughout social life was weakened by them, and the principle of voluntary cooperation strengthened. That at a subsequent period the policy of the party had the same general tendency, is well shown by a remark of Mr. Green concerning the period of Whig power after the death of Anne:

Before the fifty years of their rule had passed, Englishmen had forgotten that it was possible to persecute for differences of religion or to put down the liberty of the press, or to tamper with the administration of justice, or to rule without a Parliament.—Short History, p. 705.

And now, passing over the war-period which closed the last century and began this, during which that extension of individual freedom previously gained was lost, and the retrograde movement towards the social type proper to militancy was shown by all kinds of coercive measures, from those which took by force the persons and property of citizens for war-purposes to those which suppressed public meetings and sought to gag the press, let us recall the general characters of those changes effected by Whigs or Liberals after the re-establishment of peace permitted revival of the industrial régime and return to its appropriate type of structure. Under growing Whig influence there came repeal of the laws forbidding combinations among artisans as well as of those which interfered with their freedom of travelling. There was the measure by which, under Whig pressure, Dissenters were allowed to believe as they pleased without suffering certain civil penalties; and there was the Whig measure, carried by Tories under compulsion, which enabled Catholics to profess their religion without losing part of their freedom. The area of liberty was extended by Acts which forbade the buying of negroes and the holding of them in bondage. The East India Company's monopoly was abolished, and trade with the East made open to all. The political serfdom of the unrepresented was narrowed in areas, both by the Reform Bill and the Municipal Reform Bill; so that alike generally and locally, the many were less under the coercion of the few. Dissenters, no longer obliged to submit to the ecclesiastical form of marriage, were made free to wed by a purely civil rite. Later came diminution and removal of restraints on the buying of foreign commodities and the employment of foreign vessels and foreign sailors; and later still the removal of those burdens on the press, which were originally imposed to hinder the diffusion of opinion. And of all these changes it is unquestionable that, whether made or not by Liberals themselves, they were made in conformity with principles professed and urged by Liberals.

But why do I enumerate facts so well known to all? Simply because, as intimated at the outset, it seems needful to remind everybody what Liberalism was in the past, that they may perceive its unlikeness to the so-called Liberalism of the present. It would be inexcusable to name these various measures for the purpose of pointing out the character common to them, were it not that in our day men have forgotten their common character. They do not remember that, in one or other way, all these truly Liberal changes diminished compulsory cooperation throughout social life and increased voluntary cooperation. They have forgotten that, in one direction or other, they diminished the range of governmental authority, and increased the area within which each citizen may act unchecked. They have lost sight of the truth that in past times Liberalism habitually stood for individual freedom versus State-coercion.

And now comes the inquiry—How is it that Liberals have lost sight of this? How is it that Liberalism, getting more and more into power, has grown more and more coercive in its legislation? How is it that, either directly through its own majorities or indirectly through aid given in such cases to the majorities of its opponents, Liberalism has to an increasing extent adopted the policy of dictating the actions of citizens, and, by consequence, diminishing the range throughout which their actions remain free? How are we to explain this spreading confusion of thought which has led it, in pursuit of what appears to be public good, to invert the method by which in earlier days it achieved public good?

Unaccountable as at first sight this unconscious change of policy seems, we shall find that it has arisen quite naturally. Given the unanalytical thought ordinarily brought to bear on political matters, and, under existing conditions, nothing else was to be expected. To make this clear some parenthetic explanations are needful.

From the lowest to the highest creatures, intelligence progresses by acts of discrimination; and it continues so to progress among men, from the most ignorant to the most cultured. To class rightly—to put in the same group things which are of essentially the same natures, and in other groups things of natures essentially different—is the fundamental condition to right guidance of actions. Beginning with rudimentary vision, which gives warning that some large opaque body is passing near (just as closed eyes turned to the window, perceiving the shade caused by a hand put before them, tell us of something moving in front), the advance is to developed vision, which, by exactly-appreciated combinations of forms, colours, and motions, identifies objects at great distances as prey or enemies, and so makes it possible to improve the adjustments of conduct for securing food or evading death. That progressing perception of differences and consequent greater correctness of classing, constitutes, under one of its chief aspects, the growth of intelligence, is equally seen when we pass from the relatively simple physical vision to the relatively complex intellectual vision—the vision through the agency of which, things previously grouped by certain external resemblances or by certain extrinsic circumstances, come to be more truly grouped in conformity with their intrinsic structures or natures. Undeveloped intellectual vision is just as indiscriminating and erroneous in its classings as undeveloped physical vision. Instance the early arrangement of plants into the groups, trees, shrubs, and herbs: size, the most conspicuous trait, being the ground of distinction; and the assemblages formed being such as united many plants extremely unlike in their natures, and separated others that are near akin. Or still better, take the popular classification which puts together under the same general name, fish and shell-fish, and under the sub-name, shell-fish, puts together crustaceans and molluscs; nay, which goes further, and regards as fish the cetacean mammals. Partly because of the likeness in their modes of life as inhabiting the water, and partly because of some general resemblance in their flavours, creatures that are in their essential natures far more widely separated than a fish is from a bird, are associated in the same class and in the same sub-class.

Now the general truth thus exemplified, holds throughout those higher ranges of intellectual vision concerned with things not presentable to the senses, and, among others, such things as political institutions and political measures. For when thinking of these, too, the results of inadequate intellectual faculty, or inadequate culture of it, or both, are erroneous classings and consequent erroneous conclusions. Indeed, the liability to error is here much greater; since the things with which the intellect is concerned do not admit of examination in the same easy way. You cannot touch or see a political institution: it can be known only by an effort of constructive imagination. Neither can you apprehend by physical perception a political measure: this no less requires a process of mental representation by which its elements are put together in thought, and the essential nature of the combination conceived. Here, therefore, still more than in the cases above named, defective intellectual vision is shown in grouping by external characters, or extrinsic circumstances. How institutions are wrongly classed from this cause, we see in the common notion that the Roman Republic was a popular form of government. Look into the early ideas of the French revolutionists who aimed at an ideal state of freedom, and you find that the political forms and deeds of the Romans were their models; and even now a historian might be named who instances the corruptions of the Roman Republic as showing us what popular government leads to. Yet the resemblance between the institutions of the Romans and free institutions properly so-called, was less than that between a shark and a porpoise—a resemblance of general external form accompanying widely different internal structures. For the Roman Government was that of a small oligarchy within a larger oligarchy: the members of each being unchecked autocrats. A society in which the relatively few men who had political power, and were in a qualified sense free, were so many petty despots, holding not only slaves and dependents but even children in a bondage no less absolute than that in which they held their cattle, was, by its intrinsic nature, more nearly allied to an ordinary despotism than to a society of citizens politically equal.

Passing now to our special question, we may understand the kind of confusion in which Liberalism has lost itself: and the origin of those mistaken classings of political measures which have misled it—classings, as we shall see, by conspicuous external traits instead of by internal natures. For what, in the popular apprehension and in the apprehension of those who effected them, were the changes made by Liberals in the past? They were abolitions of grievances suffered by the people, or by portions of them: this was the common trait they had which most impressed itself on men's minds. They were mitigations of evils which had directly or indirectly been felt by large classes of citizens, as causes to misery or as hindrances to happiness. And since, in the minds of most, a rectified evil is equivalent to an achieved good, these measures came to be thought of as so many positive benefits; and the welfare of the many came to be conceived alike by Liberal statesmen and Liberal voters as the aim of Liberalism. Hence the confusion. The gaining of a popular good, being the external conspicuous trait common to Liberal measures in earlier days (then in each case gained by a relaxation of restraints), it has happened that popular good has come to be sought by Liberals, not as an end to be indirectly gained by relaxations of restraints, but as the end to be directly gained. And seeking to gain it directly, they have used methods intrinsically opposed to those originally used.

And now, having seen how this reversal of policy has arisen (or partial reversal, I should say, for the recent Burials Act and the efforts to remove all remaining religious inequalities, show continuance of the original policy in certain directions), let us proceed to contemplate the extent to which it has been carried during recent times, and the still greater extent to which the future will see it carried if current ideas and feelings continue to predominate.

Before proceeding, it may be well to say that no reflections are intended on the motives which prompted one after another of these various restraints and dictations. These motives were doubtless in nearly all cases good. It must be admitted that the restrictions placed by an Act of 1870, on the employment of women and children in Turkey-red dyeing works, were, in intention, no less philanthropic than those of Edward VI, which prescribed the minimum time for which a journeyman should be retained. Without question, the Seed Supply (Ireland) Act of 1880, which empowered guardians to buy seed for poor tenants, and then to see it properly planted, was moved by a desire for public welfare no less great than that which in 1533 prescribed the number of sheep a tenant might keep, or that of 1597, which commanded that decayed houses of husbandry should be rebuilt. Nobody will dispute that the various measures of late years taken for restricting the sale of intoxicating liquors, have been taken as much with a view to public morals as were the measures taken of old for checking the evils of luxury; as, for instance, in the fourteenth century, when diet as well as dress was restricted. Everyone must see that the edicts issued by Henry VIII to prevent the lower classes from playing dice, cards, bowls, etc., were not more prompted by desire for popular welfare than were the acts passed of late to check gambling.

Further, I do not intend here to question the wisdom of these modern interferences, which Conservatives and Liberals vie with one and other in multiplying, any more than to question the wisdom of those ancient ones which they in many cases resemble. We will not now consider whether the plans of late adopted for preserving the lives of sailors, are or are not more judicious than that sweeping Scotch measure which, in the middle of the fifteenth century, prohibited captains from leaving harbour during the winter. For the present, it shall remain undebated whether there is a better warrant for giving sanitary officers powers to search certain premises for unfit food, than there was for the law of Edward III, under which innkeepers at seaports were sworn to search their guests to prevent the exportation of money or plate. We will assume that there is no less sense in that clause of the Canal-boat Act, which forbids an owner to board gratuitously the children of the boatmen, than there was in the Spitalfields Acts, which, up to 1824, for the benefit of the artisans, forbade the manufacturers to fix their factories more than ten miles from the Royal Exchange.

We exclude, then, these questions of philanthropic motive and wise judgment, taking both of them for granted; and have here to concern ourselves solely with the compulsory nature of the measures which, for good or evil as the case may be, have been put in force during periods of Liberal ascendency.

To bring the illustrations within compass, let us commence with 1860, under the second administration of Lord Palmerston. In that year, the restrictions of the Factories Act were extended to bleaching and dyeing works; authority was given to provide analysts of food and drink, to be paid out of local rates; there was an Act providing for inspection of gas-works, as well as for fixing quality of gas and limiting price; there was the Act which, in addition to further mine-inspection, made it penal to employ boys under twelve not attending school and unable to read and write. In 1861 occurred an extension of the compulsory provisions of the Factories Act to lace-works; power was given to poor-law guardians, etc., to enforce vaccination; local boards were authorized to fix rates of hire for horses, ponies, mules, asses, and boats; and certain locally-formed bodies had given to them powers of taxing the locality for rural drainage and irrigation works, and for supplying water to cattle. In 1862 an Act was passed for restricting the employment of women and children in open-air bleaching; and an Act for making illegal a coal-mine with a single shaft, or with shafts separated by less than a specified space; as well as an Act giving the Council of Medical Education the exclusive right to publish a Pharmacopoeia, the price of which is to be fixed by the Treasury. In 1863 came the extension of compulsory vaccination to Scotland, and also to Ireland; there came the empowering of certain boards to borrow money repayable from the local rates, to employ and pay those out of work; there came the authorizing of town-authorities to take possession of neglected ornamental spaces, and rate the inhabitants for their support; there came the Bakehouses Regulation Act, which, besides specifying minimum age of employés occupied between certain hours, prescribed periodical lime-washing, three coats of paint when painted, and cleaning with hot water and soap at least once in six months; and there came also an Act giving a magistrate authority to decide on the wholesomeness or unwholesomeness of food brought before him by an inspector. Of compulsory legislation dating from 1864, may be named an extension of the Factories Act to various additional trades, including regulations for cleansing and ventilation, and specifying of certain employés in match-works, that they might not take meals on the premises except in the wood-cutting places. Also there were passed a Chimney-Sweepers Act, an Act for further regulating the sale of beer in Ireland, an Act for compulsory testing of cables and anchors, an Act extending the Public Works Act of 1863, and the Contagious Diseases Act: which last gave the police, in specified places, powers which, in respect of certain classes of women, abolished sundry of those safeguards to individual freedom established in past times. The year 1865 witnessed further provision for the reception and temporary relief of wanderers at the cost of ratepayers; another public-house closing Act; and an Act making compulsory regulations for extinguishing fires in London. Then, under the Ministry of Lord John Russell, in 1866, have to be named an Act to regulate cattle-sheds, etc., in Scotland, giving local authorities powers to inspect sanitary conditions and fix the numbers of cattle; an Act forcing hop-growers to label their bags with the year and place of growth and the true weight, and giving police powers of search; an Act to facilitate the building of lodging-houses in Ireland, and providing for regulation of the inmates; a Public Health Act, under which there is registration of lodging-houses and limitation of occupants, with inspection and directions for lime-washing, etc., and a Public Libraries Act, giving local powers by which a majority can tax a minority for their books.

Passing now to the legislation under the first Ministry of Mr. Gladstone, we have, in 1869, the establishment of State-telegraphy, with the accompanying interdict on telegraphing through any other agency; we have the empowering a Secretary of State to regulate hired conveyances in London; we have further and more stringent regulations to prevent cattle-diseases from spreading, another Beerhouse Regulation Act, and a Sea-birds Preservation Act (ensuring greater mortality of fish). In 1870 we have a law authorizing the Board of Public Works to make advances for landlords' improvements and for purchase by tenants; we have the Act which enables the Education Department to form school-boards which shall purchase sites for schools, and may provide free schools supported by local rates, and enabling school-boards to pay a child's fees, to compel parents to send their children, etc.; we have a further Factories and Workshops Act, making, among other restrictions, some on the employment of women and children in fruit-preserving and fish-curing works. In 1871 we met with an amended Merchant Shipping Act, directing officers of the Board of Trade to record the draught of sea-going vessels leaving port; there is another Factory and Workshops Act, making further restrictions; there is a Pedlars Act, inflicting penalties for hawking without a certificate, and limiting the district within which the certificate holds as well as giving the police power to search pedlars' packs; and there are further measures for enforcing vaccination. The year 1872 had, among other Acts, one which makes it illegal to take for hire more than one child to nurse, unless in a house registered by the authorities, who prescribe the number of infants to be received; it had a Licensing Act, interdicting sale of spirits to those apparently under sixteen; and it had another Merchant Shipping Act, establishing an annual survey of passenger steamers. Then in 1873 was passed the Agricultural Children's Act, which makes it penal for a farmer to employ a child who has neither certificate of elementary education nor of certain prescribed school-attendances; and there was passed a Merchant Shipping Act, requiring on each vessel a scale showing draught and giving the Board of Trade power to fix the numbers of boats and life-saving appliances to be carried.

Turn now to Liberal law-making under the present Ministry. We have, in 1880, a law which forbids conditional advance-notes in payment of sailors' wages; also a law which dictates certain arrangements for the safe carriage of grain-cargoes; also a law increasing local coercion over parents to send their children to school. In 1881 comes legislation to prevent trawling over clam-beds and bait-beds, and an interdict making it impossible to buy a glass of beer on Sunday in Wales. In 1882 the Board of Trade was authorized to grant licences to generate and sell electricity, and municipal bodies were enabled to levy rates for electric-lighting: further exactions from ratepayers were authorized for facilitating more accessible baths and washhouses; and local authorities were empowered to make bye-laws for securing the decent lodging of persons engaged in picking fruit and vegetables. Of such legislation during 1883 may be named the Cheap Trains Act, which, partly by taxing the nation to the extent of £400,000 a year (in the shape of relinquished passenger duty), and partly at the cost of railway-proprietors, still further cheapens travelling for workmen: the Board of Trade, through the Railway Commissioners, being empowered to ensure sufficiently good and frequent accommodation. Again, there is the Act which, under penalty of £10 for disobedience, forbids the payment of wages to workmen at or within public-houses; there is another Factory and Workshops Act, commanding inspection of white lead works (to see that there are provided overalls, respirators, baths, acidulated drinks, etc.) and of bakehouses, regulating times of employment in both, and prescribing in detail some constructions for the last, which are to be kept in a condition satisfactory to the inspectors.

But we are far from forming an adequate conception if we look only at the compulsory legislation which has actually been established of late years. We must look also at that which is advocated, and which threatens to be far more sweeping in range and stringent in character. We have lately had a Cabinet Minister, one of the most advanced Liberals, so-called, who pooh-poohs the plans of the late Government for improving industrial dwellings as so much "tinkering"; and contends for effectual coercion to be exercised over owners of small houses, over land-owners, and over ratepayers. Here is another Cabinet Minister who, addressing his constituents, speaks slightingly of the doings of philanthropic societies and religious bodies to help the poor, and says that "the whole of the people of this country ought to look upon this work as being their own work": that is to say, some extensive Government measure is called for. Again, we have a Radical member of Parliament who leads a large and powerful body, aiming with annually-increasing promise of success, to enforce sobriety by giving to local majorities powers to prevent freedom of exchange in respect of certain commodities. Regulation of the hours of labour for certain classes, which has been made more and more general by successive extensions of the Factories Acts, is likely now to be made still more general: a measure is to be proposed bringing the employés in all shops under such regulation. There is a rising demand, too, that education shall be made gratis (i.e., tax-supported), for all. The payment of school-fees is beginning to be denounced as a wrong: the State must take the whole burden. Moreover, it is proposed by many that the State, regarded as an undoubtedly competent judge of what constitutes good education for the poor, shall undertake also to prescribe good education for the middle classes—shall stamp the children of these, too, after a State pattern, concerning the goodness of which they have no more doubt than the Chinese had when they fixed theirs. Then there is the "endowment of research," of late energetically urged. Already the Government gives every year the sum of £4,000 for this purpose, to be distributed through the Royal Society; and, in the absence of those who have strong motives for resisting the pressure of the interested, backed by those they easily persuade, it may by-and-by establish that paid "priesthood of science" long ago advocated by Sir David Brewster. Once more, plausible proposals are made that there should be organized a system of compulsory insurance, by which men during their early lives shall be forced to provide for the time when they will be incapacitated.

Nor does enumeration of these further measures of coercive rule, looming on us near at hand or in the distance, complete the account. Nothing more than cursory allusion has yet been made to that accompanying compulsion which takes the form of increased taxation, general and local. Partly for defraying the costs of carrying out these ever-multiplying sets of regulations, each of which requires an additional staff of officers, and partly to meet the outlay for new public institutions, such as board-schools, free libraries, public museums, baths and washhouses, recreation grounds, etc., local rates are year after year increased; as the general taxation is increased by grants for education and to the departments of science and art, etc. Every one of these involves further coercion—restricts still more the freedom of the citizen. For the implied address accompanying every additional exaction is—"Hitherto you have been free to spend this portion of your earnings in any way which pleased you; hereafter you shall not be free so to spend it, but we will spend it for the general benefit." Thus, either directly or indirectly, and in most cases both at once, the citizen is at each further stage in the growth of this compulsory legislation, deprived of some liberty which he previously had.

Such, then, are the doings of the party which claims the name of Liberal; and which calls itself Liberal as being the advocate of extended freedom!

I doubt not that many a member of the party has read the preceding section with impatience: wanting, as he does, to point out an immense oversight which he thinks destroys the validity of the argument. "You forget," he wishes to say, "the fundamental difference between the power which, in the past, established those restraints that Liberalism abolished, and the power which, in the present, establishes the restraints you call anti-Liberal. You forget that the one was an irresponsible power, while the other is a responsible power. You forget that if by the recent legislation of Liberals, people are variously regulated, the body which regulates them is of their own creating, and has their warrant for its acts."

My answer is, that I have not forgotten this difference, but am prepared to contend that the difference is in large measure irrelevant to the issue.

In the first place, the real issue is whether the lives of citizens are more interfered with than they were; not the nature of the agency which interferes with them. Take a simpler case. A member of a trades' union has joined others in establishing an organization of a purely representative character. By it he is compelled to strike if a majority so decide; he is forbidden to accept work save under the conditions they dictate; he is prevented from profiting by his superior ability or energy to the extent he might do were it not for their interdict. He cannot disobey without abandoning those pecuniary benefits of the organization for which he has subscribed, and bringing on himself the persecution, and perhaps violence, of his fellows. Is he any the less coerced because the body coercing him is one which he had an equal voice with the rest in forming?

In the second place, if it be objected that the analogy is faulty, since the governing body of a nation, to which, as protector of the national life and interests, all must submit under penalty of social disorganization, has a far higher authority over citizens than the government of any private organization can have over its members; then the reply is that granting the difference, the answer made continues valid. If men use their liberty in such a way as to surrender their liberty, are they thereafter any the less slaves? If people by a plebiscite elect a man despot over them, do they remain free because the despotism was of their own making? Are the coercive edicts issued by him to be regarded as legitimate because they are the ultimate outcome of their own votes? As well might it be argued that the East African, who breaks a spear in another's presence that he may so become bondsman to him, still retains his liberty because he freely chose his master.

Finally if any, not without marks of irritation as I can imagine, repudiate this reasoning, and say that there is no true parallelism between the relation of people to government where an irresponsible single ruler has been permanently elected, and the relation where a responsible representative body is maintained, and from time to time re-elected; then there comes the ultimate reply—an altogether heterodox reply—by which most will be greatly astonished. This reply is, that these multitudinous restraining acts are not defensible on the ground that they proceed from a popularly-chosen body; for that the authority of a popularly-chosen body is no more to be regarded as an unlimited authority than the authority of a monarch; and that as true Liberalism in the past disputed the assumption of a monarch's unlimited authority, so true Liberalism in the present will dispute the assumption of unlimited parliamentary authority. Of this, however, more anon. Here I merely indicate it as an ultimate answer.

Meanwhile it suffices to point out that until recently, just as of old, true Liberalism was shown by its acts to be moving towards the theory of a limited parliamentary authority. All these abolitions of restraints over religious beliefs and observances, over exchange and transit, over trade-combinations and the travelling of artisans, over the publication of opinions, theological or political, etc., were tacit assertions of the desirableness of limitation. In the same way that the abandonment of sumptuary laws, of laws forbidding this or that kind of amusement, of laws dictating modes of farming, and many others of like meddling nature, which took place in early days, was an implied admission that the State ought not to interfere in such matters: so those removals of hindrances to individual activities of one or other kind, which the Liberalism of the last generation effected, were practical confessions that in these directions, too, the sphere of governmental action should be narrowed. And this recognition of the propriety of restricting governmental action was a preparation for restricting it in theory. One of the most familiar political truths is that, in the course of social evolution, usage precedes law; and that when usage has been well established it becomes law by receiving authoritative endorsement and defined form. Manifestly then, Liberalism in the past, by its practice of limitation, was preparing the way for the principle of limitation.

But returning from these more general considerations to the special question, I emphasize the reply that the liberty which a citizen enjoys is to be measured, not by the nature of the governmental machinery he lives under, whether representative or other, but by the relative paucity of the restraints it imposes on him; and that, whether this machinery is or is not one he shared in making, its actions are not of the kind proper to Liberalism if they increase such restraints beyond those which are needful for preventing him from directly or indirectly aggressing on his fellows—needful, that is, for maintaining the liberties of his fellows against his invasions of them: restraints which are, therefore, to be distinguished as negatively coercive, not positively coercive.

Probably, however, the Liberal, and still more the subspecies Radical, who more than any other in these latter days seems under the impression that so long as he has a good end in view he is warranted in exercising over men all the coercion he is able, will continue to protest. Knowing that his aim is popular benefit of some kind, to be achieved in some way, and believing that the Tory is, contrariwise, prompted by class-interest and the desire to maintain class-power, he will regard it as palpably absurd to group him as one of the same genus, and will scorn the reasoning used to prove that he belongs to it.

Perhaps an analogy will help him to see its validity. If, away in the far East, where personal government is the only form of government known, he heard from the inhabitants an account of a struggle by which they had deposed a cruel and vicious despot, and put in his place one whose acts proved his desire for their welfare—if, after listening to their self-gratulations, he told them that they had not essentially changed the nature of their government, he would greatly astonish them; and probably he would have difficulty in making them understand that the substitution of a benevolent despot for a malevolent despot, still left the government a despotism. Similarly with Toryism as rightly conceived. Standing as it does for coercion by the State versus the freedom of the individual, Toryism remains Toryism, whether it extends this coercion for selfish or unselfish reasons. As certainly as the despot is still a despot, whether his motives for arbitrary rule are good or bad; so certainly is the Tory still a Tory, whether he has egoistic or altruistic motives for using State-power to restrict the liberty of the citizen, beyond the degree required for maintaining the liberties of other citizens. The altruistic Tory as well as the egoistic Tory belongs to the genus Tory; though he forms a new species of the genus. And both stand in distinct contrast with the Liberal as defined in the days when Liberals were rightly so called, and when the definition was—"one who advocates greater freedom from restraint, especially in political institutions."

Thus, then, is justified the paradox I set out with. As we have seen, Toryism and Liberalism originally emerged, the one from militancy and the other from industrialism. The one stood for the régime of status and the other for the régime of contract—the one for that system of compulsory cooperation which accompanies the legal inequality of classes, and the other for that voluntary cooperation which accompanies their legal equality; and beyond all question the early acts of the two parties were respectively for the maintenance of agencies which effect this compulsory cooperation, and for the weakening or curbing of them. Manifestly the implication is that, in so far as it has been extending the system of compulsion, what is now called Liberalism is a new form of Toryism.

How truly this is so, we shall see still more clearly on looking at the facts the other side upwards, which we will presently do.

The Origin of Property and State

The political left, including the anarcho-socialists, are very confused about the nature and origin of both property and the state as an institution. According to many left-wing anarchists, property is entirely a state created thing that wouldn't exist without it. While the standard socialist position is usually collective ownership of property, the anarcho-socialists may tend more towards the idea of abolition of all property, which is quite an absurd notion.

The individualist anarchists differ with the anarcho-socialists in that they aknowledge the fundamental principle of voluntary exchange of property and the application of labor to bring original ownership into being. However, many individualist anarchists tend to take a somewhat Georgist view on land ownership, and may also claim that profit and interest wouldn't exist without the state. This stems from a fundamental misunderstanding about economics. While the individualist anarchists were much more laizzes-faire than the collectivist and communist anarchists, they still lacked certain economic insights.

In a sense, the arguements of both the socialist anarchists and some individualist anarchists throw the statists a great big bone. That is, it provides the very framework for those who favor the state to turn around and claim that we need a state because without it, property ownership and all that it entails would not exist. Both the left-anarchists and statists are accepting the same flawed premise, namely, the idea that the state is where all property comes from sociologically and historically. The premise is economically and historically inaccurate.

While it is true that the state would not exist without property (which should be obvious, as the material resources that make it up constitute property), it is not true that property would not exist without the state. Any material resource or object that is in use by an individual is by definition property. To own something is by defacto to control it. Of course, this means that it is impossible to actually get rid of property altogether. At any given points in time, someone is quite likely in control of some sort of property.

You are your own property to begin with (self-ownership). Without self-ownership, it is impossible to act in the first place. Existance itself makes it so that inherently we live in a world made up of material. In order to live in the world, individual people are made up of this matter and must interact with matter that is external to them. Without using one's self-ownership to obtain property over things external to you, such as a home, and food, and clothing, you simply die. This is simply an evolutionary, economic and sociological fact.

Breaking this down more into the fundamentals: (1) first, you have the existance of the material world (2) secondly, you have the existance of individual human beings within this material world that possess conciousness and freedom of willpower (3) consequentially, you have self-control, and therefore "personal property" (4) consequentially, you have people exercising this self-control in conjunction with material resources that are external to them, from which derives "external property" (5) consequentially, you have people transforming this external property in a manner that increases output and persues new ends, and hence you have "capital" and "technology".

Property is the natural result of people applying their self-ownership to previously unused resources through labor and homesteading, people exchanging goods and services that they already have obtained ownership of, and people making improvements upon the methods of production in the process. Both labor and capital engage in the transformation of resources into something new. A "market" is nothing but the cumulative result of all of the production and exchange between individuals. A "market" of some sort is inevitable as a consequence of human action and the necessary requirements for survival itself. A world without property and with no "market" at all is a world without human beings.

Profit is not synonamous with theft, it is not the consequence of simply taking a chunk of a worker's labor. Profit is a consequence of time preferance. Profit is the result of a sucessful allocation of resources, in conjunction with supply and demand in an uncertain atmosphere. A voluntary employment contract is an agreement of exchange between an employer and employee. The employee gets paid a certain sum of money, in exchange for their production for a given period of time. The worker presumably would prefer recieving money in the present to keeping whatever it is that they produced (why would a worker in a factory that makes wood products want to keep all of the wood products they made? They are made to be sold, and the worker works for the money, not the wood products).

Profit does not come into play until long after this. The worker is paid long before the product may be sold, and the profit results from the proper appeasing of demand. A worker may be paid and the product they produce may never be sold, but the worker still gets to keep that money while the buisiness owner loses out by taking losses for not having enough sales. If a buisiness over-supplies or under-supplies something, they may take considerable losses. Profit is not a gaurantee for a buisiness. A buisiness cannot profit by simply jacking its prices up into the sky, for it would be diminishing the amount of possible buyers.

This being established, it is true that there is an alternate method of obtaining property that differs from this. This is the method of theft, extortion and fraud. Franz P. Oppenheimer expressed this by separating the means towards property and wealth into the economic means (production and exchange) and the political means (expropriation and coercive usury). The method of parasitism represents a violation of the property rights of the original producer (and yes, workers count as producers), homesteader or capitalist. It is important to note that the predatory means of obtaining property requires no real production or any improvement upon the methods of production. This is the method of both private crime and the state.

In order for states to form, property that was previously aquired voluntarily had to be expropriated. The state did not invent property, as property pre-exists the state. The state feeds on property for its survival, like a leech. A state may very well start out as the equivolent of a small private gang; it becomes a state when such a gang obtains a coercive territorial monopoly. States do not form because of the methods of the market (I.E. peaceful exchange and production), they form because of a disruption of the methods of the market. They require land theft, systematic extortion and syndicate-baiting.

Now it is true that states, once they have expropriated property, always dole them out to special interests. But this is not a condemnation of property itself, it's a condemnation of the state. It is the state that has corrupted and abused property. All that it doles out, wether it be to banking elites and rich buisinessmen or the poor, sick and elderly, is stolen property. A state redistributes property away from original ownership and towards either its own members or to special interest groups that it colludes with. Thus, the state also corrupts people within the marketplace by buying them out and presenting an unproductive means towards property that they would not possess without the state's help.

Since a state confiscates and redistributes property by its nature as an institution, the only "market" that could be said to remain is a crippled and abused one at best. On the other hand, since there is no realistic way to stop all people from producing and exchanging property, people find ways to chug the economy along in spite of the barriers that the state may put in their way. This is the only thing that keeps the human race alive: the degree to which people engage in the economic means to wealth despite the existance of the state. It is frankly quite amazing how the American economy continues to produce despite all of the destructive regulations and redistribution that the state imposes on it.

The Goal is Freedom: No Substitute for History

by Sheldon Richman

The great economist Ludwig von Mises showed that economics can be deduced from the axiom that human beings act: individuals consciously select ends and apply scarce means to achieve them. By examining the logical implications of that undeniable fact, one can come to understand the concepts value, cost, time preference, supply, demand, money, price, profit, interest, and so on.

In light of this, it is noteworthy that Mises was also an accomplished historian. And more than that, he was an important historiographer; that is, he was interested in the why and how of history. This theorist who is so identified with the a priori method in economics (deduction from an axiom) is equally committed to the conviction that knowledge of history and its methods is indispensable to understanding the world.

Mises expounded on both matters in his underappreciated book Theory and History: An Interpretation of Social and Economic Evolution, first published in 1957. He was intent on showing that the method of economics had to be different from the method of the natural sciences because we have intimate knowledge of human action from the "inside." Molecules and planets have no motivation or discretion in how they move, so scientists can only observe, amass data from homogeneous events, look for regularities, test hypotheses, and formulate laws subject to the discovery of new evidence. But human beings do have motivation and discretion; they act on the basis of values, ideas, knowledge, and expectations -- none of which are rigidly determined the way a billiard ball's path is determined by its physical environment. Furthermore, social "scientists" know this -- because they are themselves acting individuals. So unlike in the natural sciences, anyone who studies economics has insider knowledge of the ultimate source of his subject: the acting individual. He brings to his discipline a familiarity no physicist can bring to his.

Where does history come in? The science of human action -- which Mises called praxeology -- describes the formal, logical structure of action: the implications of choosing A over B -- no matter what those may be -- and the dedication of means and time to its achievement. Economics is not directly concerned with the specific ends chosen by particular individuals. That's a subject for history and what Mises called "thymology," or psychology in its non-experimental sense. Economics takes these as given and proceeds to analyze the unintended consequences of human action in the marketplace, the effects on prices, supply, and so on.

But Mises acknowledged that there is much more to know about the world than abstract economic laws and the broad particulars of "the economy." We also need to understand certain details of our present social lives -- and to understand the present we must understand the past. Hence, the importance of studying history. Many people profess an interest in history, but they often make pronouncements about things, especially government activities, in a historical vacuum. When this is called to their attention, they may suddenly turn disdainful of history, as though it frustrates their wishful thinking. The best example of this occurred in 1979 during the Islamic revolution in Iran. You'll recall that the U.S. embassy was seized and the occupants were held hostage for a long while. When President Carter was asked if the event was related to the 1953 CIA-sponsored overthrow of Iran's elected secular prime minister in favor of the autocratic Shah, he scoffed, "That's ancient history."

Methodological Individualism

Mises's chapters on history in Theory and History are refreshing in their uncompromising methodological individualism. Much of what he says is self-evident once it's stated, but it needs saying because so much history looks like an account of disembodied actions performed by abstractions such as nations, societies, and governments. We all need reminding that only individuals act, and they act on the basis of (explicit or implicit) ideas. As philosopher Gilbert Ryle put it in The Concept of Mind, "Men are not machines, not even ghost-ridden machines. They are men -- a tautology which is sometimes worth remembering."

While individuals are each born into a specific context historically, culturally, and otherwise, their ideas are not determined mechanistically. Mises rejected the approach to history marked by environmental determinism. "Many ideas are the response elicited by the stimulus of a man's physical environment," Mises wrote "But the content of these ideas is not determined by the environment. To the same physical environment various individuals and groups of individuals respond in a different way." Likewise, he rejected Marx's economic determinism.

The ultimate reality for historians should be the acting individual. "The characteristics of individual men, their ideas and judgments of value as well as the actions guided by those ideas and judgments, cannot be traced back to something of which they would be derivatives. There is no answer to the question why Frederick II invaded Silesia except: because he was Frederick II. ...[T]he genuine history of mankind is the history of ideas. It is ideas that distinguish man from all other beings. Ideas engender social institutions, political changes, technological methods of product, and all that is called economic conditions. And in searching for their origin we inevitably come to a point at which all that can be asserted is that a man had an idea."

In one fell swoop Mises debunked all philosophies of history, which presume arbitrarily that mankind's activities are destined achieve a preset goal. He also dismissed the view that history passes through predetermined stages. All approaches to history that dispense with the purposeful individual are fatally flawed. But this does not mean that history is consciously designed by individuals. Mises wrote:

History is made by men. The conscious intentional actions of individuals, great and small, determine the course of events insofar as it is the result of the interaction of all men. But the historical process is not designed by individuals. It is the composite outcome of the intentional actions of all individuals. No man can plan history. All he can plan and try to put into effect is his own actions which, jointly with the actions of other men, constitute the historical process. The Pilgrim Fathers did not plan to found the United States.

There can be many reasons to study history, and one of them is to understand what's happening today. "There is no such thing as a nonhistorical analysis of the present state of affairs," Mises wrote. "The examination and description of the present are necessarily a historical account of the past ending with the instant just passed. The description of the present state of politics or of business is inevitably the narration of the events that have brought about the present state."
History and Economics

Do history and economics intersect? For Mises, one cannot understand history without understanding economics, or human action more generally.. Since studying actual human activity is not like studying the movement of molecules, one will end up in a hopeless morass if one tries to examine social phenomena without the theoretical lens provided by praxeology and economics. As Murray Rothbard wrote in his preface to Theory and History:

One example that Mises liked to use in his class to demonstrate the difference between two fundamental ways of approaching human behavior was in looking at Grand Central Station behavior during rush hour. The " objective" or "truly scientific" behaviorist, he pointed out, would observe the empirical events: e.g., people rushing back and forth, aimlessly at certain predictable times of day. And that is all he would know. But the true student of human action would start from the fact that all human behavior is purposive, and he would see the purpose is to get from home to the train to work in the morning, the opposite at night, etc. It is obvious which one would discover and know more about human behavior, and therefore which one would be the genuine “scientist.”

Unfortunately, few historians understand economics. And that's a shame, because, as Mises pointed out, "Books on history, especially those on the history of one's own country, appeal more to the general reader than do tracts on economic policy. ... Actually they [the historians] have merely popularized the teachings of pseudo economists.... The neo-mercantilist doctrines of the balance of payments and of the dollar shortage give an image of present-day world conditions very different from that provided by an examination of the situation from the point of view of modern subjectivist economics."

One cannot understand history without understanding economics, but one also cannot fully understand economic policy -- or government policy in general -- without understanding history. A proposal to set up a government bureau to, say, control the price of milk can be demolished by economic theory, but it can be demolished twice over by a historical perspective on the politician's and bureaucrat's penchant for expanding their power and for exploiting -- and even fabricating -- problems ("crises") to justify that expansion. (For details, see Robert Higgs's Crisis and Leviathan: Critical Episodes in the Growth of American Government.) A superficially benign government mission will look malignant in the light of the state's historical record. Even libertarians can go badly astray relying on pure a priori reasoning in judging government policy. While the a priori -- in Rothbard's broadly and qualitatively empirical sense -- is essential to economic understanding, when it comes to vigilance toward the state, the a priori is no substitute for historical knowledge.

As Mises wrote, "History looks backward into the past, but the lesson it teaches concerns things to come." One should avoid defending any government activity before consulting history.