Liberty Or Death

New at Reason: From September issue, the question of whether libertarianism can include an aggressive foreign policy continues, with Ronald Bailey, Christopher Hitchens, Christopher Preble, and Ivan Eland.

Comments

[Sir Real]

Uh- what?

Our problem with encouraging terrorists/freedom fighters is because we don't teach them secular liberalism? The solution is to separate freedom fighters from terrorist chaff? Ron says he's not advocating more taxes or debt, so appearently he talking about cutting domestic social services to teach the guerrillas the joys of economic and political liberalism?

It looks to me like Ron is spending the Peace Dividend before he even bothers earning it.

This is a joke, right?

[Kevin Carson]

The problem with this agenda of promoting liberty through the State is that it requires giving the State the benefit of the doubt regarding its motivations, and taking it at its word. For example, it's hard to take the Reagan Doctrine's opposition to "tyrannical regimes," when his administration backed landlord oligarchies and death squad regimes so long as they were "anti-communist."

Giving the U.S. government credit for good intentions in supporting "liberty" ignores the nature of the State: as Oppenheimer and Nock pointed out, it is the organized "political means" of extracting wealth from producers. The foreign policy of any State, including the U.S. government, will reflect the domestic power structure, and serve mainly the interests of the dominant class. In the case of the U.S., that means the interlocking corporate and government oligarchies that run our corporatist economy.

It is impossible to have democracy on a continental scale, or to have free trade managed by a global bureaucracy like the IMF or WTO. So when the U.S. government throws those terms around, keep your hand on your wallet.

[SPUR]

I suppose if Ron Bailey was in charge he would have parachuted in the staff of the Institute for Humane Studies into Afganistan after the Soviets left. Give the Afganis a little taste of Peter Boetke and Koch Industries and all would have been well in that part of the world. Sure.

[John Hood]

This kind of debate is exactly what causes libertarians to be on the periphery of the political discourse in America, despite the fact that most Americans, in my opinion, have broadly libertarian views on key issues. The fact of the matter is that if you cannot distinguish between "state intervention" in the market for milk and "state intervention" overseas to battle and vanquish violent and dangerous tyrants, if you equate the two, you are advancing an absurdity than most thinking people will spot quickly.

On the specifics: the American War of Independence, the Mexican-American War, and the American Civil War were all controversial in their day, had their principled opponents, and resulted in governmental abuses (I was just reading some of the accounts of how some revolutionaries in Western North Carolina treated their peaceful Tory victims).

But all also advanced the cause of freedom in the most direct way possible: they liberated millions of people who were being held in bondage, whether it be a bondage of arbritrary state power (AWI), a bondage of tyrannical and incompetent government (MAW), or a bondage of chattel slavery (ACW). Again, to accept the version of a libertarian foreign policy advanced by Ron's critics here is to advance the absurdity that all of these wars were unjust (in the first case, it was apparently unjust for the French to facilate our successful efforts, and possibly for us to accept their "foreign intervention").

To suggest that a liberal state can actually have a foreign policy, one that could involve the use of force, is not to suggest that it can or should go on ongoing military adventures. At the risk of overusing the term, it is absurd to suggest that the United States is currently engaged in such a set of reckless adventures. We are not going to invade Burma tomorrow to overthrow those nasty tyrants. We are not going to conquer West Africa and set up little IHS campuses. The US has taken action in direct response to an attack on our soil that killed thousands of our own people. We took out the terrorist's safe haven in Afghanistan, and now we have deposed a state in Iraq that has cooperated with terrorists in the past (including al Qaeda, though not necessarily in the 9/11 case), that tried to assassinate a former president of our country, and that possessed (or pretended that it possessed) dangerous weapons that could have killed hundreds of thousands or millions of Americans if placed in the hands of the Islamofascists.

There is nothing neoconservative about this analysis. The neocons are horribly misguided on many issues, mainly domestic and economic ones. Just because they happen to share an agenda, at least partially, with the more hawkish of libertarians doesn't mean that the latter have been somehow corrupted by them. Look, plenty of left-wing kooks happen to agree with libertarians on drug policy. Does that invalidate the argument?

Ron's is an analysis based on liberal principles. Either a limited government has, as one of its limited responsibilities, that of safeguarding its citizens' rights and maximizing their freedom, or it doesn't. If yes, then Ron has made a persuasive case for getting on the job. If not, then you are expressing not classical liberal principles but modern, anarchist ones.

As these will never be widely shared in America outside of certain corners (think dorm rooms), the task should be to debate how to proceed, not whether to proceed.

[Franklin Harris]

Amazing how Hitchens continues to quote (favorably) Gore Vidal even as he repudiates everything the two ever had in common.

[Anonymous]

Of course, the MAW is part of what landed a lot of those people in chattel slavery. History doesn't always lend itself to simple lessons.

And since when was Saddam dangerous to anyone in the United States? There are two defensible answers: 1) never, and 2) after we started poking at him with a stick. Al Qaeda is a legitimate threat. Ba'athists were not.

[Kevin Carson]

Flapjack,

To read my post as "championing slaveocracy," you must have read it very superficially, if at all. I'm guessing you read the first sentence, immediately thought "Lew Rockwellian neo-Confederate," and then supplied the rest of the content yourself.

If you bothered to read the post at all, you'd see that I in no way sympathize with the slaveocracy, but only with secession as a constitutional right. If anything, I'd have been more sympathetic to the ability of northern juries to nullify the Fugitive Slave Laws, or of New England states to secede at will.

Although I believe in the principles of state sovereignty and secession, I by no means sympathize with the planter class who were behind the secessionist movement of 1860-61. I am embittered enough by the "good ol' boy government" here in Arkansas not to recognize it when I see it in the history books.

And I share none of the sympathies of many neo-confederates like the Kennedy Brothers for the south as some kind of unique civilization. I think the New England of the 1780s (with its economy dominated by tradesmen and farmers who controlled their own means of livelihood, and its politics dominated by self-government through town meetings) was incomparably more responsible for our culture of liberty than the south.

Lincoln's arguments on the primacy of the nation over the states was historical nonsense. Any historical research beyond the statements of Daniel Webster and Joseph Story would tell you that. The very history of ratification shows that the Constitution only applied to a particular state after it had ratified it of its own free will; North Carolina and Rhode Island remained outside the new union until well into Washington's first administration.

The historical record shows overwhelmingly that the States declared independence on their own sovereign authority, and created two federal unions on that same authority. I base this opinion on a great deal of research into contemporary historical documents. You can find the results in Chapter one of "State Sovereignty in the American Federal System," on the Articles and Essays page of my website at http://www.mutualist.net/ If you want to challenge the evidence, you're free to do so. But please be aware of what the evidence is before you make such blanket statements.

[Flapjack]

I maintatain no State is sovereign that enforces slavery, nor can you conjure any legal hocus-pocus to make such a State a legitimate government or authority.

The destruction of a criminal and illegitimate regime such as the Confederacy was as just and correct.

And perhaps you can give me the courtesy to concetrate on my post instead of speculating on my reading comprehension.

[Balasubramani]

GREAT articles.

[Flapjack]

Hold your nose and read the Confederate Constitution yourself if you want to see the face of tryanny:

http://www.templeofdemocracy.com/CONCONST.htm

[John Hood]

Kevin:

Although I disagree with much of your post, I would like to endorse this one, though perhaps for a different reason:

This country would have been a lot better off if the slave states had been allowed to leave in peace, and what remained of the U.S. had been free to end its complicity in things like the Fugitive Slave Laws.

Lincoln did needlessly provoke a full-blown war in 1861 by threatening to use military force to recover the rump of Deep South states had that, by that point ,seceded. His over-reaction led Virginia, NC, and Tennessee out of the Union and attempts by like-minded folks in Maryland and other border states to do so. A better strategy would have been to wait things out a bit, let some federal property along the coast be seized, then perhaps demanding recompensement from the new Confederate government. Not receiving that, a blockade would have been a useful next step. Meanwhile, he could have used the time to assemble and train his military forces.

I rehearse all of this because it makes my point about prudence. To say that a liberal state can and should use military force outside its borders, to protect rights and spread freedom and so on, is not to say that such actions must be taken in every case, or even in most cases. These are prudential issues, to be worked through on the basis of the available evidence and a careful weighing of costs and benefits.

As it was, provoking rebellion in the Peripheral South and border states was a strategic mistake that prolonged the conflict and made it bloodier.

[Anonymous]

John Hood wrote:
"...if you cannot distinguish between "state intervention" in the market for milk and "state intervention" overseas to battle and vanquish violent and dangerous tyrants, if you equate the two..."

But BOTH are, infact, a violation of libertarian principle. The state has absolutly no right to force citizens to finance either unless, in the case of the later, these "dangerous tyrants" look as though they are going to actually attack the US. They are also similar in that both types of intervention often produce results that are counter to their alleged purposes. Of course, the overseas type of intervention often tends to produce results that are truly tragic and needless. (The Iraq War.)

John Hood wrote:
"Iraqi lives will be, on balanced, saved by our intervention, if that tipping point hasn't already been reached."

On what do you base this projection? Over what time frame? Of course even if true it, alone, does not justtify intervention of the GOVERNMENT type.

Note: I will not be able to write another post for at least a few hours. Thanks

[matt]

"The terrorists say, and polls of Arabic and Islamic public opinion confirm, that U.S. interventionist foreign policy -- not U.S. culture or economic and political freedoms -- is the cause of terrorist strikes against U.S. targets."

Exactly...couldn't agree more. And ivading and occupying Iraq will probably do wonders for al-qaeda's recruiting.

[Kevin Carson]

anon 0154:

Exactly. The costs of all forms of intervention should be paid for by those who benefit from them. The total costs of safeguarding capital investments overseas, for example, should be paid for entirely by the firms who need protection. If such expenses were part of their total cost-benefit calculation, and they were able to make rational decisions based on a market pricing system, they might well decide differently about whether an investment was worth it. As I never tire of pointing out, when the State breaks the link between consumption of a service and cost of providing it, people and firms rely much more intensively on it than they would in a market pricing system. They adopt modes of production that would not be cost-efficient is all costs were internalized. The State should not be in the business of shifting ANY costs of doing business. TANSTAAFL.

[Anonymous]

"The costs of all forms of intervention should be paid for by those who benefit from them."

tax the Iraqis!

[matt]

JH and Mark A,

Just so you know, I'm not a fan of using utilitarian arguments when going to war, simply because you don't know the "costs and benefits" associated with it. The only just war under libertarian principles is one of self defense (and i don't think anyone has made a convincing case saddam was a threat to us), not "freeing the iraqi people" or "ridding the word of tyrants," or any other excuse we might want to use. With my post I was simply trying to show how pre-war predictions and post-war realities (in terms of both monetary and human costs) can be quite different.

KC,

You basically summed up my arguments for secession of the south in the Civil War, but thanks for pissing off the lincoln idolators...usually that's my job.

[Flapjack]

matt: How can you defend a regime whoese founding documents include statements such as:

"No slave or other person held to service or labor in any State or Territory of the Confederate States, under the laws thereof, escaping or lawfully carried into another, shall, in consequence of any law or regulation therein, be discharged from such service or labor; but shall be delivered up on claim of the party to whom such slave belongs, or to whom such service or labor may be due."

" In all such territory, the institution of negro slavery as it now exists in the Confederate States, shall be recognized and protected by Congress, and by the territorial government; and the inhabitants of the several Confederate States and Territories, shall have the right to take to such territory any slaves, lawfully held by them in any of the States or Territories of the Confederate States."

and finally the kicker:

"No bill of attainder, ex post facto law, or law denying or impairing the right of property in negro slaves shall be passed."

[Robert Hutchinson]

This kind of debate is exactly what causes libertarians to be on the periphery of the political discourse in America

This is why it pays to not give a damn about being on the periphery of the political discourse in America. (It doesn't hurt to involuntarily smirk at that particular turn of phrase, either.)

The fact of the matter is that if you cannot distinguish between "state intervention" in the market for milk and "state intervention" overseas to battle and vanquish violent and dangerous tyrants, if you equate the two, you are advancing an absurdity than most thinking people will spot quickly.

Oh. Well, if we're "battling" and "vanquishing" "tyrants", I guess I was wrong.

(Will most thinking people quickly spot the reason I quoted those three words?)

[matt]

Hate to break it to you Flapjack but the United States founding documents also upheld slavery.

Lincon's war wasn't about ending slavery, but rather keeping the steady stream of funds that the south provided through the tariff in the union. Without the money the south provided his dream of an "American System" (usually applied to Henry Clay but Lincoln wanted the same thing) could never be realized.

If the south had been allowed to peacefully secede, then, like KC pointed out, the fugitive slave law would be a non-issue. Slaves could then escape to the North (that is if northern states would accept them), without fear of being returned into servitude. But instead we had a bloody civil war that killed over 600,000 soldiers 50,000 civilians, destroyed the south's economy, and forced former slaves into a quasi-slavery system known as sharecropping.

[Flapjack]

matt: Which documents? It is debatable that the US Constitution upheld slavery (it was not explicit) -- but it is clear that it included the means to end it, unlike the vile Confederate version which states quite clear "No bill of attainder, ex post facto law, or law denying or impairing the right of property in negro slaves shall be passed."

I see like KC you claim to predit the future. Anyway, the war was complicated and I admit there were many factors involved -- but to discount entirely that slavery was not a factor is dishonest.

Yes it is shame the south was wrecked and millions were killed, just as it was a shame millions of Germans perished defending a genocidal regime. Share-cropping is still lightyears ahead of treating human beings as "property" (though it was also an injustice).

[matt]

Flapjack,

Well, offhand the 3/5 compromise seems to be pretty accepting of slavery, and this from Article IV section 2:

"No person held to service or labor in one state, under the laws thereof, escaping into another, shall, in consequence of any law or regulation therein, be discharged from such service or labor, but shall be delivered up on claim of the party to whom such service or labor may be due."

Without it I don't think the south would have joined the union. Which is why under something much less centralizing (like the articles were), slavery might have been isolated and allowed to die out once the costs of enforcing it became to high.

I'm not here trying to defend the confederacy or slavery....just pointing out the way we went about ending it was a huge mistake.

[R C Dean]

"The terrorists say, and polls of Arabic and Islamic public opinion confirm, that U.S. interventionist foreign policy -- not U.S. culture or economic and political freedoms -- is the cause of terrorist strikes against U.S. targets."

Well, since the interventionist foreign policies they have in mind are (1) keeping the Palestinians and their Arab sponsors from killing all the Jews who won't leave Israel and (2) keeping Saddam Hussein from overrunning Saudi Arabia, I guess the question is - should we care what they think, or should we do what's right?

[Jough]

Balasubramani, Saddam became a threat to the U.S. when he conquered another oil-producing nation. It's that simple.

[John Hood]

To anoymous poster:

Of course, the MAW is part of what landed a lot of those people in chattel slavery. History doesn't always lend itself to simple lessons.

What are you talking about? The Mexican War did not land a lot of people in chattel slavery. There were slaves in Texas, but it had already joined the Union before the war broke out. Slavery did not exist and was not introduced (albeit after some political maneuvering) in the rest of the territory acquired from Mexico after the war. Now, there are some subtleties here. Many believe, for example, that the political repercussions of the Mexican War led eventually to the Civil War. But then the first war led to the liberation of Southern slaves. Or am I missing something?

And since when was Saddam dangerous to anyone in the United States? There are two defensible answers: 1) never, and 2) after we started poking at him with a stick. Al Qaeda is a legitimate threat. Ba'athists were not.

This is, I presume, an argument for not going to war in 1991. Since Hussein's government subsequently threatened Americans and American soil, and collaborated with terrorists (including al Qaeda) during the 1990s, your argument wouldn't wash. So I guess it's back to arguing why the prospect of Iraq acquiring Kuwait and, possibly, portions of Saudi Arabia was considered to be contrary to American interests, peace and security in the region, and free trade. Oh, goody.

[Kevin Carson]

Flapjack,

"And perhaps you can give me the courtesy to concetrate on my post instead of speculating on my reading comprehension."

My speculations were spurred by your bizarre misconstruction of my arguments and false attribution of a political perspective to me. I defended the constitutional right of secession, and denied the constitutional power of the federal government to compel any state to remain in the Union. From that you got the idea that I was "apologizing" for the "slaveocracy," the opposite of which should have been obvious from my remarks in the post. So you should do ME the courtesy of reading the post carefully, instead of pigeonholing any defense of secession as an apology for the Confederacy's domestic institutions.

Either secession is a legitimate right or it is not. You may not agree that it is; but IF it is, then the political reasons for secession are irrelevant to the question of whether the federal government has legitimate power to prevent it. Like any other power or right under the Constitution, it does not depend on the federal government as an arbiter of the morality of those exercizing it. There are a lot of immoral states in the world, with a lot of pretty hideous social systems, but the federal government does not have any legitimate right to impose governments on them, either.

If you don't recognize the sovereignty of southern states as a restraint on the federal government, then secession should not have made a difference, right? The federal government should have had the power to make war against all the slave states even before secession, to destroy their iniquitous social institutions. After all, their rights under the constitution depend entirely on the morality of their social systems--constitutional principles have no objective meaning apart from such cui bono calculations.

[planethoth]

Anyone who says that the Islamofascist terrorists have no beef with American culture and are only incensed about American "interventionist foreign policy" needs to quit taking so many puffs off the hookah. Obviously, anyone who writes that line doesn't take the Islamists seriously when they rant about the immorality, sexual depravity, etc. etc. of American society. Who has no interest in knowing about the very direct ideological line between Sayyid Qutb, the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood (founded in... the 1940s!) and Osama bin Laden. What a joke that some "libertarians" can convince themselves that an Islamist just wants to leave the world alone, if only we would leave them be...

[matt]

JH,

I guess the question then would be, is their marginal increase in freedom worth billions of our tax dollars a month, thousands of civilian lives, and the growing resentment of the muslim world toward an icreasingly imperial US? I'm gonna have to say no.

[John Hood]

Matt:

I guess the question then would be, is their marginal increase in freedom worth billions of our tax dollars a month, thousands of civilian lives, and the growing resentment of the muslim world toward an icreasingly imperial US? I'm gonna have to say no.

You see, your argument is focused on the costs and benefits of a particular US policy. I'd welcome more of that, and less of the "true libertarians would never endorse the Bush/Ashcroft/neocon war machine" variety of argumentation I see too much of here.

On your point, I would agree if the stakes were only in the prospect of Iraqi freedom. But I buy the rising-expectations model that to build a state with (relative) freedom and (relative) rule of law in the heart of the Arab world could have revolutionary consequences for the region, and thus for peace and freedom worldwide, at least in the long run. That's why I supported the action despite its high financial cost.

As to the other costs, I simply don't think your take is accurate. Iraqi lives will be, on balanced, saved by our intervention, if that tipping point hasn't already been reached. And if I'm right, the current snapshot of the public opinion of the Muslim world is not indicative of what it will look like over time. I find it useful, for example, to note that most Iraqis DID welcome our intervention and, while impatient with the pace of utility repair, DO want us to stay a while. They distrust Europeans and many of their fellow Arab states far more than they distrust the "imperial" U.S. For example, it would be madness to invite the Turks further into Iraq to take over responsibilities from US forces. That really would be a case of an imperial power returning to the scene of the crime.

[Mark A.]

JH,

I agree with matt --not worth it. I suppose much of the argument is dependent upon how much weight one subjectively gives to each of the costs and (especially) benefits. For me, the costs (billions of $, over-commitment of troops, distraction from the incomplete job in Afghanistan, etc.) outweigh the benefits (all the things you champion) by about 58-42 or so.

With respect to this discussion, especially the "Islamofascist" strains being invoked, the following NY Times op-ed piece has some food for thought:

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/09/22/opinion/22PAPE.html.

Not saying I buy the whole thing, mind you, just pointing out that it's there.

[Kevin Carson]

John Hood,

The "Civil War" also ended the original Constitutional model based on voluntary accession of the states to the federal union. It created precedents for an aggrandized, imperial presidency and national security state, for a plenary "war power" of the president of commander-in-chief, not of the armed forces, but of American society. (It has become customary for a war president's apologists to refer to him as "our commander-in-chief"--bear in mind that Julius Caesar's preferred title, Imperator, also implied a status of "commander-in-chief" of Roman society) It also created precedents for suspensions of civil liberty in the name of "national security."

This country would have been a lot better off if the slave states had been allowed to leave in peace, and what remained of the U.S. had been free to end its complicity in things like the Fugitive Slave Laws. If I'd been around in 1787-88, the latter would have been one reason I would prefer to stay under the Articles and leave the slave states to bear the judgment for their own iniquity, rather than voting to become a party to that iniquity.

As Burke and Bagehot pointed out, even though the Whigs of 1689 tried to preserve the outward forms of the old constitution, they were in fact refounding and replacing it with one based on Parliamentary omnipotence. Likewise, despite the pretense of continuity with the Constitution of 1787, the "Civil War" created a new constitution on the basis of conquest.

[Flapjack]

It is a sad day when we see libertarians championing a Slaveocracy.

Regardless of Lincoln's behaviour toward civil rights, the Confederacy was not a legitimate governmetn and could be destroyed at will. It was a regime of criminals.

[planethoth]

Slavery, whether across the state line or on the other side of the planet, is not something I would think a lover of liberty could rightfully throw up his hands and say, in effect, "oh well, it's their problem, not ours." Such a position is immoral on its face.

That kind of libertarianism, which I hope is not of the majority here, is as equally infantile and reductionist a position as, say, the eco-lunatics who think that 'nature' was pristine without us 'despoiling' it.

It's too bad some people can take very useful concepts like the law of unintended consequences to simply conclude, no matter what the content of the problem, that the only solution to every conceivable problem is to just do, uh, nothing. How completely asinine.

[FJ]

Kevin: Your argument to the legality of secession. That wasn't my argument. My point was moral, that the Slavocracy of the South SHOULD NOT be recognized as a sovereign State.

Perhaps "championing" was too strong a word, but it seems to me that any defense of secession is a de facto recognition that slavery should have remained in what was the United States. At any rate the South was a disgusting regime, and I fail to see how defending it in any fashion advances the cause of liberty.

[Kevin Carson]

I'm defending the right of secession, period. You're the one who's interpreting that as being an "objective ally of slavery." The existence of an evil does not automatically confer power on the federal government to eradicate that evil. I much prefer the enumeration of powers in Article I Section 8.

I'm not upholding "sovereignty" as a moral standard of authority of a state over its own people--but for the restraint of the power of states in general, the sovereignty of one state should be treated as a limit on the hubris of another state in righting its wrongs. A federal government with the power to fight evil outside the bounds of the contitution, please keep in mind, will also have the power to DO evil outside the bounds of the constitution. Lord Acton and all that....

[kevrob]

Lincoln could have "allowed" the deep South states that declared for secession early go, and then gone to Congress to declare war on them, justified by the fact that they supported slavery. This would have driven the rest of our history's Confederacy, along with such union slave states as Maryland to join the CSA. I don't know if Abe could have gotten a declaration of war from the Congress, then.

The ACW, as it went, provided us with a good outcome: slavery's extinction, by a bad means: the beginning of the slide to unitary government. There was also the matter of a war that killed half a million soldiers, and many civilians. We also got bad side effects, such as the failed Reconstruction, with its attendant debt peonage system of tenant farming, Jim Crow, and 100 years of one-party rule in the South. Only the naive believe we would have rid ourselves of slavery without paying some great price.

Kevin