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.

Ron Paul and Immigration

It's time for a little honesty about Ron Paul, particularly his position on immigration. While Ron Paul is all the rage in libertarian circles right now (for some very good reasons), on certain issues he is more of a right-wing populist or paleo-conservative. Whenever he "deviates" it's in the socially conservative direction, on issues such as immigration. He certainly is the most libertarian person to be in congress for a long time, but one should also be aware that he has affinity with the Christian right and other such groups.

Immigration restrictionist policies (immigration quotas, illegalizing immigrant jobs, publicly-funded walls, federal control of state's borders, etc.) are government interventions, economically and otherwise, and therefore are outside of the realm of libertarianism. Interventionism X (welfare) does not justify intervention Y (police statism and protectionism). Ron Paul is appealing to the sentiment of right-wing populists like Pat Buchannan on this issue. Aside from those who follow Hans Herman Hoppe's immigration position, and many Ron Paulians, no libertarian in their right mind supports immigration restrictionism.

Like all anti-immigrationists, Ron Paul uses the welfare state (the real problem) as an excuse to persue other government interventions such as publicly funded walls and mass-deportation. His vote for things such as publicly funded walls should be pointed out as unlibertarian by any libertarian with two cents. The fact that people suck off the welfare state is not an excuse to forcibly remove them from their own property or illegalize their jobs. Domestic citezens are "guilty" of just the same, on a much larger scale than immigrants ever will be.

Furthermore, the arguement is nonsensical in that for the most part illegal immigrants do not qualify for those government services; it is the legal citezens who do, and it is the legal citezens who are at least partially responsible for supporting it. There is no moral difference between a legal citezen and an "illegal" sucking off of the welfare state. All of the welfare-related complaints about illegal immigrants apply equally to domestic citezens. Under this logic, therefore, domestic citezens should be deported and have their jobs illegalized as well.

Ron has fallen into the trap of interventionism on this issue. Mises's critique of interventionism applies here. That is, interventions are proposed as a solution to past interventions, rather than a repeal of the previous intervention. The initial intervention is the welfare state. But, while he has tried his best to oppose the welfare state, Ron Paul falls back on supporting new interventions as a "solution": government-funded walls, immigration quotas and deportation. If one seriously thinks that this is going to solve "the problem", then one is fooling oneself. In practise, this will result in a further march towards a police state, more growth in federal funding, and meanwhile immigrants will still get through "illegally", just like before.

That is only on the consequentialist side of the arguement. The other side of the arguement, and the more important one, is that it's a violation of property rights to (1) force someone off of their voluntarily aquired property or force a landlord to evict a tenant (2) to illegalize someone's voluntary employment agreement; this too violates the property rights of both the immigrant and the citezen associating with them (3) to siphon funds from the tax-payer to build walls (4) to initiate force on someone for crossing unowned land and (5) in general, to force people to dissassociate with eachother on their own property. What do all of these things have in common? They are inherent in anti-immigration policies.

Ron Paul's position on immigration is better then Pat Buchannan's, but it is not too far off from it. While he does not openly champion protectionism, he still supports the police enforcement side of the equation in the name of "constitutionalism", and makes a somewhat Buchannite arguement with respect to how the welfare state relates to immigration.

It's the 1930's All Over Again

by Lew Rockwell

Jittery stock markets, an economy drunk on credit, and politicians calling for varieties of dictatorship: what a sense of déjà vu! Let us recall that the world went bonkers for about ten years way back when. The stock market crashed in 1929, thanks to the Federal Reserve, and with it fell the last remnants of the old liberal ideology that government should leave society and economy alone to flourish. After the federal Great Depression hit, there was a general air in the United States and Europe that freedom hadn't worked. What we needed were strong leaders to manage and plan economies and societies.

And how they were worshipped. On the other side of the world, there were Stalin and Hitler and Mussolini, but in the United States we weren't in very good shape either. Here we had FDR, who imagined himself capable of astonishing feats of price setting and economy boosting. Of course he used old-fashioned tricks: printing money and threatening people with guns. It was nothing but the ancient despotism brought back in pseudo-scientific garb.

Things didn't really return to normal until after the war. These "great men" of history keeled over eventually, but look what they left: welfare states, inflationary banking systems, high taxes, massive debt, mandates on business, and regimes with a penchant for meddling at the slightest sign of trouble. They had their way even if their absurd posturing became unfashionable later.

It's strange to go back and read opinion pieces from those times. It's as if everyone just assumed that we had to have either fascism or socialism, and that the one option to be ruled out was laissez-faire. People like Mises and Hayek had to fight tooth and nail to get a hearing. The Americans had some journalists who seemed to understand, but they were few and far between.
So what was the excuse for such a shabby period in ideological history? Why did the world go crazy? It was the Great Depression, or so says the usual explanation. People were suffering and looking for answers. They turned to a Strongman to bail them out. There was a fashion for scientific planning, and the suffering economy (caused by the government, of course) seemed to bolster the rationale.

All of which brings me to a strange observation: when it comes to politics, we aren't that much better off today. It's true that we don't have people running for office in ridiculous military suits. They don't scream at us or give sappy fireside chats or purport to be the embodiment of the social mind. The tune is slightly changed, but the notes and rhythms are the same.

Have you listened carefully to what the Democrats are proposing in the lead-up to the presidential election? It's just about as disgusting as anything heard in the 1930s: endless government programs to solve all human ills. It's as if they can't think in any other way, as if their whole worldview would collapse if they took notice of the fact that government can't do anything right.

But it also seems like they are living on another planet. The stock market has a long way to fall before it reaches anything we could call low. Mortgage interest rates are creeping along at the lowest possible rates. Unemployment is close to 4%, which is lower than even Keynesians of old could imagine in their wildest dreams.

The private sector is creating a miracle a day, even as the stuff that government attempts is failing left and right. The bureaucracies are as wasteful and useless as they've ever been, spending is already insanely high, debt is skyrocketing, and there's no way that any American believes himself to be under-taxed.

The Democrats, meanwhile, go about their merry business as if the public schools were a model for all of society. Oh, and let us not forget their brilliant idea of shutting down the industrial economy and human prosperity so the government can plan the weather 100 years from now. We can only hope that there are enough serious people left to put a stop to this harebrained idea.

But before we get carried away about the Democrats, let's say a few words about the bloodthirsty Republicans, who think of war not as something to regret, but rather the very moral life of the nation. For them, justice equals Guantánamo Bay, and public policy means a new war every month, and vast subsidies to the military-industrial complex and such other Republican-friendly firms as the big pharmaceuticals. Sure, they pay lip service to free enterprise, but it's just a slogan to them, unleashed whenever they fear that they are losing support among the bourgeois merchant class.

So there we have it. Our times are good, and yet we face a choice between two forms of central planning. They are varieties of socialism and fascism, but not overtly: they disguise their ideological convictions so that we won't recognize that they and their ilk have certain predecessors in the history of political economy.

Into this mix steps Ron Paul, with a message that has stunned millions. He says again and again that government is not the way out. And even though his political life is nothing short of heroic, he doesn't believe that his candidacy is about him and his personal ambitions. He talks of Bastiat, Hazlitt, Mises, Hayek, and Rothbard — in public campaign speeches! And let no one believe that this is just rhetoric. Take a look at his voting record if you doubt it. Even the New York Times is amazed to discover that there is a principled man in politics.

It is impressive how crowds are hard-pressed to disagree with him. How much good is he doing? It is impossible to exaggerate it. He provides hope when we need it most. You see, the American economy may look good on the surface but underneath, the foundation is cracking. The debt is unsustainable. Savings are nearly nonexistent. Money-supply creation is getting scary. The paper-money economy can't last and won't last. One senses that the slightest change could cause unforeseen wreckage.

What would happen should the bottom fall out? Scary thought. We need ever more public spokesmen for our cause. In many ways, the Mises Institute bears a heavy burden as the world's leading institutional voice for peace and economic liberty. And we are working in every way possible to make sure that the flame of freedom is not extinguished, even in the face of legions of charlatans and powermongers. Even though the politics of our times is as dark as ever, there are bright lights on the horizon.

A Perspective on Education

One thing that bothers me: we tend to assume that class-room-style schooling is the only kind of education. I think that's a major mistake. It's frankly quickly becoming archiac; an authoritarian model of the late 19th century, modeled after the Prussian system. I would bet that for many people a one on one atmosphere is much more conductive to learning. There's also self-education and education from good parenting. Further, I think that the future of education (and media in general) is on the internet. I would be thrilled to take college courses through one on one webcam dialogue with a teacher, and using file sends.

I also would be thrilled to have more specialized say in what subjects I take, rather than pre-picked packages. When a student is actually interested in a topic, they are more likely to succeed. That's one of the reasons why public education has failed: it takes almost no consideration for what the student's interests are as an individual, and rigorously goes over the same things in highschool that already was supposed to be learned in middle school or elementary school. Why should we be surprised that the average highschooler is bored out of their mind? It feels like a jail-cell. It frankly borders on child abuse.

Another probem is the "one size fits all" approach. Each individual is different; that's why they are an individual. It is not possible for each individual to benefit from the exact same education model and subject selection. Standardization in many ways is anathema to true education. It works sort of like communism: everything is flattened and those who do well are pushed downwards, while those who aren't so talented are artificially propped up and presented with things that are beyond their means. It just doesn't work. We are not ants. We have individuality. The system supresses that. The extremely bright kids are overlooked and frankly left behind. On the other hand, the kids that need special help do not recieve it either.

The really bright and eccentric kids are almost uniformly drop-outs, and tend to get bad grades in highschool (Albert Einstein or Bill Gates anyone?). That speaks volumes for how unworkable the education system is. I'm no genuis, but I've learned more in my post-highschool years reading essays on the internet then I ever learned in highschool. In highschool, are kids taught economics? No. Are they taught sociology? Not really, although they do have social studies class, but alot of it is frankly biased, nationalist and romantic. Are they taught survival skills? Not at all! Are they vocationally trained? Perhaps a little bit, but it's mostly just a "what would you like to do when you grow up?" day once per year.

Another point that is not often considered is that our Prussian-style education system creates a disincentive towards parental responsibility. That is, the teachers or schoolmasters take over the role of parents, while the actual parents are given an incentive to transfer responsibility away from themselves and towards the bereaucrats. The public schools thus become nothing more than baby-sitters that have no real connection with the children. At best, the teacher is like a lazy baby-sitter. At worst, an abusive one. A teacher may be qualified to teach, but it is not likely that they are qualified to baby-sit a classroom full of children.

Save the Planet!

America: Free Market or Right-wing Socialism?

It is generally assumed without proof that the status quo, the current economic system in America, is capitalism. In the current political climate, the political left accepts this assumption and concludes that capitalism is bad because they see some negative things going on in the current system, some real and some entirely imagined. The political right accepts this assumption and concludes that the current system is good, that it is a free market economy, and they tend to have high confidence in the state of the economy because they see some good things going on in the current system, some real and some entirely imagined.

The trouble is, both of them are wrong. The left is under the illusion that the system they're attacking is capitalism. The right is under the illusion that the system they're supporting is capitalism. But the economic system of America is not free market capitalism, and argueably never was. If capitalism could be said to have ever existed as a system in America, it was roughly between 1750 and 1850, and it was never fully implemented, so we couldn't even say that the free market has ever really been implemented in full. That's because in order to get to the point of a pure free market, the state cannot exist.

This is important to point out. To the extent that there is a state, to the extent that there it has power over the individual, is the extent that the market is not free. To the extent that the government taxes, borrows, inflates, spends, legislates, subsidizes, prohibits, colludes, etc., is the extent to which the market is not free. To the extent that the government confiscates, claims ownership of or regulates property is the extent to which the market is not free. Every service that the government tries to provide, and monopolistically so, is a disruption of the voluntary economy. The enterprise of law and arbitration itself is a scarce resource like all others, and the existance of a government represents a disruption of a free market in this area.

So how can economic and governmental systems be evaluated? Boiling everything down to capitalism vs. communism is a bit oversimplistic. There certainly are systems that are somewhere in between the two. And it's not wise to red-bait people who are not necessarily red. However, it also must be emphasized that there is no such thing as a static equilibrium. Because no system is completely static, it is impossible to genuinely be "perfectly in the middle" of a political or economic spectrum. The advocation of such a position is contradictary and most certainly disingenuous.

One way to classify systems of economic organization would be to use a general spectrum of more vs. less economic control. A sensible interpretation may look as follows, in the order of the least economic control to the most:

The Free Market - No Economic Control. The free market is a system in which there is no government control of the economy. It is an economy based entirely on the voluntary decisions of those taking part in it. The free market is based primarily on private ownership of property, obtained through homesteading and voluntary exchange between property titles. To be carried out in practise, there can be no government in the commonly understood sense of the word.

Laizzes-Faire - Very Little Economic Control. Laizzes-faire is a system in which the government has strictly limited control over the economy. In it's most pure form, the only government services allowed is police, courts and defense. A laizzes-faire system largely has private ownership of the means of production and minimal if not negligable regulation.

Interventionism - Moderate Economic Control. Interventionism is essentially the process that leads towards socialism. It is not a permanent, static system perfectly in the middle, but rather a transatory system.

Socialism - Heavy Economic Control. Socialism is a system in which the government has considerable control over the economy. The government may own a significant portion of the means of production and it tries to centrally plan the economy.

Totalitarianism - Total Economic Control. There is no economic freedom in totalitarianism. The entire "economy" is completely determined, owned and regulated by the government. The state, in essence, replaces the economy entirely. There can be no "economy", in the commonly understood sense, to speak of.

But there are also various types of economic control. Economic control can be split up into government ownership and government regulation. Communism specifically involves government ownership, while Fascism specifically is based more on government regulation and collusion between private interests and the government. There are also various types of economic organization that are more specific than socialism or interventionism, which are forms of socialism or interventionism, or alternate forms of economic organization for stateless societies.

Syndicalism, for example, is a system based heavily or entirely on unions and worker-directed communes. Some anarchists believe that they can set up syndicalist and communist economic systems without a state. Pure free marketers tend to disagree, pointing out that both systems require force and confiscation, wether through a state or not, in order to be brought about. On the other hand, communist or socialist anarchists tend to make the claim that the free market is inherently coercive, and will lead to dictatorship. But in reality the free market is simply whatever the outcome is of people's voluntary labor and exchanges.

It should be clear that, no matter how totalitarian the government is, some degree of voluntary economic activity is going to take place, even if it is illegal. This is particularly obvious when we look at the case of prohibitions. It is illegal to voluntarily buy or sell certain drugs, but people find ways to do it anyways. It is impossible to completely stamp out free economic activity. On the other hand, illegal economic activity cannot be considered a true free market, because it is the consequence of government intervening to prohibit and/or limit the supply of a good or service. It becomes a free market as soon as the government ends the prohibition, and abstains for regulating it or claiming ownership over it.

There are many ways in which a government can erode the free market. To begin with, it's very existance disrupts it, because it's very existance and the continuation of that existance is dependant first and foremost on taxation, which siphons money away from the private sector, away from the original owner of the property. There are all sorts of different taxes. There are income taxes, property taxes, sales taxes, land-value taxes, inheritance taxes, capital gains taxes, and so on. There are also alternative ways for the government to accrue revenue, all of which disrupt the free market. It can borrow credit from foreign governments or banks, which also siphons money away from its private use. It can monopolize banking and print new money. It can also impose tariffs, which are essentially a tax on imports.

How the government spends this money disrupts the free economy, as it determines how the money will be redistributed away from its original owner and use towards new owners and uses. In short, government's revenue devices and it's spending of that revenue inherently creates a network of redistribution of resources. Government spending represents a reallocation of labor and goods and services other than would have voluntarily been chosen. First and foremost, this money goes to the primary functions of government such as police, courts and the military. Beyond this, it also goes to a whole host of other services such as public education, healthcare and roads. As the power of a government increases, it starts taking control of things that blatantly aren't really "necessities", such as space exploration and the arts.

Government services tends to be monopolized over time. The most obviously monopolized of these services would be the police. The government outlaws the private competition to the services that it provides. Furthermore, even if a degree of competition to a particular service is allowed, it is eroded by the spending of tax money on the public sector, which inherently erodes the capital of the private competition and warps the incentive structure. People often try to justify public services with the claim that there is no profitability in it, but they have it backwards. It is the public services that erode the profitability of the competition. If the public services were privatized, they would quickly become vastly more profitable, as well as vastly cheaper and more available to the masses.

Government spending for goods and services comes in all types. There is foreign aid, which transfers money and weapons from government to government. There is personal welfare, which gaurantees a direct redistribution of wealth between citezens. Modern warfare, of course, requires a whole lot of spending that goes to machinery, and to pay those in the army. It comes in the form of subsidies to agriculture, energy and various industries. It comes in the form of government contracts and bail-outs that go to buisinesses. As a piece of the pie, the money for all of this shows up in the paychecks of government bereaucrats. All of this involves a massive redistribution of resources, contrary how they would have been otherwise used and away from original ownership.

There seems to be no area that the government doesn't want to spend some money on, no matter how frivolous the cause in question is and regaurdless of wether or not it is necessary. It funds science, it funds the arts, it funds broadcasting, it funds sporting events. There is almost no special interest that the government does not collude with and redistribute resources to. Internally, the government expands the amount of people working for it, to run all of the departments and agencies, and mega-becreaucracies such as the department of homeland security. It all adds up.

There are many ways in which the government controls the economy without spending money. It can prohibit goods and services outright, or set a limit on their supply. It can impose wage and price controls. It can set minimum and maximim prices and wages. It can set quotas on imports and exports. It can use licensing to bestow the privilege of being allowed to legally work in certain fields. It can set up all sorts of regulations and requirements for goods and services. It can deliberately organize cartels. It can trust-bust buisinesses for having "predatory pricing", which can be defined subjectively however one desires, wether it's super lower prices or high ones. It can impose penalties and give out special rewards. It can control the rate of interest. It can force employers to hire certain people.

Governments can use conscription to either force people to work for it directly or for some other, private group. They can institutionalize and legalize involuntary servitude. They can control the hours of the workday. They can make union membership compulsory. They can impose compulsory consumption. They can restrict immigration, I.E. the amount of people and willing labor coming into and out of the territory. They can monopolize technology and intellectual property through the selective and privileged use of patent laws. They can use eminent domain on one's land and home property to either transfer ownership to the state or to some private lobbying interest and/or buisiness. They can put up barriers to unused resources and claim ownership of unused land. They can try to direct private investment.

America? A laizzes-faire haven? Give me a break. The American state, to varying degrees, engages in all of the kinds of intervention that's been mentioned. At best, it's an interventionist system quickly headed towards right-wing socialism. Perhaps a more sober examination reveals it already to be a right-wing socialist, fascist type of system. While the government in America does not own the means of production to the extent that a communist country would, it heavily redistributes, regulates and controls the economy in all kinds of ways. It has a long history of government-buisiness collusion and protectionism.

It's as if the left doesn't like right-wing socialism, but they think that right-wing socialism is the free market, so they want left-wing socialism or communism. And it's as if the right doesn't like left-wing socialism and communism, but they think that right-wing socialism is the free market, so they want right-wing socialism or fascism. The cliche idea that Republicans are die-hard free marketers hasn't had any truth to it for decades, since the 1950's at least, and even when the cliche had some truth to it, those weren't really the people who were running the party and in the mainstream of it. And the cliche idea that the Democrats are a bunch of commies doesn't necessarily hold up either, as they've historically been quite sympathetic to fascism and conservative brands of socialism.

It's time for people to understand what a free market actually is, in comparison to the current system, and that the current system is far from it.

Vintage Ron Paul

A Debate on "The West" vs. "Islam" and War

This is exerpted from a debate on a message board, in which the person being debated with is trying to justify the following premises (1) that all Muslims inherently present a threat to "the west", and this alleged threat on "the west" is meant to mean a threat on me as an individual and (2) that not only are "the west's" current wars in the middle east justified, but war against the entire Muslim world is justified. Their statements will be in quotes and italics, mine will be without quotes.

It is amazing that people who are supposed to be the greatest enemies of collectivism buy into forms of hobbesian collectivism by putting forth a conflict model of society ("the west", whatever that's supposed to mean, vs. the muslim heathen). This is all about breeding social conflict where it didn't exist before or need not exist. I'm interested in avoiding social conflict, not increasing it.

"You have hit on a fascinating subject when you said “the west” and expressed doubt as to whether such a thing really exists."

The point is that the invocation of "the west" is an obfuscation. Taking the word to describe a geographical territory, I am part of "the west" in that I am within that territory. I am not directly or overtly effected by Muslim people thousands of miles away, and I never will be. To say that there is a "war against the west" is to imply that there is a war against me; it implies uniformity.

But I walk around all day without any Muslim attacking me; indeed, without coming into contact with any at all. To imply that "the west" and me are the same thing is to engage in collective obfuscation. I am an individual. I am not "the west". And if I am considered to be a component part of "the west" this does not mean that an attack on another component part is an attack on me; as an individual I am still independant from those other component parts.

"The conflict does exist whether you choose to acknowledge it, or avoid it."

What conflict? An inherent conflict between "the west" and the "middle east"? That's just collectivist nonsense, because again it presumes uniformity on the part of both sides, which is not the case. Everyone who is a Muslim or everyone who is in the middle east is not waging war against everyone who is not a Muslim or everyone who is not in the middle east. If you take a look at objective reality, it would become obvious that it is particular "western" governments that have engaged in war against particular middle eastern territories by invading, occupying and bombing them.

On the other hand, empirical reality tells me that the chances of me being a victim of muslim terrorism are less than my chance of winning the lottery or spontaneously combusting; and the chances of "America" being taken over by middle easterners and transformed into a muslim theocracy is zero. The chances for a Muslim in the middle east to be "collateral damage" in "western" occupations and internal strife is much much higher than the chances for me to ever have to worry about anything close to what they deal with on a daily basis.

"As I have already stated before, there are people who mean us ill."

Intent in itself is not a crime. To enact an aggression against someone simply because you think that they might aggress against you in the future makes you the aggressor. It is not legitimate to enact force on people simply because they have ill desires towards others. You can only enact force in defense once they have actually overtly presented the threat. If I punch you in the nose because you, while on your own property to boot, insulted my character verbally or advocated verbally that the institutions I personally like should be done away with, then I am guilty of assault. Justifying initations of aggression by alluding to intent or "psychic damage" is the oldest trick in the book.

"There is a war."

Indeed, there is. It is was initiated by the U.S. government against multiple countries that did not attack "us".

"It was declared by them against us."

I'm sorry, but this is pure horsedung. No Muslims have literally militarily invaded any "western" territory. Many "western" governments, on the other hand, have been occupying their territory for decades on end. In either case, "Us vs. Them" is a collectivist obfuscation that assumes uniformity on the part of both sides, which simply is not the case, and creates what I refered to as a conflict model above. There is no "us"; we do not all agree. There is no "them"; neither are they uniform. The conflict model pits groups against eachother, as if there is inherent conflict between them that is impossible to resolve without warfare.

I object, because I myself as an individual am variant with the other members of the group that I'm allegedly part of, and I see the capacity in man to "live and let live" with people of different asthetic preferances. Man contains the capacity for cooperation despite inequality and disagreement. Conflict models are hobbesian and obfuscate the individual and variance. They invent social conflict where they need not exist or did not previously exist.

"We are not bad people for defending ourselves."

Once again, who is "we" to begin with? "We" presumues a uniformity that does not exist; I have not been aggressed against by any Muslim, therefore I have no legitimate defense claim. It would not be legitimate for me to go shoot some Muslim fellow; that would be murder. Furthermore, if "we" means the people of the united states, or any western "nation", you are simply making a false defense claim. There has been no offense to defend yourself against. What you are doing is engaing in the classic tactic of trying to justify iniations of aggression with false (and collective) defense claims.

Muslims can shout "down with the west! down with the west!" all they like. That would not present anyone with a justification for enacting aggression on them simply because they insulted your character. Furthermore, if we would stop identifying with collectives (such as "the west"), we would understand that we are decieving ourselves to interpret insults of "the west" as an insult of our personal characters as individuals. "The west" is just a concept to describe a territory. No particulular individual and their character can be described with the phrase. Otherwise, one is engaging in an absurd kind of anthropromorphicism.

This "us" and "the west" stuff is simply the old trick of getting people to identify with the state, which leads to the idea that the state is defending "us" in engaging in offensive warfare. I refuse to identify with something that I am not part of myself, and I further refuse to act as if any group I may be part of requires uniformity (I.E. absolute conformity to the other component parts) on my part. I refuse to be insulted personally by attacks on an abstract concept that does not actually describe me as an individual. And I refuse to allow the illusion of national territorialism to force me sacrifice myself to such an abstraction. I will only sacrifice myself for what I value as an individual (I.E. self-interest), not to collectives.

"There are dangers to you posed by Islam in the form of an establishment of a muslim theocracy."

In America? Absolute lunacy. There is virtually zero chance of me being subject to Muslim theocracy as imposed externally. On the other hand, there is indeed a huge chance of me being subject to totalitarianism as imposed internally. Furthermore the logical result of the aggressive state warfare that you suggest would lead to increases in government power at home, and that in itself is what constitutes the true, direct threat to me right in my backyard.

"Intent IS the crime!"

Intent in itself can be nothing more than a thought. Intent is not a crime. Intent in itself does not effect me as an individual. A criminal is a criminal because they act out their ugly intentions. On the other hand, someone who simply has ugly intentions, but lacks the courage or willpower to actually carry them out in physical action against others, does not constitute a criminal. A low-life perhaps, but not an aggressor.

"Intent is at the center of what it means to commit a crime."

Not quite. I can simply wish death upon you, and not act this out. Intent does not necessarily lead to physical action. I can intend things all day and not actually do anything about them. Most muslims, and religionists in general, I think can be viewed this way. They are cowardly in this sense. Sure, they may shout incoherancies and advocate ugly things against "the west", but the bulk of them do not carry it out in action against those whom they preach hate against (out of cowardice, at best they can externalize the costs onto others to act it out for them, through the mechanism of an institution such as a government). Are you seriously trying to get me to believe that an entire collective deserves aggression to be enacted on them because of either (1) their hateful opinions in themselves or (2) the aggressive actions of a small group of people within their ranks? This cultural collectivism of yours has to be addressed. It is illogical.

"Someone who advocates killing you because you are a kafur invites a just retaliation as long as you confine your killing to just him."

Really now? So if someone simply makes the statement that "all Americans should die", I am justified in aggressing against that person merely because of their verbal advocation that I should be dead (which, again, hinges on me identifying with the nation and state, which I regaurd as a pile of collectivist bulldung)? Verbal advocation is not a crime. You can write all the pamphlets and advocate stuff verbally all you like. It becomes a crime when you start to act on it. Most people do not act on their verbal advocations. Now, if the person makes the verbal advocation on my property, then we can start to have a legitimate defense claim of some sort, insofar as I can have that person leave my property if I desire, forcably if necessary.

"As I will show, we did not start this war."

As can be seen from objective reality, the united states government invaded a territory, which contains some people who never did anything to any American (actually practically none of them have; zilch, zero). That is an initation of aggression. To argue otherwise is to make a grand obfuscation of what an initation of aggression is. The country that actually militarily invades another territory is the starter of a war, the initator of the war.

This should be quite obvious. A war is started by the initial act of invasion. No Iraqi (or Iranian) has invaded America, there has been no military invasion of America, and nor would it be legitimate to enact aggression against an entire group because of what one person in that group did (that would constitute an initiation of aggression against innocent bystanders). You go after the actual individual aggressors, not entire "nations", not everyone within an entire territory irrespective of their own responsibility as individuals.

"I will leave it at that and continue assembling my sources and references so that you can read and judge for yourself whether there is a threat, who constitutes that threat, if we may consider all of Islam as a rotten egg as regards their intentions towards us etc etc."

Here's a clue: it's the governments that set up the initial crises. All of them to one degree or another. On the other hand, governments are to be distinguished from "society" or "the people". Governments are a particular small band of individuals who control a monopoly over a given territory. The "society" that they rule over is constituted by a separate group; those who are subjects to the given territorial monopolist (I.E. state). None of the people in that group have aggressed against me, and therefore as an individual I cannot have a defense claim against that which has not actually aggressed against me. I am not justified in aggressing against people who never aggressed against me. It's that simple. It's really that simple.

I think your position hinges on collective territorialism and group-identity-think. What you are asking me to do, in essence, is sacrifice myself to a collective ("the west") in the name of fighting a collective ("the muslims") that has done nothing to me as an individual. When I think about it, the demand you're making of people is incredibly altruistic. To spell things out even more clearly: what you are advocating is genocide in the name of "preserving the west".

The Libertarian Alliance With Paleo-Conservatism

Libertarians have traditionally had an assumed alliance with the "old right" or "paleo-conservatives". This makes sense in that many modern libertarian figures came out of the "right" of the 20's and 30's. However, I think there is some mythology going on here. While the old right certainly had its virtues, it is a stretch to claim that they were the bastion of libertarianism.

The old right contained definite libertarian elements within it to be sure, but it also contained some rather ugly elements as well: racists, nationalists and protectionists. Libertarians were never, ever, in the majority, even in the "old right". The old right, like all major political movements, was a mixed bag. It had a libertarian faction, but it also had some rather statist factions.

When I think of the old right, I am knee-jerkedly led to think of its virtues: resistance to the new deal, resistance to communism, resistance to WWI and the warfare state in general, laizzes-faire sentiment. But libertarians would be foolish to gloss over its vices: cultural separatism, bad forms of isolationism and protectionist elements. While libertarians tend to be non-interventionists on foreign policy, non-interventionism is not isolationism in my view.

Isolationism is an interventionist policy, revolving around (1) economic protectionism (2) extreme hostility to immigration; heavy immigration restriction and police enforcement of "borders" and (3) support for, or by the very least indifferance to, institutional (I.E. governmentally backed) segregation and racism; racist governmental policies. "Isolationism" does not just apply to relations between large territories like nations, but also down to the micro level, between towns and the various identity-groups within them.

While libertarians support free association (and by defacto, free disassociation), some paleo-conservatives tend to cross the line of free association in supporting some degree of forced segregation, I.E. governmentally created forced disassociation. The distinction between free disassociation and institutional segregation is an important one to make, for it separates a neutral policy from a separatist one. The two are entirely different.

There are other elements of the old right that are simply ultra-conservative, not libertarian, such as support for religious-based legislation, affinity with white power and neo-nazi movements, and even monarchists. Even in conjunction with libertarian causes such as opposition to central banking, you will find fringe nutbags with their own personal agendas (like world government and marxist conspiracy theories).

Indeed, neo-nazis tend tend to jump on the anti-central-banking bangwagon because they connect it to their views on Jews as banker-robber-barons. While libertarians oppose the federal reserve because of the disastrous economic effects of inflation, the need for competition and the Austrian buisiness cycle theory, paleos and neo-nazis oppose it because of tin-foil-hat conspiracy theories about the illuminati, free masons and Jews.

When libertarians ally themselves with paleoconservatives, they should be weary that they are allowing these elements into the libertarian movement itself. It should be quite clear that libertarianism is NOT a right-wing movement (and neither is it a left-wing one). Figures such as Pat Buchannan, while they may help the cause in some respects, hinder the cause in many respects (such as his extreme support for protectionism and his "culture war" nonsense).

It should be stated loud and clear: paleo-conservatives are not libertarians. Libertarians differ with paleo-conservatives as much as they share things with them, if not moreso. Furthermore, when properly estimated, the agenda of modern paleo-conservatives is not much less interventionist then that of the neo-conservatives. Nazism and paleo-conservatism have at least this one thing in common: staunch opposition to international capitalism.

Classical liberalism, which libertarianism is descended from, was cosmopolitan in that it viewed liberty as something to be applied universally, and it supported freedom of exchange (in economic goods and services, ideas, and people) between territories. Paleo-conservatism is just the opposite: it is anti-cosmopolitan, and therefore nationalist. It is fundamentally opposed to international trade, including the movement of people between territories. Paleo-conservatism wishes for an impossible world in which "nations" (I.E. territories) are kept hermetically sealed from eachother, with no genuine inter-territorial relations.

To the modern day paleo-conservative, it is the government's legitimate job to "protect our culture" (which in reality means the personal culture of a particular group, rather than the actual culture) and create "national unity". But from a purist classical liberal perspective, this destroys the natural polycentric nature of the society; "national unity" becomes nothing but a canard for coerced uniformity. "Protecting our culture" becomes nothing but the governmental enforcement of a particular cultural world-view onto everyone.

While the paleos are correct in their opposition to global government, their rationale for it is nonsensical and they unfortunately extend it to opposition to a global economy. Indeed, they tend to equate the two, claiming that a global economy is the pre-text to global government. They base their attack on global government not from the perspective of anti-government so much as pro-national-government. In other words, they oppose global government only because they see it as a threat to national government.

In practise, paleo-conservative opposition to global government is based on nationalism. They are national territorialists; which is, at root, a collectivistic conception of land/territorial property. In short, paleoconservatives correctly reject the collectivism of global territorialism, but then incorrectly support the collectivism of national territorialism. Indeed, hardcore paleo-conservatism appears to have much in common with national socialism than anything else on such questions. The national socialists strongly opposed the idea of both global communism and global capitalism, and then strongly supported a nationalist and right-wing variant of socialism.

If libertarians allow themselves to turn a blind eye to the obvious vices of their paleo-conservative bretheren, then the movement will be hijacked by them, gauranteed. Nationalist and protectionist notions are not conductive to liberty. They are historical enemies of it. The spirit of nationalism destroys the spirit of liberty by instilling the desire for territorial monopoly and uniformity into people's minds. It destroys all consideration for natural polycentrism and inequality (I.E. "diversity"). Paleo-conservatism is simply too monocentric and monolithic to be conductive to liberty.

Penn and Teller on Immigration

Identifying With the State

by Buttler Shaffer

One of the deadliest practices we engage in is that of identifying ourselves with a collective entity. Whether it be the state, a nationality, our race or gender, or any other abstraction, we introduce division – hence, conflict – into our lives as we separate ourselves from those who identify with other groupings. If one observes the state of our world today, this is the pattern that underlies our deadly and destructive social behavior. This mindset was no better articulated than when George W. Bush declared “you’re either with us, or against us.”

Through years of careful conditioning, we learn to think of ourselves in terms of agencies and/or abstractions external to our independent being. Or, to express the point more clearly, we have learned to internalize these external forces; to conform our thinking and behavior to the purposes and interests of such entities. We adorn ourselves with flags, mouth shibboleths, and decorate our cars with bumper-stickers, in order to communicate to others our sense of “who we are.” In such ways does our being become indistinguishable from our chosen collective.

In this way are institutions born. We discover a particular form of organization through which we are able to cooperate with others for our mutual benefit. Over time, the advantages derived from this system have a sufficient consistency to lead us to the conclusion that our well-being is dependent upon it. Those who manage the organization find it in their self-interests to propagate this belief so that we will become dependent upon its permanency. Like a sculptor working with clay, institutions take over the direction of our minds, twisting, squeezing, and pounding upon them until we have embraced a mindset conducive to their interests. Once this has been accomplished, we find it easy to subvert our will and sense of purpose to the collective. The organization ceases being a mere tool of mutual convenience, and becomes an end in itself. Our lives become “institutionalized,” and we regard it as fanciful to imagine ourselves living in any other way than as constituent parts of a machine that transcends our individual sense.

Once we identify ourselves with the state, that collective entity does more than represent who we are; it is who we are. To the politicized mind, the idea that “we are the government” has real meaning, not in the sense of being able to control such an agency, but in the psychological sense. The successes and failures of the state become the subject’s successes and failures; insults or other attacks upon their abstract sense of being – such as the burning of “their” flag – become assaults upon their very personhood. Shortcomings on the part of the state become our failures of character. This is why so many Americans who have belatedly come to criticize the war against Iraq are inclined to treat it as only a “mistake” or the product of “mismanagement,” not as a moral wrong. Our egos can more easily admit to the making of a mistake than to moral transgressions. Such an attitude also helps to explain why, as Milton Mayer wrote in his revealing post-World War II book, They Thought They Were Free, most Germans were unable to admit that the Nazi regime had been tyrannical.

It is this dynamic that makes it easy for political officials to generate wars, a process that reinforces the sense of identity and attachment people have for “their” state. It also helps to explain why most Americans – though tiring of the war against Iraq – refuse to condemn government leaders for the lies, forgeries, and deceit employed to get the war started: to acknowledge the dishonesty of the system through which they identify themselves is to admit to the dishonest base of their being.

The truthfulness of the state’s rationale for war is irrelevant to most of its subjects. It is sufficient that they believe the abstraction with which their lives are intertwined will be benefited in some way by war. Against whom and upon what claim does not matter – except as a factor in assessing the likelihood of success. That most Americans have pipped nary a squeak of protest over Bush administration plans to attack Iran – with nuclear weapons if deemed useful to its ends – reflects the point I am making. Bush could undertake a full-fledged war against Lapland, and most Americans would trot out their flags and bumper-stickers of approval.

The “rightness” or “wrongness” of any form of collective behavior becomes interpreted by the standard of whose actions are being considered. During World War II, for example, Japanese kamikaze pilots were regarded as crazed fanatics for crashing their planes into American battleships. At the same time, American war movies (see, e.g., Flying Tigers) extolled the heroism of American pilots who did the same thing. One sees this same double-standard in responding to “conspiracy theories.” “Do you think a conspiracy was behind the 9/11 attacks?” It certainly seems so to me, unless one is prepared to treat the disappearance of the World Trade Center buildings as the consequence of a couple pilots having bad navigational experiences! The question that should be asked is: whose conspiracy was it? To those whose identities coincide with the state, such a question is easily answered: others conspire, we do not.

It is not the symbiotic relationship between war and the expansion of state power, nor the realization of corporate benefits that could not be obtained in a free market, that mobilize the machinery of war. Without most of us standing behind “our” system, and cheering on “our” troops, and defending “our” leaders, none of this would be possible. What would be your likely response if your neighbor prevailed upon you to join him in a violent attack upon a local convenience store, on the grounds that it hired “illegal aliens?” Your sense of identity would not be implicated in his efforts, and you would likely dismiss him as a lunatic.

Only when our ego-identities become wrapped up with some institutional abstraction – such as the state – can we be persuaded to invest our lives and the lives of our children in the collective madness of state action. We do not have such attitudes toward organizations with which we have more transitory relationships. If we find an accounting error in our bank statement, we would not find satisfaction in the proposition “the First National Bank, right or wrong.” Neither would we be inclined to wear a T-shirt that read “Disneyland: love it or leave it.”

One of the many adverse consequences of identifying with and attaching ourselves to collective abstractions is our loss of control over not only the meaning and direction in our lives, but of the manner in which we can be efficacious in our efforts to pursue the purposes that have become central to us. We become dependent upon the performance of “our” group; “our” reputation rises or falls on the basis of what institutional leaders do or fail to do. If “our” nation-state loses respect in the world – such as by the use of torture or killing innocent people - we consider ourselves no longer respectable, and scurry to find plausible excuses to redeem our egos. When these expectations are not met, we go in search of new leaders or organizational reforms we believe will restore our sense of purpose and pride that we have allowed abstract entities to personify for us.

As the costs and failures of the state become increasingly evident, there is a growing tendency to blame this system. But to do so is to continue playing the same game into which we have allowed ourselves to become conditioned. One of the practices employed by the state to get us to mobilize our “dark side” energies in opposition to the endless recycling of enemies it has chosen for us, is that of psychological projection. Whether we care to acknowledge it or not – and most of us do not – each of us has an unconscious capacity for attitudes or conduct that our conscious minds reject. We fear that, sufficiently provoked, we might engage in violence – even deadly – against others; or that inducements might cause us to become dishonest. We might harbor racist or other bigoted sentiments, or consider ourselves lazy or irresponsible. Though we are unlikely to act upon such inner fears, their presence within us can generate discomforting self-directed feelings of guilt, anger, or unworthiness that we would like to eliminate. The most common way in which humanity has tried to bring about such an exorcism is by subconsciously projecting these traits onto others (i.e., “scapegoats”) and punishing them for what are really our own shortcomings.

The state has trained us to behave this way, in order that we may be counted upon to invest our lives, resources, and other energies in pursuit of the enemy du jour. It is somewhat ironic, therefore, that most of us resort to the same practice in our criticism of political systems. After years of mouthing the high-school civics class mantra about the necessity for government – and the bigger the government the better – we begin to experience the unexpected consequences of politicization. Tax burdens continue to escalate; or the state takes our home to make way for a proposed shopping center; or ever-more details of our lives are micromanaged by ever-burgeoning state bureaucracies.

Having grown weary of the costs – including the loss of control over our lives – we blame the state for what has befallen us. We condemn the Bush administration for the parade of lies that precipitated the war against Iraq, rather than indicting ourselves for ever believing anything the state tells us. We fault the politicians for the skyrocketing costs of governmental programs, conveniently ignoring our insistence upon this or that benefit whose costs we would prefer having others pay. The statists have helped us accept a world view that conflates our incompetence to manage our own lives with their omniscience to manage the lives of billions of people – along with the planet upon which we live! – and we are now experiencing the costs generated by our own gullibility.

We have acted like country bumpkins at the state fair with the egg money who, having been fleeced by a bunch of carnival sharpies, look everywhere for someone to blame other than ourselves. We have been euchred out of our very lives because of our eagerness to believe that benefits can be enjoyed without incurring costs; that the freedom to control one’s life can be separated from the responsibilities for one’s actions; and that two plus two does not have to add up to four if a sizeable public opinion can be amassed against the proposition.

By identifying ourselves with any abstraction (such as the state) we give up the integrated life, the sense of wholeness that can be found only within each of us. While the state has manipulated, cajoled, and threatened us to identify ourselves with it, the responsibility for our acceding to its pressures lies within each of us. The statists have – as was their vicious purpose – simply taken over the territory we have abandoned.

Our politico-centric pain and suffering has been brought about by our having allowed external forces to move in and occupy the vacuum we created at the center of our being. The only way out of our dilemma involves a retracing of the route that brought us to where we are. We require nothing so much right now as the development of a sense of “who we are” that transcends our institutionalized identities, and returns us – without division and conflict – to a centered, self-directed integrity in our lives.

Trendy, Modern, Emergent Evangelicals Want To Bomb Darfur

by Bill Barnwell

Count me as a loud dissenter to one of the latest trendy causes of many younger Evangelicals: Darfur. I have no desire to push our already overstretched military to intervene and bomb foreign warring factions into peace, love, and happiness. Interesting how many of the same people who complain about our continued military presence in Iraq (and I join in their criticisms) want the UN or the US to start dropping bombs in Darfur to kill even more people in the name of humanitarianism.

Darfur is certainly a troubled region. You can read about this very unstable area of Sudan and its long and complicated background here. However, according to some younger "emergent church"-type Evangelicals and a coalition of other voices on the left and right, the situation isn’t really all that complex. We have the power to easily solve the crisis. What’s needed is "social justice," they say. Apparently the socially just thing to do is bomb Sudan, invade yet another country, and involve ourselves in yet another messy civil war. Alas, the facts are always a little more complicated than the humanitarian enthusiasts would have you believe.

So, while many progressive Evangelicals are calling for our exit in Iraq, they are also simultaneously calling for our entrance into Sudan. Their problem is not so much that bombs are falling; they are just are in disagreement with where the bombs are falling. Progressive Evangelicals will take issue with that statement and say they merely support sanctions and UN peacekeepers to start with, and then maybe the tanks and bombs. But if history is any judge, once we insert ourselves into a "UN peacekeeping mission," we seemingly never leave. A timetable is set and pushed back year after year. "Peacekeeping" also tends to be a prelude to "war-making." And as Richard Land (the Southern Baptist Convention’s head of their Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission) says, any peacekeeping mission will need the necessary "military teeth."

According to some of our anti-Iraq war, pro-peace Evangelicals, all we need to do is just give war a chance in Darfur. This turnaround is similar to the peacenik left-wingers who in '99 traded in their lava lamps, open-toed sandals and Grateful Dead CD’s for machines guns during their euphoria to bomb Serbia for "humanitarian" reasons. Of course, those laptop bombardiers weren't the ones actually going to war, just like the belligerent rightwing bloggers and radio personalities are not the ones serving in Iraq today.

Yet eight years later that region is still largely a mess and most the stated reasons for going into that war turned out to be exaggerations or untrue. We were told Milosevic was a "new Hitler" even though he was losing a province every couple of years and his country's economic and military strength was puny. Allegations of genocide were overstated and atrocities were revealed on both sides. There's certainly real atrocities going on in Darfur right now (and that are worse than existed in Kosovo), but I have no reason to believe that we are going to make the situation all better with tanks and bombs, and apparently neither do many of the aid workers actually on the ground over there.And what of all those millions of dollars raised by the "Save Darfur Coalition?" Well, according to this recent New York Times article, it's actually not getting to Darfur and not doing much if any relief. And what do relief workers think of this proposed UN military intervention being pushed for by various left-wing gunslingers and their hipster Evangelical buddies? They claim it will result in more carnage and more damage, not less.

Note that most people attracted to a particular cause think that war should be waged long before all other options are exhausted or facts on the table (See Iraq in the summer 2002–early 2003). Personally as a Christian, I really don't see the New Testament ethic pointing towards a promotion of military strife, certainly not before all the facts are in and all options exhausted.

For every Christian who plays some "gotcha" game with me by pointing to the various wars of ancient Israel, I ask them to actually look at what the New Testament has to say. Romans 13 grants the state the authority to punish its own transgressors, but I don't see this as giving blanket authority for waging undeclared do-gooder wars against other sovereign territories – wars that often cause more harm than good. And this is a disputed point, but some NT Greek scholars would contend that the "sword" being referenced in Romans 13 is a small defensive dagger. Whatever it is, its best application for today probably isn't Humvees and stealth bombers against foreigners and "collateral damage" (a.k.a. innocent civilians).

But I'm a realist, and I know war is not likely to go away anytime soon. As a practical matter, however, I don't see this one meeting a theological or constitutional smell test. Certainly not yet at least. If someone could actually make a convincing case that bombing the bad guys of Darfur would result in a net positive, even though it would probably inflict its own evils, I might entertain such utilitarian notions even though that kind of moral equivocating troubles me. But more likely you'd have a situation similar to what happened in Kosovo, an area most people today have long forgotten about which is still quite screwed up. Or you could have American ground soldiers get in the middle of a bloody and messy civil war. I think we're already in the middle of one too many of those as it is. There is also the unfortunate reality that even though America is big and strong, it is not able, nor should it try to correct all the wrongs in the world. And as we are now seeing, it doesn't always work to try and force people to resolve their differences and get along happily ever after, even when you try and force them with a government-paid-for gun. Also, whether we want to admit it or not, we are just too stretched economically and militarily to insert ourselves into a never-ending stream of global conflicts, even ones like Darfur that involve real human rights abuses.

Make no mistake, both the left and right love military force; they just love it for different reasons. Putting the humanitarian crusaders in charge would not necessarily reduce America’s involvement in foreign wars and entanglements. They too love to play the role of Globocop. Keep that in mind before you enlist in their brigades to hop aboard the Darfur bandwagon.

On Immigration: Take Our Freedoms, Please!

http://www.strike-the-root.com/71/morris/morris3.html
by Jonathan David Morris

I’m glad immigration is in the news these days. I love when people start discussing immigration. No other topic does a better job of popping the veins in Bill O’Reilly’s forehead.

It’s amazing how rarely we frame this debate in terms of what it is. There are people in this country—and O’Reilly is one of them—who would close the border, line it with soldiers, and build a brick wall reaching all the way up to Heaven. These people invariably paint a picture of crazed lawbreaking aliens who come here to break laws and be crazed as if killing and raping Americans were what they were bred to do.

Unfortunately, crazed lawbreaking aliens aren’t what this issue is really about. If it was, I could see supporting a closed-border policy. But it isn’t. It’s about us.

You may be asking, “How do you figure?” Or maybe you’re thinking, “Darn right it’s about us. It’s about protecting the people who already live here.” Even in theory, this is nonsensical. Like closing our doors to an influx of foreigners could possibly save us from murder and rape?

To understand what’s at stake in immigration, you have to understand what immigration is. The only way to describe it is freedom—freedom to travel where one wants to travel; freedom to work where one wants to work.

Some people aren’t going to like this definition. That’s fine. You don’t have to. Just admit the description is true.

Immigration, in a sense, is the very stuff of freedom. If humans can’t go where they want to go, they aren’t entirely free.

America is [mostly] a nation of laws. America should be a nation of laws, and people who want to be Americans should respect the laws we’ve established. But the problem with immigration isn’t that immigrants are disrespecting our policies. It’s that our policies disrespect individual freedom. Laws that infringe upon liberty are difficult laws to respect.

The hysteria over “getting control” of our borders resembles a furor that has never worked for any people in any country ever. It didn’t work for the pure and innocent Germans who accepted restrictions on evil, greedy, go-where-they-please Jewish people. And it didn’t work for post-World-War-I Americans who accidentally banned the most useful crop in history under the guise of a devious Mexican weed called marihuana that was causing scary black men to get high and elope with fancy white girls.

Whenever a country salivates over the chance to hand in a freedom, that country is always, inevitably wrong. Restricting the rights of others to come here renders us a prison from sea to shining sea.

What America really needs isn’t more restrictive immigration policies, but less. Don’t make it harder for people to come here; make it easier. If you want to keep track of who lives here, punish rapists and killers, and stop folks from siphoning all our free services, open immigration is the surest way how.

Who knows? Stop forcing immigrants to immigrate under the radar and you may even encourage them to assimilate faster. This will finally do away with all those bilingual phone prompts we’ve all grown so sick of. And maybe if they speak English, you won’t feel so bad when hardworking foreigners come and take your job.

The internal contradictions of U.S. imperialism

http://antiwar.com/justin/?articleid=11152
by Justin Raimondo

When the history of the Iraq war is written, the question of who lost it and how it was lost will be paramount, yet the answer is clear enough even today. The seeds of defeat were sown long ago, and not just by the policymakers and authors of our present disastrous policy. The co-authors of defeat in Iraq are the politicians and the U.S. military, both of whom are constrained by the internal political dynamics of U.S. imperialism. The military deficiencies that some, like Sen. Harry Reid, have pointed to are not a matter of individual "incompetence" on the part of some generals: the inefficiencies are inherent in the system.

Via Matt Yglesias we hear the news that the U.S. is now ramping up the air strikes, a sure sign – according to William Lind – that we are losing and clueless:

"Nothing could testify more powerfully to the failure of U.S. efforts on the ground in Iraq than a ramp-up in airstrikes. Calling in air is the last, desperate, and usually futile action of an army that is losing. If anyone still wonders whether the 'surge' is working, the increase in air strikes offers a definitive answer: it isn't."

Civilian casualties are way up – but who cares? Not the Americans, who are so fixated on the internal politics of the war – the "battles" raging in Washington, D.C. – that they don't have either the time or the inclination to pay attention to the "metrics" coming out of Iraq.

Besides which, as Yglesias reminds us, the Pentagon doesn't bother keeping track of Iraqi casualties. In a war for hearts and minds, however, the civilian casualty rate is a big indicator of American (or insurgent) success: the higher the rate, the lower are the chances that the U.S. can pull it off. After all, we are aiming – presumably – to give the Iraqis the security within which they can resolve their intractable political situation and begin to stand up (so we can stand down), but the bureaucratic and political imperatives of the imperial system that is evolving – in Iraq and everywhere else the American footprint is large – override the strategic requirements of fighting a successful war, as this story makes all too clear:

"The Air Force feels left out of the counterinsurgency debate. What's particularly galling to some officials is that the role of air power was relegated to a five-page annex at the back of the new Army and Marine Corps counterinsurgency manual. Setting out to rectify that perceived shortcoming, the Air Force is drafting its own manual for irregular warfare, due out this summer. And officials are speaking out about air power's contribution to labor-intensive irregular warfare, seen as the domain of the U.S. military's ground pounders."

The war on the ground in Iraq must take a back seat to the ongoing war within the U.S. military between the "air power" boys and the "ground pounders." Everybody wants a piece of the action – except, of course, when it comes time to take responsibility for defeat, which is even now looming large in the Pentagon's nightmares.

One of the chief weaknesses of imperialism is that empires have their own internal dynamics, which don't always conform to the requirements of external military and diplomatic policy. The only hearts and minds the American military seems to care about are those in Washington: winning over the Iraqi people is incidental, because the incentives work the other way. The Air Force has to show it is part of the solution in Iraq, whether or not it can actually play a significant positive role on the battlefield, because that is the road to increased pull on the Hill and in the White House, which means more funding. Within the Empire are all these little empires, competing for tax dollars, prestige, and political primacy, and it is this civil war – always being fought, albeit at various levels of intensity – that is the ultimate undoing of the imperial order.

It doesn't matter that air power exacerbates the problem in Iraq, rather than solving it. It doesn't matter that we're alienating ordinary Iraqis, who often are the victims of U.S. air raids; all that matters is that the Air Force's rivalry with the Army (and the Navy) requires air strikes. What determines our "strategy" is a shifting concatenation of competing agencies and political factions that meet on the battlefield of congressional committees and the higher councils of U.S. policymakers. The outcome of this war – the intra-bureaucratic turf war – determines the strategy and conduct of the external war. And that is the road to certain defeat.

Rent by internal contradictions, the American Empire contains within it the seeds of its own destruction, and these are sown and nurtured by the sheer scope of it. I am reminded of an anecdote Rose Wilder Lane tells in her 1936 polemic Give Me Liberty: she had gone to Russia a convinced Communist and supporter of the October Revolution and was astonished to find that the "liberated" workers and peasants didn't share her enthusiasm for the proletarian state. She got into a debate with a Russian peasant, who appeared impervious to the lure of Leninism:

"I drew for him a picture of Great Russia, to its remotest corner enjoying the equality, the peace, and the justly divided prosperity of his village. He shook his head sadly. 'It is too big,' he said. 'Too big. At the top, it is too small. It will not work. In Moscow there are only men, and man is not God. A man has only a man's head, and one hundred heads together do not make one great big head. No. Only God can know Russia.'"

The American Empire is being undone by its bigness – no one can centrally plan such an enormous undertaking. The physical holdings of the Pentagon alone are so vast that they constitute a nation unto themselves, a huge empire as complex and far-flung as Great Russia then or now. The regime-changers in Washington are no better at planning the reconstruction of the Iraqi state than the central planners in the Kremlin were at building a modern industrial state out of a peasant-based economy.

The American Empire will end just as certainly and ignominiously as the Soviet Empire did – and, perhaps, even more rapidly, on account of the economic factors involved. It's true that our enormous wealth – i.e., the boundless productive capacity of capitalism – masks the true economic cost of war, to some degree. Yet, in the end, we may wind up being destroyed by the very market forces we are so intent on globalizing.

Empires cost money, and this one, as Garet Garrett wryly observed half a century ago, is unique in that "everything goes out and nothing comes in." The Romans exacted tribute from subject nations, seizing gold, slaves, and anything not nailed down. The American Imperium, on the other hand, is the Bizarro Empire, where U.S. taxpayers pay tribute to America's local satraps, such as Egypt and Israel – the two biggest recipients of our "foreign aid" program. We defend Japan and South Korea, allowing them to shelter under our military umbrella while they export finished goods to the American market – and lend us the money to build an empire of bases around the world.

As Ron Paul tirelessly points out, the American welfare-warfare state is built on the shifting sands of an economic pump-priming perpetual motion machine, i.e., government debt. We are selling our children into slavery and bankrupting the nation: this is the price of empire, at least in purely economic terms. The price in blood– ours, the Iraqis, and perhaps the Iranians and others in the not-too-distant future – is higher still. Whether the American people are prepared to pay it is a question that is currently torturing our elites: this is the real heart of the Iraq war issue in American politics, and both parties seem committed to persuading us that the price of empire is worth it. The Democrats propose to do it on the cheap. They solemnly vow to fight future wars of conquest "smartly," while the Republicans are more extravagant and daring, with a devil-may-care attitude about the expenditure of troops and treasure in pursuit of "global hegemony," as the neocons like to put it.

The rise and fall of the Bizarro Empire is going to be an object lesson in how greatness, and liberty along with it, is lost. The story promises to be Spenglerian in its tragic denouement yet oddly inspiring in that the old republic survived as long as it did – up until at least the fatal year 1917, when we were dragged into the Great War and the seeds of the next were planted. The beginning of the end was when America embarked on its long overseas crusade to make the world safe for democracy against the villain of the day. Twice the villains were Germans, and since then the Russians, the Iraqis, and now the "Islamofascists" have all had their turn.

Tomorrow it may well be the Russians again, and then there's always the Red Chinese, whom the Fates have entrusted with much of our debt – a weapon more deadly than any H-bomb.

America, having exhausted itself militarily, economically, and spiritually, will one day be found washed up on some foreign shore, a hapless Gulliver overrun by hordes of angry Lilliputians and bound by a thousand threads to their feuds. When the history of the American Empire is written, any fair and objective author will have to concur that it didn't have to turn out that way: if we choose the prerogatives of Empire over the ascetic ideals of our republican tradition, we go willingly to our doom.