On the Nature of Political Parties. by Fremdfirma

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On the Nature of Political Parties.

POSTED BY: FREMDFIRMA
UPDATED: Friday, August 3, 2007 13:18
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Wednesday, August 1, 2007 5:56 AM

I have already intimated to you the danger of parties in the State, with particular reference to the founding of them on geographical discriminations. Let me now take a more comprehensive view, and warn you in the most solemn manner against the baneful effects of the spirit of party generally.

This spirit, unfortunately, is inseparable from our nature, having its root in the strongest passions of the human mind. It exists under different shapes in all governments, more or less stifled, controlled, or repressed; but in those of the popular form it is seen in its greatest rankness and is truly their worst enemy....

It serves always to distract the public councils and enfeeble the public administration. It agitates the community with ill-founded jealousies and false alarms; kindles the animosity of one part against another; foments occasionally riot and insurrection. It opens the door to foreign influence and corruption, which finds a facilitated access to the government itself through the channels of party passion. Thus the policy and the will of one country are subjected to the policy and will of another.

There is an opinion that parties in free countries are useful checks upon the administration of the government, and serve to keep alive the spirit of liberty. This within certain limits is probably true; and in governments of a monarchical cast patriotism may look with indulgence, if not with favor, upon the spirit of party. But in those of the popular character, in governments purely elective, it is a spirit not to be encouraged. From their natural tendency it is certain there will always be enough of that spirit for every salutary purpose; and there being constant danger of excess, the effort ought to be by force of public opinion to mitigate and assuage it. A fire not to be quenched, it demands a uniform vigilance to prevent its bursting into a flame, lest, instead of warming, it should consume.

It is important, likewise, that the habits of thinking in a free country should inspire caution in those intrusted with its administration to confine themselves within their respective constitutional spheres, avoiding in the exercise of the powers of one department to encroach upon another. The spirit of encroachment tends to consolidate the powers of all the departments in one, and thus to create, whatever the form of government, a real despotism.... If in the opinion of the people the distribution or modification of the constitutional powers be in any particular wrong, let it be corrected by an amendment in the way which the Constitution designates. But let there be no change by usurpation; for though this in one instance may be the instrument of good, it is the customary weapon by which free governments are destroyed. The precedent must always greatly overbalance in permanent evil any partial or transient benefit which the use can at any time yield.

George Washington, 1796.

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Wednesday, August 1, 2007 7:09 AM

RIGHTEOUS9

I remember reading this somewhere before. I'm no great scholar of our electoral system, but I remember thinking how unjust the two-party setup was in the past.

I'm not sure it bothers me as much now. Granted, the actual establishment within both parties have a lot of control over the candidates that will be representing them, or I assume they do. Do people get vetted somehow when they decide to choose a ticket? Does somebody have to verify them, or is it just a matter of who the parties give money to?

I just don't know if any other system would be any different beyond appearance. It will still really just be about money in the end. It seems like at least in theory, people could use either party to build up a new face at the grass-roots level.

In our current primaries we have quite a spectrum in both parties, from hillary to Kusinich, and then the outlier Gravel who sounds more liberetarian, and from Huckabee to Paul in the Republican party. It also seems like 3rd parties never do anything more than play spoiler.

I would not vote for Nader because of that. If Nader got himself on a democratic primary ticket, then maybe I'd put my vote towards him...maybe(I don't really know much about his positions).

I did hear of one idea that was pretty interesting though, that might actually open up the viability of 3rd party candidates, and diminish the grip that the 2 dominating parties have. It was some sort of priority voting system. Everybody would choose a primary and secondary candidate. This might actually be in use in a country, I'm not sure. If your primary candidate was way too low in the race, your vote would default to your second choice, or something like that. This would allow people to feel like they weren't just throwing away their vote when they went for a long shot. Probably unlikely though.

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Wednesday, August 1, 2007 12:28 PM

FREMDFIRMA

That's called IRV, or Instant Runoff Voting, and of *course* they'd never allow it.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instant-runoff_voting

God forbid us peons actually have any say in running our so-called "representative" government, golly gee, we might actually dare to actually vote in someone not part of the established elite nobility, and then where would we be ?

The only way John Q Public is gonna get his say back is with the fourth box, and I think it's time we admitted that.

-Frem
It cannot be said enough, those who do not learn from history, are doomed to endlessly repeat it

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Thursday, August 2, 2007 7:36 AM

KANEMAN

A little long but kinda relevent

This talk was delivered on June 1, 2007, at the Future of Freedom Foundation’s Conference on "Restoring the Republic: Foreign Affairs and Civil Liberties."

There are two clear and present dangers to liberty in America. One is known as the left, and the other is known as the right. They are dangerous because they seek to use government to mold society into a form they seek, rather than the form that liberty achieves if society is left on its own.

I'm going to assume that the left and the right come to their views sincerely, that their passion for using government is driven by some fear that the absence of government would yield catastrophe. So the burden of my talk today will be to identify and explain the common thread that connects the worldview of the left and the right, and suggest that they are both wrong about the capacity of society, whether it is defined locally or internationally, to manage itself.

Let us begin with the question: why should we have confidence in the notion that society can develop on its own, that it contains within itself the capacity for self-management? Another way to ask the question: why do the advocates of leviathan believe that the members of society are incapable of achieving cooperative engagement in the absence of the state?

The discovery of this capacity for cooperation was the great intellectual contribution of the classical liberal school that gave rise to the American Revolution. It grew out of a belief that whatever imperfections social self-organization had, there was nothing that centralized government could do to improve it. They took the daring step of tossing off the rule of the state in favor of complete self-government. They didn't fear chaos. They looked forward to liberty.

This event was the product of the liberal idea, as held by most all sectors of society. Liberalism did not seek utopia. It sought liberty under the conviction that society had a built-in mechanism that permitted individual members to achieve a harmony of interests. They believed it to be true because they lived it. The belief in this harmony of interests was the great passion of the old liberal intellectuals, of which Thomas Jefferson was a leading exponent.

After the revolution, when government began to regroup and reconsolidate, the liberal idea began to gain detractors. John Adams, whom Jefferson beat in the great presidential election of 1800, never stopped resenting Jefferson's suspicions toward power and opposition to practically everything the federal government wanted to do. It was Jefferson's conviction that liberty yielded social cooperation; it was Adams's view that liberty could only be established and sustained through government authority. These two opposing views persist to this day.

Adams went so far as to level a familiar accusation against Jefferson's faith in pure liberty. Adams wrote him in 1813: "You never felt the terrorism of Shays' Rebellion in Massachusetts,…. You certainly never felt the terrorism excited by Genet in 1793, when ten thousand people in the streets of Philadelphia, day by day, threatened to drag Washington out of his house and effect a revolution in the government…. I have no doubt you were fast asleep in philosophical tranquility when…Market Street was as full of men as could stand by one another, and even before my door when some of my domestics, in frenzy, determined to sacrifice their lives in my defence…. What think you of terrorism, Mr. Jefferson?"

So we can see, then, how Shays' Rebellion served the government in the same way that 9-11 does now: it is held up as an example of the kind of terror that will befall us if we refuse to give government the power and money necessary to make the world peaceful and wonderful. What Adams conveniently overlooked is that the rebellion of which he spoke was actually sparked by taxation and government-backed credit expansion. There would have been no need for a revolt had government not created the conditions that led to it.

And so it is with 9-11. It was government that created the motives that led the hijackers to give up their lives, and it was government that had so regulated airline security that passengers and crew were defenseless in the face of criminals with box cutters. The right response would have been to roll back the conditions that created the motives for 9-11, and to unleash the power of private enterprise to prevent such attacks in the future. Instead, the impulse of the state as backed by uninformed public ideology was to escalate the conditions that breed terrorism and put government ever more in charge of airline security.

From Shays' Rebellion to 9-11, we see two worldviews of society at work. One sees the government as a source of liberty and order, and fears society without the state more than any conceivable alternative. The other sees government as a source of disorder that uses that disorder to enhance its power and material resources at the expense of society.

The left and the right in this country hold to the first view. The successors to Jefferson hold to the second view, which in Jefferson's time was called the liberal view, and which today is called the libertarian view.

There are international parallels in each of these positions. Conservatives are of the view that a world without a single superpower is chaos and darkness. The left believes in internationalizing their version of the domestic welfare state under the management of a single supra-national institution. Libertarians, on the other hand, believe that international society thrives best without either a superpower or a supranational manager. I maintain that these two views of order constitute the decisive ideological conflict of our time, that which pits the libertarians against the two prevailing ideologies.

The old liberal view lives in the writings of such people as John Locke, Frédéric Bastiat, Lord Acton, Alexis de Tocqueville, and, in the 20th century, in the work of Mises, Hayek, and Rothbard. Hayek himself traced the liberal tradition from Cicero, through the Middle Ages, to John Locke, David Hume, and Immanuel Kant. The thread that connects all their thought is the idea that society is more capable than government elites in shaping a prosperous order. In the same way that Locke believed that the nation-state was a threat to human rights and social peace, so Kant envisioned an international order that was unmanaged from the top down but rather generated its own orderly peace.

What was critical for Hayek in the liberal tradition was the conviction that liberty and law could exist in harmony with each other. Law itself emerged spontaneously from within society as its members sought better ways of managing their own affairs. The law of which Hayek speaks is law adhered to as a matter of voluntary contract, or what we more commonly refer to as rules. We have rules that govern the management of subdivisions, or civic organizations, or businesses, or churches. Or think of merchant law that emerged over many centuries of international trade. This law exists apart from the state, and reflects the desire of individuals to cooperate toward their own betterment, and the rightful conviction that their own betterment is consistent with the flourishing of society.

In contrast, writes Hayek, there is another tradition of law that sees all rules in society as rising from the state, and always and everywhere must amount to a restriction on the liberty of individuals. The exponents of this view include the tyrants and despots of the ancient world, and, in modern times, Thomas Hobbes and Karl Marx. The writings of the latter two are the preeminent influence over what we today call the right and the left.

It is impossible to understand this view of government without first understanding the illiberal view of society. The illiberal view regards society as essentially unworkable on its own because it is riddled with conflicting interests.

Let us begin with the left. They believe society has fundamental flaws and deep-rooted conflicts that keep it in some sort of structural imbalance. All these conflicts and disequilibria cry out for government fixes, for leftists are certain that there is no social problem that a good dose of power can't solve.

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

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

The remarkable fact about the conflict theory of society held by the left is that it ends up creating more of the very pathologies that they believe have been there from the beginning. The surest way to drive a wedge between labor and capital is to regulate the labor markets to the point that people cannot make voluntary trades. Both sides begin to fear each other. It is the same with relations between races, sexes, the abled and disabled, and any other groups you can name. It is the same with international relations. A tariff or trade sanction is nothing but war by another means. The best path to creating conflict where none need exist is to put a government bureaucracy in charge.

This view is the very heart of the old socialist vision. They believed that the key conflict in history was between those who owned capital and those who worked for capital. The gain of the capitalists always comes at the expense of labor; similarly, the advance of labor can only come from the expropriation of the capitalist class through a revolution that is just because the laborers are only taking back what was expropriated from them.

Now, as time has passed, we've come to see the error of this view. Capital and labor do not exist in fundamental conflict. Their relations are managed by contract in the same way that relations between laborers and capitalists are managed by contract. Moreover, these two groups are not hermetically sealed off from each other. Capitalists are workers, and workers can be capitalistic owners of their own property. Only in the most primitive stages does it appear otherwise.

Once it became obvious that Marxism had mischaracterized the workings of capitalism, the left looked for other forms of conflict to confirm their worldview. Most recently, they have begun to advance the idea that man's interests can only be pursued at the expense of nature. The flourishing of one occurs at the expense of the other. Thus it is that a seemingly happy and prosperous people could in reality be doing deadly damage to the earth, the interests of which can only be advanced at the expense of prosperous consumers and producers. The left accepts the reality that this will make everyone poorer, as all forms of socialism do, but they tell us that this is good for us and good for the planet.

The traditional and correct answer to the conflict theory is that there is essentially nothing government can do to improve the workings of society. During the Great Depression, for example, most everyone on the left thought that government was the only way out. The hard left favored Communist revolution. The soft left favored the New Deal. The old liberals pointed out that it was government itself that brought about the crisis, and that more government intervention could only make matters worse. This was a rational response, but it did not carry the day.

After the Second World War, we saw the emergence of a strange creature in American life, something that called itself conservatism. It was opposed to the left in American life, particularly that branch that was sympathetic to Communism. It counseled vagaries like prudence in public affairs. But in a crucial way, it adopted one tenet of the leftist worldview: it rejected old liberalism as a vision for how society can work in absence of government. It adopted a conflict view of society, a different brand rooted in the assertions of Hobbes rather than Marx. The idea that conflict was at the very heart of society, absent government, was a key aspect of this.

This new thing called conservative adopted some of the rhetoric of the old right. It defended property and enterprise in economic affairs. But what was critical was the introduction of a notion that society, if left to its own devices, would collapse into chaos. This was particularly true in international affairs. So while the Cold War was originally an invention of the Democrat Harry Truman, it was tailor-made to appeal to conservatives who were looking for an ideological enemy to slay. It is one thing to say that Communism is an evil ideological system; it is another to say that we cannot rest until every communist is killed and every Communist government wiped off the face of the earth.

What happened to the non-interventionist views of the old right? They were predicated on the idea that there could be a leaderless world order, that nations could get along without one overarching authority and source of law. But after the war, that too began to change. A new conviction arose.

Russell Kirk wrote in 1954 that "civilized society requires distinctions of order, wealth, and responsibility; it cannot exist without true leadership… society longs for just leadership…." He contrasted this view with what he considered the erroneous opinion of Ludwig von Mises, whom he attacks over the course of many pages. Mises, wrote Kirk, had exaggerated faith in the rationality of individuals. Kirk, in contrast, sees that all of history is governed by two great forces: love and hate. Neither are rational impulses. In order to achieve the triumph of love over hate, wrote Kirk, the conservative "looks upon government as a great power for good."

And so conservatives threw themselves behind the force of government to achieve their aims, and no matter how many wicked things government did over the years under conservative control, they always told themselves that it was surely better than the much-feared alternative of an unmanaged society.

Kirk became more explicit as the years went on, and after the old liberalism was refashioned by Rothbard as libertarianism, conservatives began to define themselves in opposition to all forms of liberalism. The government had many things to do in this world, they said. The police were the thin blue line that separated chaos from order – and forget just how awful the police often are in reality. The US military empire was all that stood between us and Soviet domination – and pay no attention to the fact that the Soviet economy was itself a basket case. They became cheerleaders of government power of a different sort.

Frank Chodorov was so fed up with tendencies on the right that he once said: "anyone who calls me a conservative gets a punch in the nose."

We have lived through six years of a Republican president who was backed by conservatives but who still escapes fundamental criticism by them. After promises of a humble foreign policy, war and war spending define our era. We're told that every problem with war can be solved through more force, there is nothing necessarily wrong with imprisoning people without cause and without legal representation, that torture can be a legitimate wartime tactic, that some countries have to be destroyed in order to be made free, and that we can have all the warfare and welfare we desire at virtually no cost, thanks to the miracle of central banking and debt-driven economic growth.

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

Elsewhere, I've referred to members of political groups that support the conservative right as "red-state fascists," and I don't use that phrase merely for rhetorical purposes. There was and is such a thing as fascism as a non-leftist form of social theory that puts unlimited faith in the state to correct what they see as flaws in society and the world.

Let's look more closely at the conservative view of police power. While it is true that law itself is critical to freedom, and police can defend rights of life and property, it does not follow that any tax-paid fellow bearing official arms and sporting jackboots is on the side of the good. Every government regulation and tax is ultimately backed by the police power, so free-market advocates have every reason to be as suspicious of socialist-style police power as anyone on the left.

Uncritical attitudes toward the police lead, in the end, to the support of the police state and, in turn, to the celebration of American imperialism as somehow filling a void in the world. And to those who doubt that, I would invite a look at the U.S.-backed regime in Iraq, which has been enforcing martial law since the invasion even while most conservatives have been glad to believe that these methods constitute steps toward freedom. I don't see this as a contradiction of conservative principles; it appears as the fulfillment of their essentially Hobbesian view of how society must function.

The problem of police power is hitting Americans very close to home. It is the police, much militarized and federalized, who are charged with enforcing the on-again-off-again states of emergency that have characterized American civilian life. It is the police that confiscated guns from New Orleans residents during the flood, kept residents away from their homes, refused to let the kids go home in the Alabama tornado earlier this spring, and will be the enforcers of the curfews, checkpoints, and speech controls that the politicians want during the next national emergency.

If we want to see the way the police power could treat US citizens, look carefully at how the US troops in Iraq are treating the civilians there, or how prisoners in Guantánamo Bay are treated. A leading contender for the Republican nomination received wild cheers when he proposed to double the capacity of Guantánamo.

This ideology of power that is inherent in postwar conservatism is particularly clear when it comes to war. In the 1970s, there developed a myth on the right that the real problem with Vietnam was not the intervention itself, but the failure to carry it out to a more grim and ruthless end. This seems to be the only lesson that the Bush administration garnered from the experience.

So the solution to every problem in Iraq – at least I can't think of an exception to the rule – has been to apply more force through more troops, more bombs, more tanks, more guns, more curfews, more patrols, more checkpoints, and more controls of all sorts. They believe that another surge will work wonders because they are out of ideas. It's as if the administration were on an intellectual trajectory that it cannot escape.

Even after all the evidence that the war on terror has produced ever more terrorism – and this evidence is offered up by the government’s own statistics – the champions of the war on terror cannot think their way out of the intellectual trap into which their ideology of force has locked them.

How is it that the war planners and their vast numbers of supporters do not question the underlying assumption that government is capable of achieving all its aims, provided that it is given enough time and firepower?

Let's look more carefully at their crude form of Hobbesianism. Thomas Hobbes's book Leviathan was published in 1651 during the English Civil War in order to justify a tyrannical central government as the price of peace. The natural state of society, he said, was war of all against all. In this world, life is "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short." Conflict was the way of human engagement. Society is rife with it, and it cannot be otherwise.

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

In fact, the result of the Civil War was the brutal and ghastly dictatorship of Oliver Cromwell, who ruled under democratic slogans. This was a foreshadowing of some of the worst political violence of the 20th century. It was Nazism, Fascism, and Communism that transformed formerly peaceful societies into violent communities in which life did indeed become "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short." Leviathan didn't fix the problem; it bred it, and fastened it on society.

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

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

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

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

The law of association points out that people of radically different abilities, backgrounds, religions, races, and capacities can successfully cooperate to achieve ever-higher levels of social welfare through negotiation and trade. The law of association is what explains the method by which humans were able to move out of caves, away from isolated production, beyond the hunter-gatherer stage, and into what we call civilization. This law makes it possible for people not to steal from each other and kill each other but cooperate. It is the basis of society. It is also the basis of international order.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The conviction that society, no matter how orderly it appears, is really nothing more than a gloss on deep-rooted conflict, expresses itself in the romantic attachment to the police power and war.

But it also affects the right's attitude toward religion. Many people are convinced that, in the end, it is not possible that society can be religiously heterogeneous. In particular, these days, most conservatives believe that the United States cannot abide the presence of Muslims and other religious minorities.

I'm sure you have heard, as I have, conservatives telling us that there can be no peace in the world so long as the Muslim religion exists. It is inherently bent on violence. They have always been our enemy and always will be. When I hear such claims, I can't help but think of Orwell's 1984, in which the enemies were always changing and the history always being rewritten. For it wasn't too long ago that we were told that Islam, and its fundamentalist branch in particular, was a wonderful ally in the war against Communism, and, moreover, that they share with us the virtues of faith and family.

So with a sigh, we must point out that so long as Western troops are not invading their countries and starving their people, we tend to get along rather well.

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

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

In short, their meta-understanding of politics bypassed the liberal revolution of the 18th century and embraced the anti-liberal elements of the Enlightenment. Liberty is fine but order, order, is much more important, and order comes from the state. They can't even fathom the truth that liberty is the mother, not the daughter, of order. That thought is too complex for the mind that believes that "the law" alone, legislated or by executive fiat, is what separates barbarism from civilization. Freedom, to them, is not a right but something conferred as a reward for good behavior. The absence of good behavior justifies any level of crackdown.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Thursday, August 2, 2007 8:27 AM

FREMDFIRMA

My word, Kane espousing Anarchist/Libertarian/Anti-Federalist sentiment, hand me the defillibrator martha, I may die of shock.

Painful tho it is to say, A+ for doing your own homework on this topic, Kane.

-Frem
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Thursday, August 2, 2007 11:02 AM

FLETCH2

Dang, Kane just posted something that's actually intelligent, on topic and thought provoking.

(Checks the sky isnt falling.)

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Friday, August 3, 2007 7:34 AM

RIGHTEOUS9

I'm sure there's a bit of a spectrum that encompasses leftist liberals like myself, but that speech certainly mischaracterized my own position numerous times.

First, and most importantly. I don't trust government to make good decisions for us. Faith in a big daddy government is not at all what me or most American liberals believe in. We believe that government is an extention of the people, and that the people should never stop paying attention to what their left and right hands are doing.

What I am hopeful of, is a government that actually does represent the people, because the people are paying attention, and to real information.

As a liberal, I don't want to take our governance out of our hands...I want us to govern. But there are forces that serve to weaken our ability to do so.

As a liberal, I take to heart Maslow's hierarchy of needs. They make sense to me. The American people need to govern. Therefore they need the fundamentals provided to them so that they can make healthy decisions.

As a liberal I am torn by states rights versus those of a central government. Some states are more conscienable towards their residents than others. I can be happy I live where I do and just hope things work out for them, but in truth our states are ultimately at the mercy of them as well. Matters of public educaton and matters of labor should be handled by the central government because states with governments that devalue the public will damage the public's ability to be capable and active voters.

I'm not being elitist. When people have less time to worry about public affairs because they're too worried about getting food on the table, or when people are informed that man coexisted with the dinosaurs after god created the earth in a public classroom, what kind of intelligent decisions can we expect them to make when they vote for a candidate, if they vote at all.

Granted, when folks like George Bush and the republican party gain power, then I become a renewed convert of states rights over federal. I appreciate the push and pull here to some extent. I remember Madison and Jefferson's campaign for states rights after the alien and sedition act was passed and I'm grateful to them.

Ultimately, I think with a working education, with enough humanitarian governance and motivation, we may not have to face a George Bush in the white house.

And I'm not talking about education as propaganda, by the way. I'm really talking about education as teaching the basics of how to solve problems and the importance of being curious.

........

I love that part in the speech about the employer employee contract. Like that exists without government oversight. Hell, even with government oversight and consent, we have companies yanking pensions of people who thought they had a "contract."

What kind of regulation under the auspices of "old liberal" ideals would exist? Or will we really just sort it all out ourselves.

I'll submit here that by voting in our public officials, and by demanding of them they act on our behalf, that is how we sort this out ourselves.

Wasn't it government regulation that put an end to shanty towns and forced a living wage? Wasn't it government regulation that busted up trusts? How do the people tackle a corporation? What contract exists between worker and employer if the worker has no real options? Eat a little or starve is not a choice. Big business displaces competition for our labor.

I assume outsourcing isn't a problem in the pure liberetarian view, because to do something about it would be government regulation?

I assume massive disinformation at the hands of the marketing engine we know of as the 4th estate is nothing we can't handle without using our government either, and what's wrong with a snazzy, streamlined internet anyway?

.............................

We agree on alot of the current problems with our nation. But the liberetarian view looks at government as only capable of evil. That just doesn't represent our nation's history fairly. My view looks at government as a tool. A really fucking dangerous tool, like a circular saw. Pay attention to it, and you can make some nice lines, turn away and you might lose your thumb. Why not use the tool we have at our disposal already? We just need to keep our eye on it.

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Friday, August 3, 2007 8:49 AM

FREMDFIRMA

I disagree with a good bit of that, mind, although you state your case eloquently and have actually thought it through, thus I will not flame you.

And it was violence, rather than regulation, that put an end to many corporate antics, recent posts have delved heavily into that topic.

But you nailed it over the fence for sure in a single sentance.

Quote:
My view looks at government as a tool. A really fucking dangerous tool, like a circular saw. Pay attention to it, and you can make some nice lines, turn away and you might lose your thumb.

That is very much true - but actions of that very government have put a big curtain in between us and the saw, so we cannot see what it is doing, and then outlawed any notion of pulling it aside.

Awful hard to make judgement calls and "pay attention" when they hide every possible bit of doings or decision making behing the veil of "national security".

Look up *how* COINTELPRO was exposed, which lead to the Church Committee, which lead to FISA, which was then, completely ignored.

You proceed under the false assumption that the Government actually obeys the rules they set for us peons, and that is absolutely not the case.

And trusting them to self-enforce is neither wise nor effective.

Government power is much like The One Ring, regardless of who wields it, it serves only one master, has only one cause, and will almost inevitably corrupt it's wielder, save in the rare case of having no means to do so.

-Frem
It cannot be said enough, those who do not learn from history, are doomed to endlessly repeat it

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Friday, August 3, 2007 9:03 AM

RIGHTEOUS9

Problem is you're advocating for a cycle that can only end with violence. Companies will push until finally, a desperate and enraged public stands up and does something violent in response.

Companies will also be capable of their share of violence, and worse, they'll have the money to pay for armed security, plants that incite violence, etc.

How bad does it always have to get before it gets better under this vision?

........

You're right about government placing a curtain between us and the saw. That's unacceptable. That's something we do have the power to impact though, or would if the will of the people were behind doing something about it. People are pushing every day with freedom of information requests...laws have been placed on books for the sake of requiring disclosure in numerous matters. That the curtain is winning out is not a result of our action upon government, it's the result of our inaction upon it.

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Friday, August 3, 2007 9:56 AM

KANEMAN

Another long one , but again relevant. It's a speech given by Lew Rockwell this past April.

This talk was given at the Houston Mises Circle on April 14, 2007.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lock 'em up

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

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

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

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

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

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

In the US prison and justice system, there is no emphasis at all on the idea of restitution, which is not only an important part of the idea of justice but, truly, its very essence. What justice is achieved by robbing the victim again to pay for the victimizer's total dehumanization? As Rothbard writes: "The victim not only loses his money, but pays more money besides for the dubious thrill of catching, convicting, and then supporting the criminal; and the criminal is still enslaved, but not to the good purpose of recompensing his victim."

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

Kill 'em All

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

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

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

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

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

Law-Keeper, Law-Breakers

What we have at work here is a crude form of Hobbesianism, the political philosophy hammered out by the 17th-century Englishman Thomas Hobbes. His book Leviathan was published in 1651 during the English Civil War in order to justify a tyrannical central government as the price of peace. The natural state of society, he said, was war of all against all. In this world, life is "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short." Conflict was the way of human engagement. Society is rife with it, and it cannot be otherwise.

What is striking here is the context of this book. Conflict was indeed ubiquitous. But what was the conflict over? It was over who would control the state and how that state would operate. This was not a state of nature but a society under Leviathan’s control. It was precisely the Leviathan that bred that very conflict that Hobbes was addressing, and he proposed a cure that was essentially identical to the disease. In fact, the result of the Civil War was the brutal and ghastly dictatorship of Oliver Cromwell, who ruled under democratic slogans. This was a foreshadowing of some of the worst political violence of the 20th century. It was Nazism, Fascism, and Communism that transformed formerly peaceful societies into violent communities in which life did indeed become "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short." Leviathan didn't fix the problem; it bred it, and fastened it on society as a permanent condition.

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

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

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

We Can Get Along

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

One Faith Per Society

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

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

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

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

In short, their meta-understanding of politics bypassed the liberal revolution of the 18th century and embraced the anti-liberal elements of the Enlightenment. Up with Hobbes, down with Locke: that is their implied creed. Liberty is fine but order, order, is much more important, and order comes from the state. They can't even fathom the truth that liberty is the mother, not the daughter, of order. That thought is too complex for the mind that believes that the law alone, legislated or by executive fiat, is what separates barbarism from civilization. Freedom, to them, is not a right but something conferred as a reward for good behavior. The absence of good behavior justifies any level of crackdown.

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Rothbard Revival

Having said all of this about the modern-day right, I do want to draw your attention again to the forgotten tradition of the old right of the 1930s and 40s. These were times when Garet Garrett was celebrating free enterprise against New Deal planning, John T. Flynn was exposing the warfare state as a tool of socialism, Albert Jay Nock was heralding the capacity of private education to create literacy and artistry, and when politicians on the right were advocating peace and trade. This period came to an end in the 1950s with the emergence of the first neoconservatives attached to National Review.

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

The manuscript has circulated privately for 30 years. It will soon see the light of day. He names names. He spares no enemy of freedom. Many people will cheer. Many others will weep. It will be a great day.

If you would like to join in supporting this project please let us know. If you want to help in other ways, please talk to us. The Mises Institute is the powerhouse for publishing and educating in the libertarian tradition. The young are listening and we are having a great effect in bringing to life the vision of society that animated the American Revolution and, indeed, gave rise to civilization as we know it.

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

We do find ourselves not quite in a crowd in this struggle, indeed depending completely on your help. More than ever, both the left and the right are allied against us, and they are both in league with power. But the forces of liberty have always been in the minority and yet we can and do prevail. Thank you for your continued support in the great struggle between liberty and power.

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Friday, August 3, 2007 10:26 AM

FLETCH2

I hope Lew wrote both of these or someone is guilty of Plagerism.

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Friday, August 3, 2007 10:40 AM

KANEMAN

He did indeed....

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Friday, August 3, 2007 11:14 AM

FREMDFIRMA

Quote:
laws have been placed on books for the sake of requiring disclosure in numerous matters.

Which are almost universally ignored, look at FISA, look at the rejection and defiance of the Subpeano process, the outright contempt at even the thought of compliance with the rule of law, in our current regime.

You are dealing with folk that will not only hold YOU to the rules, but heap more abitratry and vague ones upon you to prevent your interference - at this point you could consider the Girl Scouts a band of "Terrorists" by the letter of the law.

One does not walk into a card sharpers place of business, and play by HIS rules, with HIS deck, on HIS table, and expect a fair game, and this is what you are doing when you depend on the rule of law to be self-applied by folk who have utterly no respect for it.

Quote:
How bad does it always have to get before it gets better under this vision?

Bad enough that it is more profitable for the corpos to cut a deal than continue the fight, simple economics.

Look at the history of strikes and strike breaking that I posted in another thread.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_strikes

The corpos in almost every case went screaming to the state to break the workers FOR them, in NO case did the Gov come in substantially against the corpos, and in essence the government used it's power to *crush* workers rights, rather than support them - but because of folk willing to continue the fight in spite of bloodshed and imprisonment for wanting a square deal, we now have SOME few (often ignored) Labor Rights.

The Rule of Law does not always function as intended, and sometimes one must stand against it in a greater cause - were that not true, we'd still be a British Colony, and we're not.

What our Founding Fathers did was "illegal" and "an act of terrorism" by the letter of the law, but it was what was "Right" as well.

Men make Laws to protect things, but when those Laws become more important than, or even an anethma to, the very things they were intended to protect, then those Laws have no value save as a tool of oppression.

Sometimes you have no option but to play rough, our Founding Fathers acknowledged that, it's why we're not supposed to have a standing army (The Constitution was intended to forbid it) and why the second amendment exists.

"God forbid we should ever be twenty years without such a rebellion.
The people cannot be all, and always, well informed. The part which is wrong will be discontented, in proportion to the importance of the facts they misconceive. If they remain quiet under such misconceptions, it is lethargy, the forerunner of death to the public liberty. ...
And what country can preserve its liberties, if it's rulers are not warned from time to time, that this people preserve the spirit of resistance? Let them take arms. The remedy is to set them right as to the facts, pardon and pacify them. What signify a few lives lost in a century or two? The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time, with the blood of patriots and tyrants.
It is its natural manure."
Thomas Jefferson.

I'm not, even tho it may seem so, 100% in disagreement, just saying that any expectation for the Gov to clean up it's act without threat of violent force behind it, is foolish and ineffective - to be frank, what is a protest march but in essence, the threat of a violent riot ?

Without that threat, your entreaties will fall upon deaf ears every single time.

-Frem

It cannot be said enough, those who do not learn from history, are doomed to endlessly repeat it

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Friday, August 3, 2007 12:38 PM

RIGHTEOUS9

Thanks Frem,

I agree with alot of what you've posted, while we still disagree on certain points.

I'm not convinced that relying on mob response to corpo mistreatment is going to yield great results, though point taken about companies running to the government that is in their pockets, for backup.

If we have to rely on our tendency to mob when things get bad, then we can also expect a lot of unfortunate scapegoats to be the first targets of our frustrations.

And how bad would it have to get before people took action? things are worse than they should be now. That's a condition that could change with holding our government accountable.

.......

You're absolutely right again...the laws on the books are being ignored. The reason they are being ignored is because, contrary to Jefferson's urge that we keep the government ever wary, we have not done so. Our government is not afraid of us because the American people have become either apologizing abetters, jaded nehilists(not that I don't sympathize), blissful ignorants, zealous nationalistic ignorants, or else they've been relegated to the fringes by the 4th estate where they are made to look like loonies.

Even when we see a crime go unpunished before us, we shrug it off. We should never have let Ford get away with his pardoning of Nixon. The American people should have had him impeached for that. We shouldn't have let Bush get away with the shit we know, like bringing back so many of Nixon's inner circle into the white house, a second time. We shouldn't be passively accepting all these broken laws we're finding out about under the bush administration, as simply the status quo of government. We are enabling a corrupt system. It's our baby. Because we don't scold it, it takes what it wants and hits us with it.

Again, no question the laws are inefectual, but we could make them be effective, at least in theory.

ON EDIT

I agree by the way that it was the people willing ot fight for change that made the change occur...not the people in office. But the change effected the laws...effected the status quo. largely ignored? sure. Are we better off with out them? I doubt it. Should we have to tread the same ground time and again, or should we be trying to forge forward. At least a law is a record of some paradigm shift, even if it can be renigged upon.

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Friday, August 3, 2007 1:18 PM

FREMDFIRMA

Quote:
If we have to rely on our tendency to mob when things get bad, then we can also expect a lot of unfortunate scapegoats to be the first targets of our frustrations.

Too bloody true, I never understood why rioters pissed off at the apparatus of government then burn down local businesses, it completely boggles me.

That being one reason I'd prefer it not to come to that.
City Hall should be the FIRST stop in such a case, followed by the local courts, but that's not very likely.

Quote:
Our government is not afraid of us

Very large part of the problem, yep.
"People should not be afraid of their governments. Governments should be afraid of their people" -V

Quote:
We should never have let Ford get away with his pardoning of Nixon.

He shoots, he SCOOORESsss.. a big three from half-court

Yeah, that's been one of my pet peeves for over a decade.

Quote:
We shouldn't be passively accepting all these broken laws we're finding out about under the bush administration, as simply the status quo of government.

Agreed.

Overall, I dont feel that violence in and of itself is an answer, but without the THREAT of it, effective resistance and/or forced compliance isn't going to happen.

-Frem

It cannot be said enough, those who do not learn from history, are doomed to endlessly repeat it

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