The media’s caricature of
libertarians is a pendulum that swings from one extreme to another. One
minute we’re grasping plutocrats, championing the privileged, and the next
minute we’re losers living in our parents’ basements.
Not long ago, Michael
Lind adopted the first of these, professing to find it risible that a
libertarian might pose as the champion of the common man. Why, libertarians
favor the super rich!
Hence, according to Lind,
the idea of “libertarian populism” is absurd. Now I agree with Bob Wenzel
that the last thing we need is another term, and
that plain old “libertarian” suits us just fine. But it’s
worth noting that the idea of libertarian populism – that libertarians
are indeed the champions of the ordinary folk, because we are champions of
all innocent people against the predatory state – is not ridiculous at all.
As the great champion of regular people, Ron Paul, has shown.
Now to be sure,
libertarians don’t favor anyone in particular. We don’t single out the poor,
the rich, the working class, the industrialists, the conservationists, the
farmers, the young, the old, the black, the white, or anyone else for special
treatment. We are the champions of everyone against the biggest ripoff of them all.
This was the view of
Murray N. Rothbard, Mr. Libertarian himself, who
said in 1977:
Too many libertarians
have absorbed the negative and elitist conservative worldview to the
effect that our enemy today is the poor, who are robbing the rich; the
blacks, who are robbing the whites; or the masses, who are robbing
heroes and businessmen. In fact, it is the state that is
robbing all classes, rich and poor, black and white, worker and
businessman alike; it is the state that is ripping us all off; it is the
state that is the common enemy of mankind. And who is the state? It
is any group who manages to seize control of the state’s coercive
machinery of theft and privilege. Of course these ruling groups have
differed in composition through history, from kings and nobles to
privileged merchants to Communist parties to the Trilateral Commission.
But whoever they are, they can only be a small minority of the
population, ruling and robbing the rest of us for their power and
wealth. And since they are a small minority, the state rulers can only
be kept in power by deluding us about the wisdom or necessity of their
rule. Hence, it is our major task to oppose and desanctify
their entrenched rule, in the same spirit that the first libertarian revolutionaries opposed
and desanctified their rulers two hundred years
ago. [Emphasis added.]
This is why the Jacksonians (who were, to be sure, far from pure
libertarians, but that isn’t the point) in 1830s America adopted “equal
rights” as their slogan. We know what “equal rights” means today, of course:
expropriation of one group to benefit another, with the state skimming off
its usual cut for itself. But in those days, equal rights meant only that no
person or group received any state-provided advantage, since state-provided
advantages always come at the expense of other people or groups.
This was considered the
obvious program for the common man. While the Whigs pined for a national bank
and various corporate welfare projects, the Democrats believed themselves to
be champions of the workingman’s cause by opposing all forms of state
privilege. By and large they did not counter with federal programs of their
own.
But hasn’t the state
lifted up the poor? The state’s efforts to alleviate poverty have had minuscule
effects when they haven’t been counterproductive. The vast bulk of the
conquest of poverty that took place in the twentieth century occurred well
before the federal government had done much of anything. It occurred because
the unhampered market naturally leads to an improvement in the general
standard of living.
Meanwhile, as the country
at large endures great economic distress, civilian employment has skyrocketed
in Washington, DC, where the average federal worker earns more than double
the salary of the average worker in the private sector. The parasite-host
relationship that exists between the ruling few and the toiling many is rarely so stark.
It’s no coincidence that
Mr. Libertarian, Murray N. Rothbard, was also a
pioneer in power-elite analysis. For instance, Rothbard’s
essay “Wall Street, Banks, and American
Foreign Policy,”
published by as a small book by the Center for Libertarian Studies, proposes
that there might be a teensy bit more to American foreign policy than a disinterested
dedication to promoting “democracy.”
Consider just a few
paragraphs:
A glance at foreign
policy leaders since World War II will reveal the domination of the
banker elite. Truman’s first Secretary of Defense was James V.
Forrestal, former president of the investment-banking firm of Dillon,
Read & Co., closely allied to the Rockefeller financial group.
Forrestal had also been a board member of the Chase Securities
Corporation, an affiliate of the Chase National Bank.
Another Truman
Defense Secretary was Robert A. Lovett, a partner of the powerful New
York investment-banking house of Brown Brothers Harriman. At the same
time that he was Secretary of Defense, Lovett continued to be a trustee
of the Rockefeller Foundation. Secretary of the Air Force Thomas K. Finletter was a top Wall Street corporate lawyer and
member of the board of the CFR while serving in the cabinet. Ambassador
to Soviet Russia, Ambassador to Great Britain, and Secretary of Commerce
in the Truman Administration was the powerful multi-millionaire W. Averell Harriman, an
often underrated but dominant force within the Democratic Party
since the days of FDR. Harriman was a partner of Brown Brothers
Harriman.
Also Ambassador to
Great Britain under Truman was Lewis W. Douglas, brother-in-law of John
J. McCloy, a trustee of the
Rockefeller Foundation, and a board member of the Council on Foreign
Relations. Following Douglas as Ambassador to the Court of St. James was
Walter S. Gifford, chairman of the board of AT&T, and member of the
board of trustees of the Rockefeller Foundation for almost two decades.
Ambassador to NATO under Truman was William H. Draper, Jr.,
vice-president of Dillon, Read & Co.
That’s just half of Rothbard’s analysis of the power elite surrounding just
one president’s foreign policy team. Not exactly a cross-section of the
downtrodden, in other words.
(Read Rothbard’s
essay in its
entirety, by the way, where he discusses some of the less glamorous
motivations at work in the making of foreign policy.)
Who has benefited from
the American warfare state? Who, that is, apart from those with political
connections or government jobs? The question answers itself. Everyone else
has suffered from the trillions of dollars looted from them so the Pentagon
might have the power to obliterate every conceivable enemy city a dozen times
over. We have suffered from increased indebtedness, and – because capital
formation is undermined by the squandering of resources in war and in massive
diversion of resources to the military sector – lower real wages than we
would otherwise have enjoyed. We’ve suffered from the civilian research and
development that never occurred because the brains behind it were siphoned into
military research. The costs go on and on.
We can repeat this
analysis over and over again, as we survey important components of American
life. Who suffers under the federal government’s drug war? Not the wealthy
and powerful. And who benefits? Certainly not the poor. But the tax-funded
police forces that are awarded with more powerful weapons, more authority,
and a seemingly endless cash cow, seem to do rather well.
Who angled for the
Federal Reserve? The American public, or the bankers
themselves? Anyone reading Rothbard knows the
answer. It
is not reasonable to expect us to believe that in just this one case, an
interest group coming together to enshrine its preferences in law was doing
so entirely for the public welfare.
The Fed, meanwhile, has
not “stabilized the economy,” contrary to the usual propaganda, and in recent
years gave rise to a housing bubble that wrecked the finances of a great many
ordinary Americans. Then, adding insult to injury, it bailed out – on
preposterous and indefensible grounds – some of the most reckless and
irresponsible institutions.
What has the Fed’s
economic planning accomplished for Main Street? The Fed’s planning, according
to David Stockman, was based on the “wealth effect”: if the Fed pushed stock
prices higher, Americans would feel wealthier and would be likely to spend
and borrow more, thereby stimulating economic activity.
The results? Zero
net breadwinner jobs created between early 2000 and early 2007. From 2000 to
2012, there have been 18,000 new jobs created each month. That’s about
one-eighth of the growth in the labor force over the same period.
This is what the average
person is supposed to be so grateful for?
The state, in short,
enriches itself at the expense of the public it fleeces, all the while using
its influence over education, the media, and culture to persuade the people
that all this fleecing is good for them, that taxes
are donations, and that bombing foreigners on ludicrous pretexts is “serving
your country.” It urges the general public to consider the absence of the
state as the most horrifying, inconceivable scenario of all.
The libertarian tears off
the mask of the state, revealing it as the wealth-destroying, poverty-enhancing
instrument of terror and expropriation it is. The advances that constitute
civilization, libertarians argue, have resulted not from the orders of
hangmen and other executioners, or the social planning of bureaucrats and
academics, but from human beings cooperating voluntarily in ways that will
amaze and astonish anyone who opens his eyes to see them.
And that makes
libertarianism the most liberating political philosophy of all.
