There is something about April. From Columbine to Virginia Tech, from Oklahoma City to Boston, mid-to-late April occasions some of the most infamous massacres on U.S. soil. At least, these are the ones we are told to focus on. The killers are called terrorists. Unless they wear uniforms, as they did on April 19, 1993, just outside Waco, Texas. That time, as we are urged to believe, the terrorists were the ones who died. In all these massacres, regardless of specifics, the government portrays itself as all that keeps chaos at bay.

The state claims to stand against terrorism, but killing people is its stock in trade. Slaughters come in various forms, almost all of which feed the health of the state. The state conducts much killing outright. The state officially poses against other killing, while nevertheless encouraging it through its own violence. Even the killing that the state has no hand in serves as a pretext for the state to grow.

In Boston this Monday, someone left bombs that murdered three people, including an eight-year-old boy, and injured 176 others. President Obama called the crime an “act of terrorism.” The establishment definition of “terrorism” was always flawed, in that it categorically absolved the government, but at least it specified the targeting of civilians for political goals. Yet these days, even before the motive is known, such as at Boston, or when the targets are not civilians, such as American soldiers abroad, the U.S. government calls any dramatic acts of violence of which it disapproves “terrorism.”

This February, they called ex-cop Chris Dorner a terrorist. Then the police surrounded him in a cabin to burn him alive, asking the media to cover its eyes like at Waco. Everyone who knew how the state operates had no reason to expect he would get due process. They were going to hunt him down and kill him no matter what. The media dropped the formality of calling him an “alleged” murderer. The LAPD tried and convicted and executed him all on the same day and no one batted an eye. Meanwhile, liberals say all talk of American tyranny is irresponsible and conservatives continue to worship law enforcement.

Today, violent resistance to the state is called terrorism. Many of the “terrorists” rounded up and imprisoned at Guantánamo Bay were at most guilty of defending their country against an invading army. Some of these people continue to languish in that dungeon, seeing their desperate hunger strike in protest of declining conditions go unanswered, except by an administration willing to cut off their water.

From February 28 to April 19, 1993, the Branch Davidians resisted. On the morning of February 28, about one hundred ATF agents, concealed in livestock trailers, descended upon their property. The agents had planned and trained for eight months, having practiced their histrionic assault on model buildings. There was no reason for all this other than publicity. The agents could have easily arrested Koresh, whom they had befriended. The agents had conducted an investigation of weapons violations and found nothing. Koresh had cooperated with them. 60 Minutes had recently focused on an ATF sexual harassment scandal, and the agency was accused of racial discrimination during a House subcommittee meeting. The bureau wanted to improve its public image. Officials reached out to the press to make sure reporters could witness their heroics on the last February morning of 1993.

Unlike the vast majority of the hundreds of daily domestic militarized raids in America, the ATF’s surprise raid “Operation Showtime” faced resistance. When the agents ran out of ammo, the Davidians ceased fire. There were casualties on both sides, although one anonymous agent told the Dallas Morning News that he suspected some agents had fallen from friendly fire. Once the raid became a clear disaster, the ATF forced the press away.

Then came the standoff. The FBI took over and turned it into a full-blown military operation on American soil. Psychological warfare came down hard on Koresh’s followers. The FBI blared loud, obnoxious music, and sounds of animal slaughter, while shining blinding lights through the night. Agents gratuitously drove a vehicle to defile a Davidian grave. The government cut off this group’s access to family, media, and lawyers. It destroyed their water supply.

The media demonized the Davidians as a heavily armed cult that abused its children. Journalists tended to report government claims as fact. But they became increasingly critical of the ATF and FBI as well. After weeks of looking like fools in the mainstream press, particularly after a critical exposé in the New York Times on March 28 revealed the initial raid’s bad planning and recklessness, government officials became increasingly hostile to the media. On April 11, ATF intelligence chief David Troy stopped holding his regular press conferences altogether.

Attorney General Janet Reno, who took office in the middle of the standoff, finally decided to put an end to it. At about 6AM on April 19, the FBI began pumping flammable and poisonous CS gas, banned in international warfare, into the Davidian home. Officials knew that women and children were holed up in the section of the home exposed to this gas. The government continued to deploy gas for almost six hours.

Chemistry professor George F. Uhlig testified in congressional hearings that he estimated there was a sixty percent chance that the gassing alone killed some children. “Turning loose excessive quantities of CS definitely was not in the best interests of the children,” Uhlig said. “Gas masks do not fit children very well, if at all.” He intoned that the gassing could have transformed their surroundings “into an area similar to one of the gas chambers used by the Nazis at Auschwitz.”

The FBI brought out an Abrams tank, the Army’s heaviest armored vehicle, to replace its Bradley fighting vehicles. Agents drove the tank, which Attorney General Janet Reno later obscenely compared to “a good rent-a-car,” into the building. FBI sniper Lon Horiuchi, who had shot and killed Vicki Weaver in August 1992 at Ruby Ridge as she held her infant in her arms, was at the scene. FBI agents launched incendiary tear gas canisters. Justice Department spokesman Myron Marlin later declared, “We know of no evidence to support that any incendiary device was fired into the compound on April 19, 1993.” The FBI finally admitted six years later it had indeed used such projectiles at Waco.

The Davidian home went up in flames in the early afternoon. More than seventy people died, all of them civilian targets, many of them Americans, others hailing from other countries, more than twenty of them children and close to half of them people of color, although somehow the Davidians are often smeared, along with the so-called militia movement, as white supremacists. As the fire raged, the FBI turned back the local fire department. Special agent Jeffrey Jamar claimed that he feared for firefighters’ safety—presumably, the Davidians might shoot at the very people trying to stop the fire that was burning them to death. When it was all over, the ATF hoisted its flag atop the conquered ruins.

The trial of the survivors was a sham. Confused jurors intended to convict survivors of weapons offenses but not murder charges. The judge sided with the prosecution and defied the jurors’ intentions. By 1999, polling indicated that a strong majority of Americans blamed the FBI for setting the fire. Special counsel John Danforth, a Republican, released a report the next year whitewashing the Clinton administration of all guilt in this atrocity.

After Sandy Hook, liberals regurgitated every tired gun control argument, but one of the most interesting is that an armed populace fails as a break on tyranny because the government has the military hardware to win any confrontation. And indeed it’s true: most who resist government are swatted down like bugs. Some resist violently, like the Lakota Indians at Wounded Knee in December 1890, and are slaughtered. Others are shot for daring to resist even by throwing rocks at armed troops, like the four students murdered and the nine wounded at Kent State in May 1970. Others are targeted after a few years of relative calm, like the Philadelphia MOVE radicals in May 1985. Liberals are correct that the government has the means and the willingness to crush Americans who dare to resist. This fact never seems to convince liberals that the state is way too powerful and menacing to begin with, and maybe the last thing we should want is to give it more law enforcement powers, such as the monopolization of firearms through a war on guns.

About once a day police kill an American, but it’s often a criminal and no one cares, or at least a marginalized person like the homeless Kelly Thomas, beaten in July 2011 by five officers in Southern California, dying of complications five days later. Or they are veterans like Jose Guerena, at whom Tuscon police fired 71 rounds in the middle of the night in May 2011 – innocent of any crime, just in his own house at the wrong time. The state saves most of its killing for abroad, where killing is its very policy. And now, thanks to the war on terror, Obama calls America his battlefield and the world his jurisdiction. He has made it official doctrine that the president can order anyone’s death unilaterally.

Twenty years ago, Waco showed Americans the truth about law enforcement, the U.S. government, and the state itself. It revealed what reality was like for foreigners overseas. Yet most Americans seem totally indifferent to the mass murder the U.S. government has perpetrated and unleashed in the Middle East. On the day three were murdered in Boston, seventy-five died in Iraq. Violence in Iraq nine years ago was called terrorism, unless it was committed by U.S. troops. Today, violence in Iraq hardly makes the news. The state decides whose lives are worth caring about, and when.

Some critics of state violence dislike the very word “terrorism,” calling it meaningless, but I disagree. The state perverts most words it uses, but these words can still hold value. Terrorism refers to violence intentionally inflicted on the innocent to instill fear and advance political goals. American officials commit terrorism all the time. In the twenty years since Waco, state terrorism has escalated, from the anti-civilian sanctions on Iraq to the double-tap drone attacks on foreign first responders, all the way down to the constant domestic police raids. Even the more pedestrian police measures such as the systematic groping of New York City residents known as “stop and frisk” are there to “instill fear,” as police commissioner Raymond Kelly boasted was the intention, according to former NYPD captain Eric Adams’s testimony. From top to bottom, at home and abroad, the post-Waco American state seems intent on instilling fear in all of us.

Every April since 2003, I’ve written a piece about Waco. I think Americans should never forget what happened. LRC published most of these articles. They each have a little bit of something different and discuss contemporary events. I also wrote my undergraduate thesis on Waco and the relationship between the media and the police state. Here are my archives for those interested:

• 20 Years Ago Today: Operation Showtime (Independent Institute, February 2013)
• We’re All Branch Davidians Now (LRC, April 2012)
• From Waco to Libya: Eighteen Years of Humanitarian Mass Murder (LRC, April 2011).
• Waco and the New Brown Scare (LRC, April 2010).
• The Waco Butchers Are Back (LRC, April 2009).
• Why Waco Still Matters (LRC, April 2008).
• Waco, Oklahoma City, Columbine, Virginia Tech (LRC, April 2007).
• Waco and the Bipartisan Police State (LRC, April 2006).
• Waco, Oklahoma City, and the Post-9/11 Left-Right Dynamic (LRC, April 2005).
• Eleven Years Since Waco and Very Little Has Changed (LRC, April 2004).
• An Anniversary We Must Never Forget (Independent Institute, April 2003).
• “God Help Us, We Want the Press”: The 1993 Waco Disaster and Media/Government Relations”  (UC Berkeley Undergraduate thesis, 2003).

Waco, Twenty Years Later – What State Power Is All About

I might take a break from revisiting Waco next April, not because I’ve forgotten the victims – I never will – but simply because I feel like I’ve done enough writing about this particular atrocity for a little while, given that the state has raged on in so many directions, making Branch Davidians out of so many foreigners and Americans caught on the wrong side of the U.S. government’s never-ending siege of the world. Many Davidians died and others suffered injustice at trial, but tragically these victims are not so unusual. There are also the many thousands slaughtered abroad in the last 20 years. There are the thousands shot by law enforcement since then. There is Abdulrahman al-Awlaki, the sixteen-year-old from Denver whom Obama snuffed out with a drone, whose death was justified on the grounds that he had a bad father. Before the rapid rise of the surveillance state and the post-9/11 terror war, Waco was the best opportunity to turn things around. Instead, most Americans turned their backs and now our country is becoming one big playground for the police state.

We might call the situation David Koresh’s revenge.

Classical Liberalism and the Austrian School by Ralph Raico, (Auburn, Ala.: Ludwig von Mises Institute, 2012); 347 pages.

Part 1: The Great Liberal Heritage

If any one word is responsible for more confusion in the United States than “liberalism,” I’d surely like to know what it is. To the average American, a liberal is someone who votes Democratic, favors redistribution of wealth from rich to poor, wants more government regulation of the market, probably champions gun regulations, loves public education, and generally stands on the opposite side of the spectrum, such as it is, from what passes as “conservative” these days.

Yet outside the United States, and for more than a century, “liberalism” has carried a different meaning, something quite distinct from, if not diametrically opposed to, the modern American definition. Liberalism is the tradition of Adam Smith and John Locke and the more radical of the Founding Fathers – the tradition of the British opponents of the Corn Laws, of French economists and legal theorists such as Frédéric Bastiat, and of Americans who questioned the very necessity of the state in the late 19th century. Liberalism is, in other words, the political creed of those who favored liberty above the state, believed peace was preferable to war, and saw free trade and free association as the very foundations of a just and equitable society; who saw the moral status of wealth accumulation as being determined not by how much was accumulated, but rather by how it was accumulated – whether by the peaceful and productive means of voluntary free exchange or the political means of plunder and government privilege.

Liberalism, in short, is the philosophical antecedent to modern libertarianism. And though many of today’s liberals claim the legacy of old liberalism for themselves, saying that economic realities and refinement of theory forced them into their more collectivist mold, it becomes clear from studying the liberal tradition that its core values of individual liberty, belief in the self-organizing effectiveness of society, and distrust in government have much more in common with today’s consistent opponents of tax-and-spend liberalism than with its proponents.

We libertarians are lucky to have a great historian in Ralph Raico, whose Classical Liberalism and the Austrian Schoolcontains nine fantastic essays that shed much needed light on these profound philosophical issues. Raico, our premier historian of classical liberalism, is fluent in the intellectual foundations of those ideals as well as in economics, particularly Austrian economics, rendering him uniquely qualified to discuss the intimate relationship between the most radical of free-market schools and the struggle for individual liberty.

Defining liberalism

Raico laments that “no serious effort has been made to provide an overall account of the history of liberalism” outside of the work of Guido de Ruggiero, which he considers “deeply flawed” and notes “was limited to … Britain, France, Germany, and Italy.” Another problem arises with the very definition of liberalism: “[A] survey of the literature on liberalism reveals a conceptual mayhem. One root cause of this is the frequent attempt to accommodate all important political groupings that have called themselves ‘liberal.’” That approach does not impress Raico, who points out the absurdity of defining liberalism so broadly:

If one holds that the meaning of liberal must be modified because of ideological shifts within the British Liberal Party (or the Democratic Party in the United States), then due consideration must also be given to the National Liberals of Imperial Germany. They – as well as David Lloyd George and John Maynard Keynes – would have a claim to be situated in the same ideological category as, say, Richard Cobden, John Bright, and Herbert Spencer. Yet the National Liberals supported, among other measures: the Kulturkampf against the Catholic Church and the anti-socialist laws; Bismarck’s abandonment of free trade and his introduction of the welfare state; the forcible Germanization of the Poles; colonial expansion and Weltpolitik; and the military and especially naval buildup under Wilhelm II.

“It is evident,” Raico argues, “that mere self-description by politicians or political intellectuals cannot be decisive on this issue.” Even libertarians will sometimes include Keynes and other collectivists on the list of true liberals, but for Raico that will not do. “Canvassing the views of, say, Kant, Spencer, Popper, and Rawls yields no consensus on crucial issues.”

The “chief bone of contention in the debate,” as Raico sees it, is private property, which modern liberals and some presumed older liberals have viewed with hostility, seeing it as a “conservative” institution. Raico takes on one thinker, Michael Freeden, who “seeks to exclude belief in private property altogether from the contemporary meaning of liberalism.” But to welcome welfare state liberals, especially for the sake of continuity of language, results in some perverse implications. “Liberalizing the economy” would no longer mean “dismantling of government controls, but instead, something like extending welfare benefits.”

Raico traces a lot of the problem to the “vastly inflated position in the conception of liberalism” held by John Stuart Mill, the 19th-century thinker with genuinely liberal views on free speech, but who “rejected the liberal notion of the long-run harmony of interests of all social classes,” who “repudiated the liberal principle of non-intervention in foreign wars,” and who redefined “liberty itself” so as to find as much fault in “institutions whose authority over them [people] freely accept” as in state-inflicted physical aggression.

More of the confusion comes in the reluctance of British and American collectivists, in particular, to be honest with their language:

In Anglophone countries, those who anywhere else would be straightforwardly identified as social democrats or democratic socialists shy away from acknowledging their proper name. It is hard to avoid the conclusion that this is essentially a matter of political expediency. For some reason, labels suggestive of socialism have not been popular in countries of English heritage.

Raico seeks to trace the origins of liberalism back far enough to establish a distinct and long-standing trend of thought that held political power in suspicion. Those origins pre-date the Enlightenment and are found in the medieval era. Raico credits the Catholic Church for its role in modernizing law, desacralizing the state, and promoting decentralized authority. He then discusses the mid-17th-century English Levellers, who opposed radical egalitarianism, violations of freedom of conscience, and state monopoly.

French liberals and class struggle

Raico devotes an entire chapter to the French liberals, who have often been neglected in the English-speaking world. “Benjamin Constant is,” according to Raico, “the representative figure not only of French but of European liberalism in the nineteenth century.” Constant had found the flaw in the French Revolution and its terror in “the idea of Ancient Liberty misapplied to the modern age.”

The classical republics of Greece and Rome, as well as writers such as Rousseau and Abbé de Mably, saw freedom consisting “in the citizens’ exercise of political power. It is a collective notion of freedom, and it is compatible with – even demands – the total subordination of the individual to the community.” Modern liberty, in Constant’s view, was different: it was “one based on free labor and peaceful commerce.” Constant, like today’s libertarians, contended with opponents on both the left and right: “His enemies were the Jacobin and socialist descendants (for the most part) of Jean-Jacques Rousseau on the one side, and, on the other, the theocratic conservatives such as de Maistre and de Bonald.” Constant’s vision of peaceful diversity and social pluralism continues to be relevant in today’s culture wars, as “conflicting groups wish to make use of the state power to realize their own cultural – religious, moral ethical, even aesthetic – values.”

The French liberals identified many problems of the modern state in very sophisticated terms. They saw “the danger of centralized powers.” Raico identifies French Catholic liberals for their major contributions to religious liberty. He finds much to credit in Alexis de Tocqueville’s views on “the danger of centralized power,” the anti-statism advocated by Count de Montalembert, and the anarchism of Gustave de Molinari, who opposed the nation-state but also found revolutionary movements threatening to liberty.

Of the French contributions to liberal thought that continue to be neglected even by many libertarians, the theory of class conflict is a major one. The cause of this neglect may be that “few ideas are as closely associated with Marxism as the concepts of class and conflict.” Marx saw the inevitable tension between the workers and the state-privileged capitalists as the great hinge on which history would unstoppably turn.

Yet as Marx himself noted in 1852, “No credit is due to me for discovering the existence of classes.” Instead, he credited “bourgeois historians” and “bourgeois economists.” In particular, he named the French historians François Guizot and Augustin Thierry.

Raico traces class-conflict theory to the heritage of classical liberalism, finding that a liberal class-conflict theory emerged in a polished form in France, in the period of the Bourbon Restoration, following the defeat and final exile of Napoleon.

From 1817 to 1819, two young liberals, Charles Comte and Charles Dunoyer, edited the journal Le Censuer Européen. Along with Thierry, they began to formulate a theory, later expounded on by Constant and Jean-Baptise Say, of class conflict. According to Say, the market economy provided for a harmony of interests. Conflict arose when a state drew parasitically from some to benefit others. Thus we have the two adversarial classes: the rulers and the ruled.

According to Comte,

What must never be lost sight of is that a public functionary, in his capacity as functionary, produces absolutely nothing; that, on the contrary, he exists only on the products of the industrious class; and that he can consume nothing that has not been taken from the producers.

At times, Marx’s class theory closely resembled that of the liberals. Marxism contains two rather different views of the state: most conspicuously, it views it as the instrument of domination by exploiting classes that are defined by their position within the process of social production, e.g., the capitalists. Sometimes, however, Marx characterized the state itself as the independently exploiting agent.

The difference in economic and social theory goes a long way in explaining the distinction between Marxist and liberal class analysis, despite the many similarities. It also hints at the difference between the way left-liberals and classical liberals look at the economy and wealth distribution. If one believes that the state is merely doing the bidding of the capitalists, then the latter become the principal enemy, and the state can presumably be taken over for the purpose of proletarian liberation – an endeavor that, whenever it is attempted in real life, results in mass suffering and totalitarianism. If, on the other hand, the state itself is the exploiter and parasite, and the politically connected capitalists are merely beneficiaries of its intrinsically exploitative nature, then taking over and enlarging the state cannot be seen as the proper course of action – rather, shrinking the state as much as possible would be the solution to inequitable privilege.

Economic science has long been fundamental to classical liberalism. As Raico explains, Austrian economics has emerged as the school most conducive to championing free markets and individual liberty. In its origins, its historical dialectical relationship with socialist economics, its emphasis on subjective value and methodological individualism, and its many theories that undermine the case for state intervention, today’s libertarians have every reason to study this field closely. Seeing that economics as much as anything divides modern liberalism from its more libertarian counterpart, precision in economic education takes on great importance.

Part 2: The Economics of Liberty

The passionate interest in economics among libertarians is not immediately understood by all students of liberty. Even those generally in favor of economic freedom for ethical reasons may wonder why so many libertarians adhere specifically to the Austrian school. Complicating the matter even further, libertarianism is a political philosophy – and liberalism a political orientation – that concerns ethical principles of what the government oughtand ought not to do. Economics, in stark contrast, is often described as a science, and in particular a value-free science, that can teach us a lot about the material world of scarcity, but does not in itself tell us what the state ought to do. So why are so many libertarians not just free-marketers, but also inclined toward the most a priori of economic schools – that of the Austrians? Ralph Raico makes sense of it all in Classical Liberalism and the Austrian School.

Austrian economics and individual liberty

I wish that I had read Ralph Raico when I first became a libertarian, for his explanation of liberalism’s relationship to Austrian economics is the best that I know of, bringing great clarity to the question. He sums up the distinctive elements perfectly: “According to [Ludwig von Mises], economics teaches the means necessary for the promotion of the values most people endorse. Those means comprise, basically, the maintenance of the free market, private property economy. Thus the economist qua economist passes no value judgments, including political value judgments. He only proposes hypothetical imperatives: if you wish to achieve A, then do B.”

As an example we might consider the minimum wage. Economics informs us that raising the minimum wage will, other things being equal, increase unemployment by pricing low-skilled workers out of the labor market. This is a scientific insight. The libertarian is against minimum-wage laws primarily because they are a violation of the rights of both employer and employee to freely make an agreeable deal. But to reinforce this point, the libertarian, steeped in economics, can explain that the results likely to be produced by the minimum wage are not what most people want. Economics is value-free in that it doesn’t tell us whether we should want to increase unemployment, only that raising the minimum wage will tend toward that consequence. But since most decent people do not want to increase unemployment, the science of economics is nicely complementary to the libertarian ethical principle.

Because economics reinforces the case for liberty, “there is a sense in which economic theory per se, any analytical approach to economic questions, can be said to favor the market economy…. But Austrian economics has been so often and so closely tied to liberalism that it is plausible to seek the connection also in its distinctive economic theories.”

Liberalism is concerned with ethical individualism. Methodological individualism – the analytical reduction of all human activity down to the individual actors – is central to Austrian economics and has been from the start. Carl Menger, founder of the Austrian school, explained a nation’s economy in terms of the results of all the innumerable individual economic efforts in the nation…. Whoever wants to understand theoretically the phenomena of ‘national economy’ [must] attempt to go back to their true elements, to the singular economies in the nation.” (Emphasis in original.)

Also quite conducive to liberal individualism is the Austrian emphasis on subjectivism – the principle that persons make economic choices that are based on their subjective preferences. Classical liberals, Raico writes, “focused on the individual human being per se … as the fountainhead of creative response to an ever-changing world.” Economic schools of thought more in line with central planning, such as mainstream macroeconomics, tend to assume “that various global magnitudes act upon one another,” an assumption that liberals as well as Austrians would question. Moreover, “Individuality bears an intimate, perhaps even logical connection, to diversity, and Austrianism, in contrast to neoclassical economics, likewise accentuates the role of diversity in economic life.”

Austrians tend toward many general themes in liberalism, such as “the recognition of the self-regulating capacity of civil society” – or what Austrians call spontaneous-order theory. Yet unique and much more specific Austrian insights go even further in undermining the case for government intervention. They include the impossibility of states’ engaging in economic calculation without prices as “the fatal flaw of central planning”; the Austrian theory of the business cycle, which demonstrates the inability of central banks to manipulate market interest rates without distorting the economy and thereby causing booms and busts; “the analysis of the market as a process” – an approach that stifles socialist pretensions; and Mises’s explanation of why government interventionism is unstable, since one intervention leads to another and society eventually descends toward totalitarianism. Most important in Raico’s assessment is the approach of Austrian economics toward the free market not simply as “producing the greatest possible amount of material goods,” as it is seen by neoclassical defenders of the market, but rather as, in Menger’s words, “a pattern of economic governance exercised by consumer preferences.”

Moreover, the Austrian school itself emerged in an ideological context. Many of the first Austrians in the late 19th century were intimately involved in debates with the Marxists on key questions of economic theory, particularly the theory of value. The Austrians played a major role in the marginal revolution, overthrowing centuries of understanding economic exchange value (price) in terms of labor. The labor theory of value was generally taken for granted by Adam Smith and the classical school of economics. The Austrians, however, believed that economic value, including exchange value, originated in the subjective valuation of individual economic actors who – and this is most important – value units of goods on the margin; that is, that they assess the next unit of a commodity in relation to the next-most-valued thing they would forgo to obtain it.

This revolution in value theory finally answered mysteries that had nagged economists for many years, such as the diamond/water paradox. Why is a diamond worth so much more than a cup of water in most circumstances, but not if you are dying of thirst in the desert? Why would an additional cup of water be worth less once you’ve had one cup? Marxism’s whole conception of exploitation was wrapped up in basing the objective value of a commodity on the labor it “contains.” Because Marxism was one of the economic schools most conducive to the creation of a totalitarian state and so was at war with the Austrians over basic theory of value, Austrian economics was distinguished early on as the camp of individual liberty.

Yet the historical context of the Austrian school’s emergence might explain why not all early Austrians embraced liberalism consistently. Raico explains that “the underlying tradition in Austria was one of state paternalism, to the point where even the expression of the concept of a spontaneous economic order had been actively suppressed.” Such considerations among others meant that early luminaries of the school, such as Friedrich von Wieser and Eugen von Bo?hm-Bawerk, did not always adhere to classical-liberal ideas.

Two 20th-century Austrian economists, for their part, were far more distinct in their classical liberalism and have become universally recognized as significant figures in the birth of modern libertarianism: Ludwig von Mises and F.A. Hayek. Beginning with them, “the links between liberalism and the Austrian School become intense and pervasive.” Mises was decisively a liberal, having “highlighted the possibilities of meeting the needs of the deserving poor through private charity and assailed Bismarckian schemes of social insurance.”

Hayek, on the other hand, at times took positions that few libertarians today would endorse. Seeing the state as “a service agency,” he believed that (in his words) “there is little reason why the government should not … play some role, or even take the initiative, in such areas as social insurance and education, and temporarily subsidize certain experimental developments.” Yet it would be an understatement to say that Hayek was a brilliant thinker and economist whose many insights have helped develop libertarian theory.

Illiberal economists and scholars

That the economic divide is as prevalent as any divide between modern and classical liberals should be obvious. It is important to ask, therefore, about the major economic influences on modern liberalism and their relationship to original liberalism. We focus on John Maynard Keynes, whose brand of economic theory is the most dominant strain of economics in the modern world, enjoying a virtual monopoly on the economic thinking of modern liberalism.

Raico asks whether Keynes was a liberal. Since modern liberals claim the legacy of classical liberalism, this is a most important question indeed. Raico writes, “It is now common practice to rank John Maynard Keynes as one of modern history’s outstanding liberals, the most recent ‘great’ in the tradition of John Locke, Adam Smith, and Thomas Jefferson…. If he is different from the ‘classical’ liberals in a few obvious and important ways, it was simply because he tried to update the essential liberal idea to suit the economic conditions of a new age.” ”

In fairness, Keynes did embrace values “such as tolerance and rationality” and “always called himself a liberal…. But none of this carries great weight when it comes to classifying Keynes’s political thought.”

The general idea espoused by those who call Keynes a great liberal is that his “turn to neo-mercantilism was necessitated by his discovery of fundamental flaws in classical economics,” especially in light of Britain’s unemployment problems of the 1920s and the Great Depression. According to Raico, however, those crises “were themselves produced by misguided government policies.”

There are other problems with inducting Keynes into the Liberal Hall of Fame: “Liberalism is characterized by its insistence onrules, in political as in economic life.” The rule of law and laissez faire are conspicuous examples. But “it is no exaggeration to say that [Keynes] was constitutionally averse to rules, or ‘dogmas,’ as he often called them.”

Moreover, “authentic liberalism has traditionally harbored a deep distrust for agents of the state,” whereas Keynes’s “airy reliance on economic experts whose sage advice would be put into effect by self-denying politicians flies in the face of this wholly warranted suspicion and all of the historical and theoretical evidence supporting it.” Keynes went so far as to believe that the state should “even decide the optimal level of population” and, at times, that the state should be active in eugenics-based social engineering. He also spoke highly of the Soviet system and, in the preface to the German edition of his General Theory, remarked that the Nazi “totalitarian state” was more compatible with his economic prescriptions, owing to “the theory of output as a whole” than were “the Anglo-Saxon countries.”

Yet many if not most intellectuals remain devoted followers of Keynes – which raises a question: why do intellectuals oppose economic liberty? “The continued flourishing of [anti-market] intellectuals remains an enduring puzzle and problem for classical liberals,” Raico writes. His treatment of that question wonderfully explores the relevance of intellectuals and their ideas in shaping society and the role of historical myth in perpetuating statist thought.

Raico sees the problem as multidisciplinary: “In literature, economics, philosophy, sociology, and other subjects, the student is continually subjected to data and interpretations that converge on a single point: the viciousness of private enterprise and the virtuousness of state intervention and state-supported labor unionism.”

For Hayek the problem is principally one of poor understanding: “Hayek’s view of the intellectuals,” Raico writes, “is flatteringly benign: their ideas are determined by and large by ‘honest convictions and good intentions.’” Raico is unconvinced by Hayek’s attempt to explain this poor understanding. As one example, Hayek “appears to be saying that because the natural sciences have made great advances and because innumerable particular engineering projects have succeeded, it is quite understandable that many intellectuals should conclude that ‘the direction of all forms of human activity according to a single coherent plan’ will be similarly successful.” But Raico challenges the entire premise, pointing out that “the advances of the natural sciences were not brought about in accordance with any overall central plan; rather, they were the product of many separate decentralized but coordinated researchers.”

Raico finds more value in Mises’s explanation: “Often Mises emphasizes invidious personal motivation – resentment and bitter envy – as the source of this attitude.” He is even more moved by Mises’s other insight – that “the contempt of money-making [is] deeply ingrained in western culture,” leading to “hostility towards capitalists, trade, and speculation.”

Revitalizing a grand tradition

Raico is a great historian but also a player in the history of libertarian ideas. At one time or another, he was associated with the three men regarded by many as the 20th century’s greatest Austrians and libertarian scholars: Mises, Hayek, and Murray Rothbard.

To the extent our tradition of liberalism has faded, Raico serves as an eloquent bearer of bad news. In an essay on Eugen Richter, he gives his eulogy for German liberalism. In America the decline of liberalism has in large part been due to militarism, which Raico addresses in his discussion of Arthur Ekirch’s book The Civilian and the Military.

If liberalism has failed to challenge the modern state, perhaps part of the reason is that it has not been radical enough. Reviewing Mises’s great workLiberalism, Raico takes issue with his mentor’s failure to be more hard-line in opposing colonialism and imperialism. If ever there was a great mind to whom every libertarian owes an intellectual debt, it is certainly Mises. Yet even he went astray at times. Raico finds the problem in Mises’s antiseptic conception of the state. For him, the state is simply “the apparatus of compulsion and coercion.” He contemptuously rejects Nietzsche’s dictum that “the state is the coldest of all cold monsters.”

Yet being radical is not enough. We must understand our role in the history of ideas, including what came before us!

Recently by Anthony Gregory: The Totalitarianism of Universal Background Checks

Classical Liberalism and the Austrian School by Ralph Raico, (Auburn, Ala.: Ludwig von Mises Institute, 2012); 347 pages.

Part 1: The Great Liberal Heritage

If any one word is responsible for more confusion in the United States than “liberalism,” I’d surely like to know what it is. To the average American, a liberal is someone who votes Democratic, favors redistribution of wealth from rich to poor, wants more government regulation of the market, probably champions gun regulations, loves public education, and generally stands on the opposite side of the spectrum, such as it is, from what passes as “conservative” these days.

Yet outside the United States, and for more than a century, “liberalism” has carried a different meaning, something quite distinct from, if not diametrically opposed to, the modern American definition. Liberalism is the tradition of Adam Smith and John Locke and the more radical of the Founding Fathers – the tradition of the British opponents of the Corn Laws, of French economists and legal theorists such as Frédéric Bastiat, and of Americans who questioned the very necessity of the state in the late 19th century. Liberalism is, in other words, the political creed of those who favored liberty above the state, believed peace was preferable to war, and saw free trade and free association as the very foundations of a just and equitable society; who saw the moral status of wealth accumulation as being determined not by how much was accumulated, but rather by how it was accumulated – whether by the peaceful and productive means of voluntary free exchange or the political means of plunder and government privilege.

Liberalism, in short, is the philosophical antecedent to modern libertarianism. And though many of today’s liberals claim the legacy of old liberalism for themselves, saying that economic realities and refinement of theory forced them into their more collectivist mold, it becomes clear from studying the liberal tradition that its core values of individual liberty, belief in the self-organizing effectiveness of society, and distrust in government have much more in common with today’s consistent opponents of tax-and-spend liberalism than with its proponents.

We libertarians are lucky to have a great historian in Ralph Raico, whose Classical Liberalism and the Austrian School contains nine fantastic essays that shed much needed light on these profound philosophical issues. Raico, our premier historian of classical liberalism, is fluent in the intellectual foundations of those ideals as well as in economics, particularly Austrian economics, rendering him uniquely qualified to discuss the intimate relationship between the most radical of free-market schools and the struggle for individual liberty.

Defining liberalism

Raico laments that “no serious effort has been made to provide an overall account of the history of liberalism” outside of the work of Guido de Ruggiero, which he considers “deeply flawed” and notes “was limited to … Britain, France, Germany, and Italy.” Another problem arises with the very definition of liberalism: “[A] survey of the literature on liberalism reveals a conceptual mayhem. One root cause of this is the frequent attempt to accommodate all important political groupings that have called themselves ‘liberal.’” That approach does not impress Raico, who points out the absurdity of defining liberalism so broadly:

If one holds that the meaning of liberal must be modified because of ideological shifts within the British Liberal Party (or the Democratic Party in the United States), then due consideration must also be given to the National Liberals of Imperial Germany. They – as well as David Lloyd George and John Maynard Keynes – would have a claim to be situated in the same ideological category as, say, Richard Cobden, John Bright, and Herbert Spencer. Yet the National Liberals supported, among other measures: the Kulturkampf against the Catholic Church and the anti-socialist laws; Bismarck’s abandonment of free trade and his introduction of the welfare state; the forcible Germanization of the Poles; colonial expansion and Weltpolitik; and the military and especially naval buildup under Wilhelm II.

“It is evident,” Raico argues, “that mere self-description by politicians or political intellectuals cannot be decisive on this issue.” Even libertarians will sometimes include Keynes and other collectivists on the list of true liberals, but for Raico that will not do. “Canvassing the views of, say, Kant, Spencer, Popper, and Rawls yields no consensus on crucial issues.”

The “chief bone of contention in the debate,” as Raico sees it, is private property, which modern liberals and some presumed older liberals have viewed with hostility, seeing it as a “conservative” institution. Raico takes on one thinker, Michael Freeden, who “seeks to exclude belief in private property altogether from the contemporary meaning of liberalism.” But to welcome welfare state liberals, especially for the sake of continuity of language, results in some perverse implications. “Liberalizing the economy” would no longer mean “dismantling of government controls, but instead, something like extending welfare benefits.”

Raico traces a lot of the problem to the “vastly inflated position in the conception of liberalism” held by John Stuart Mill, the 19th-century thinker with genuinely liberal views on free speech, but who “rejected the liberal notion of the long-run harmony of interests of all social classes,” who “repudiated the liberal principle of non-intervention in foreign wars,” and who redefined “liberty itself” so as to find as much fault in “institutions whose authority over them [people] freely accept” as in state-inflicted physical aggression.

More of the confusion comes in the reluctance of British and American collectivists, in particular, to be honest with their language:

In Anglophone countries, those who anywhere else would be straightforwardly identified as social democrats or democratic socialists shy away from acknowledging their proper name. It is hard to avoid the conclusion that this is essentially a matter of political expediency. For some reason, labels suggestive of socialism have not been popular in countries of English heritage.

Raico seeks to trace the origins of liberalism back far enough to establish a distinct and long-standing trend of thought that held political power in suspicion. Those origins pre-date the Enlightenment and are found in the medieval era. Raico credits the Catholic Church for its role in modernizing law, desacralizing the state, and promoting decentralized authority. He then discusses the mid-17th-century English Levellers, who opposed radical egalitarianism, violations of freedom of conscience, and state monopoly.

French liberals and class struggle

Raico devotes an entire chapter to the French liberals, who have often been neglected in the English-speaking world. “Benjamin Constant is,” according to Raico, “the representative figure not only of French but of European liberalism in the nineteenth century.” Constant had found the flaw in the French Revolution and its terror in “the idea of Ancient Liberty misapplied to the modern age.”

The classical republics of Greece and Rome, as well as writers such as Rousseau and Abbé de Mably, saw freedom consisting “in the citizens’ exercise of political power. It is a collective notion of freedom, and it is compatible with – even demands – the total subordination of the individual to the community.” Modern liberty, in Constant’s view, was different: it was “one based on free labor and peaceful commerce.” Constant, like today’s libertarians, contended with opponents on both the left and right: “His enemies were the Jacobin and socialist descendants (for the most part) of Jean-Jacques Rousseau on the one side, and, on the other, the theocratic conservatives such as de Maistre and de Bonald.” Constant’s vision of peaceful diversity and social pluralism continues to be relevant in today’s culture wars, as “conflicting groups wish to make use of the state power to realize their own cultural – religious, moral ethical, even aesthetic – values.”

The French liberals identified many problems of the modern state in very sophisticated terms. They saw “the danger of centralized powers.” Raico identifies French Catholic liberals for their major contributions to religious liberty. He finds much to credit in Alexis de Tocqueville’s views on “the danger of centralized power,” the anti-statism advocated by Count de Montalembert, and the anarchism of Gustave de Molinari, who opposed the nation-state but also found revolutionary movements threatening to liberty.

Of the French contributions to liberal thought that continue to be neglected even by many libertarians, the theory of class conflict is a major one. The cause of this neglect may be that “few ideas are as closely associated with Marxism as the concepts of class and conflict.” Marx saw the inevitable tension between the workers and the state-privileged capitalists as the great hinge on which history would unstoppably turn.

Yet as Marx himself noted in 1852, “No credit is due to me for discovering the existence of classes.” Instead, he credited “bourgeois historians” and “bourgeois economists.” In particular, he named the French historians François Guizot and Augustin Thierry.

Raico traces class-conflict theory to the heritage of classical liberalism, finding that a liberal class-conflict theory emerged in a polished form in France, in the period of the Bourbon Restoration, following the defeat and final exile of Napoleon.

From 1817 to 1819, two young liberals, Charles Comte and Charles Dunoyer, edited the journal Le Censuer Européen. Along with Thierry, they began to formulate a theory, later expounded on by Constant and Jean-Baptise Say, of class conflict. According to Say, the market economy provided for a harmony of interests. Conflict arose when a state drew parasitically from some to benefit others. Thus we have the two adversarial classes: the rulers and the ruled.

According to Comte,

What must never be lost sight of is that a public functionary, in his capacity as functionary, produces absolutely nothing; that, on the contrary, he exists only on the products of the industrious class; and that he can consume nothing that has not been taken from the producers.

At times, Marx’s class theory closely resembled that of the liberals. Marxism contains two rather different views of the state: most conspicuously, it views it as the instrument of domination by exploiting classes that are defined by their position within the process of social production, e.g., the capitalists. Sometimes, however, Marx characterized the state itself as the independently exploiting agent.

The difference in economic and social theory goes a long way in explaining the distinction between Marxist and liberal class analysis, despite the many similarities. It also hints at the difference between the way left-liberals and classical liberals look at the economy and wealth distribution. If one believes that the state is merely doing the bidding of the capitalists, then the latter become the principal enemy, and the state can presumably be taken over for the purpose of proletarian liberation – an endeavor that, whenever it is attempted in real life, results in mass suffering and totalitarianism. If, on the other hand, the state itself is the exploiter and parasite, and the politically connected capitalists are merely beneficiaries of its intrinsically exploitative nature, then taking over and enlarging the state cannot be seen as the proper course of action – rather, shrinking the state as much as possible would be the solution to inequitable privilege.

Economic science has long been fundamental to classical liberalism. As Raico explains, Austrian economics has emerged as the school most conducive to championing free markets and individual liberty. In its origins, its historical dialectical relationship with socialist economics, its emphasis on subjective value and methodological individualism, and its many theories that undermine the case for state intervention, today’s libertarians have every reason to study this field closely. Seeing that economics as much as anything divides modern liberalism from its more libertarian counterpart, precision in economic education takes on great importance.

Part 2: The Economics of Liberty

The passionate interest in economics among libertarians is not immediately understood by all students of liberty. Even those generally in favor of economic freedom for ethical reasons may wonder why so many libertarians adhere specifically to the Austrian school. Complicating the matter even further, libertarianism is a political philosophy – and liberalism a political orientation – that concerns ethical principles of what the government ought and ought not to do. Economics, in stark contrast, is often described as a science, and in particular a value-free science, that can teach us a lot about the material world of scarcity, but does not in itself tell us what the state ought to do. So why are so many libertarians not just free-marketers, but also inclined toward the most a priori of economic schools – that of the Austrians? Ralph Raico makes sense of it all in Classical Liberalism and the Austrian School.

Austrian economics and individual liberty

I wish that I had read Ralph Raico when I first became a libertarian, for his explanation of liberalism’s relationship to Austrian economics is the best that I know of, bringing great clarity to the question. He sums up the distinctive elements perfectly: “According to [Ludwig von Mises], economics teaches the means necessary for the promotion of the values most people endorse. Those means comprise, basically, the maintenance of the free market, private property economy. Thus the economist qua economist passes no value judgments, including political value judgments. He only proposes hypothetical imperatives: if you wish to achieve A, then do B.”

As an example we might consider the minimum wage. Economics informs us that raising the minimum wage will, other things being equal, increase unemployment by pricing low-skilled workers out of the labor market. This is a scientific insight. The libertarian is against minimum-wage laws primarily because they are a violation of the rights of both employer and employee to freely make an agreeable deal. But to reinforce this point, the libertarian, steeped in economics, can explain that the results likely to be produced by the minimum wage are not what most people want. Economics is value-free in that it doesn’t tell us whether we should want to increase unemployment, only that raising the minimum wage will tend toward that consequence. But since most decent people do not want to increase unemployment, the science of economics is nicely complementary to the libertarian ethical principle.

Because economics reinforces the case for liberty, “there is a sense in which economic theory per se, any analytical approach to economic questions, can be said to favor the market economy…. But Austrian economics has been so often and so closely tied to liberalism that it is plausible to seek the connection also in its distinctive economic theories.”

Liberalism is concerned with ethical individualism. Methodological individualism – the analytical reduction of all human activity down to the individual actors – is central to Austrian economics and has been from the start. Carl Menger, founder of the Austrian school, explained a nation’s economy in terms of the results of all the innumerable individual economic efforts in the nation…. Whoever wants to understand theoretically the phenomena of ‘national economy’ [must] attempt to go back to their true elements, to the singular economies in the nation.” (Emphasis in original.)

Also quite conducive to liberal individualism is the Austrian emphasis on subjectivism – the principle that persons make economic choices that are based on their subjective preferences. Classical liberals, Raico writes, “focused on the individual human being per se … as the fountainhead of creative response to an ever-changing world.” Economic schools of thought more in line with central planning, such as mainstream macroeconomics, tend to assume “that various global magnitudes act upon one another,” an assumption that liberals as well as Austrians would question. Moreover, “Individuality bears an intimate, perhaps even logical connection, to diversity, and Austrianism, in contrast to neoclassical economics, likewise accentuates the role of diversity in economic life.”

Austrians tend toward many general themes in liberalism, such as “the recognition of the self-regulating capacity of civil society” – or what Austrians call spontaneous-order theory. Yet unique and much more specific Austrian insights go even further in undermining the case for government intervention. They include the impossibility of states’ engaging in economic calculation without prices as “the fatal flaw of central planning”; the Austrian theory of the business cycle, which demonstrates the inability of central banks to manipulate market interest rates without distorting the economy and thereby causing booms and busts; “the analysis of the market as a process” – an approach that stifles socialist pretensions; and Mises’s explanation of why government interventionism is unstable, since one intervention leads to another and society eventually descends toward totalitarianism. Most important in Raico’s assessment is the approach of Austrian economics toward the free market not simply as “producing the greatest possible amount of material goods,” as it is seen by neoclassical defenders of the market, but rather as, in Menger’s words, “a pattern of economic governance exercised by consumer preferences.”

Moreover, the Austrian school itself emerged in an ideological context. Many of the first Austrians in the late 19th century were intimately involved in debates with the Marxists on key questions of economic theory, particularly the theory of value. The Austrians played a major role in the marginal revolution, overthrowing centuries of understanding economic exchange value (price) in terms of labor. The labor theory of value was generally taken for granted by Adam Smith and the classical school of economics. The Austrians, however, believed that economic value, including exchange value, originated in the subjective valuation of individual economic actors who – and this is most important – value units of goods on the margin; that is, that they assess the next unit of a commodity in relation to the next-most-valued thing they would forgo to obtain it.

This revolution in value theory finally answered mysteries that had nagged economists for many years, such as the diamond/water paradox. Why is a diamond worth so much more than a cup of water in most circumstances, but not if you are dying of thirst in the desert? Why would an additional cup of water be worth less once you’ve had one cup? Marxism’s whole conception of exploitation was wrapped up in basing the objective value of a commodity on the labor it “contains.” Because Marxism was one of the economic schools most conducive to the creation of a totalitarian state and so was at war with the Austrians over basic theory of value, Austrian economics was distinguished early on as the camp of individual liberty.

Yet the historical context of the Austrian school’s emergence might explain why not all early Austrians embraced liberalism consistently. Raico explains that “the underlying tradition in Austria was one of state paternalism, to the point where even the expression of the concept of a spontaneous economic order had been actively suppressed.” Such considerations among others meant that early luminaries of the school, such as Friedrich von Wieser and Eugen von Bo?hm-Bawerk, did not always adhere to classical-liberal ideas.

Two 20th-century Austrian economists, for their part, were far more distinct in their classical liberalism and have become universally recognized as significant figures in the birth of modern libertarianism: Ludwig von Mises and F.A. Hayek. Beginning with them, “the links between liberalism and the Austrian School become intense and pervasive.” Mises was decisively a liberal, having “highlighted the possibilities of meeting the needs of the deserving poor through private charity and assailed Bismarckian schemes of social insurance.”

Hayek, on the other hand, at times took positions that few libertarians today would endorse. Seeing the state as “a service agency,” he believed that (in his words) “there is little reason why the government should not … play some role, or even take the initiative, in such areas as social insurance and education, and temporarily subsidize certain experimental developments.” Yet it would be an understatement to say that Hayek was a brilliant thinker and economist whose many insights have helped develop libertarian theory.

Illiberal economists and scholars

That the economic divide is as prevalent as any divide between modern and classical liberals should be obvious. It is important to ask, therefore, about the major economic influences on modern liberalism and their relationship to original liberalism. We focus on John Maynard Keynes, whose brand of economic theory is the most dominant strain of economics in the modern world, enjoying a virtual monopoly on the economic thinking of modern liberalism.

Raico asks whether Keynes was a liberal. Since modern liberals claim the legacy of classical liberalism, this is a most important question indeed. Raico writes, “It is now common practice to rank John Maynard Keynes as one of modern history’s outstanding liberals, the most recent ‘great’ in the tradition of John Locke, Adam Smith, and Thomas Jefferson…. If he is different from the ‘classical’ liberals in a few obvious and important ways, it was simply because he tried to update the essential liberal idea to suit the economic conditions of a new age.” ”

In fairness, Keynes did embrace values “such as tolerance and rationality” and “always called himself a liberal…. But none of this carries great weight when it comes to classifying Keynes’s political thought.”

The general idea espoused by those who call Keynes a great liberal is that his “turn to neo-mercantilism was necessitated by his discovery of fundamental flaws in classical economics,” especially in light of Britain’s unemployment problems of the 1920s and the Great Depression. According to Raico, however, those crises “were themselves produced by misguided government policies.”

There are other problems with inducting Keynes into the Liberal Hall of Fame: “Liberalism is characterized by its insistence on rules, in political as in economic life.” The rule of law and laissez faire are conspicuous examples. But “it is no exaggeration to say that [Keynes] was constitutionally averse to rules, or ‘dogmas,’ as he often called them.”

Moreover, “authentic liberalism has traditionally harbored a deep distrust for agents of the state,” whereas Keynes’s “airy reliance on economic experts whose sage advice would be put into effect by self-denying politicians flies in the face of this wholly warranted suspicion and all of the historical and theoretical evidence supporting it.” Keynes went so far as to believe that the state should “even decide the optimal level of population” and, at times, that the state should be active in eugenics-based social engineering. He also spoke highly of the Soviet system and, in the preface to the German edition of his General Theory, remarked that the Nazi “totalitarian state” was more compatible with his economic prescriptions, owing to “the theory of output as a whole” than were “the Anglo-Saxon countries.”

Yet many if not most intellectuals remain devoted followers of Keynes – which raises a question: why do intellectuals oppose economic liberty? “The continued flourishing of [anti-market] intellectuals remains an enduring puzzle and problem for classical liberals,” Raico writes. His treatment of that question wonderfully explores the relevance of intellectuals and their ideas in shaping society and the role of historical myth in perpetuating statist thought.

Raico sees the problem as multidisciplinary: “In literature, economics, philosophy, sociology, and other subjects, the student is continually subjected to data and interpretations that converge on a single point: the viciousness of private enterprise and the virtuousness of state intervention and state-supported labor unionism.”

For Hayek the problem is principally one of poor understanding: “Hayek’s view of the intellectuals,” Raico writes, “is flatteringly benign: their ideas are determined by and large by ‘honest convictions and good intentions.’” Raico is unconvinced by Hayek’s attempt to explain this poor understanding. As one example, Hayek “appears to be saying that because the natural sciences have made great advances and because innumerable particular engineering projects have succeeded, it is quite understandable that many intellectuals should conclude that ‘the direction of all forms of human activity according to a single coherent plan’ will be similarly successful.” But Raico challenges the entire premise, pointing out that “the advances of the natural sciences were not brought about in accordance with any overall central plan; rather, they were the product of many separate decentralized but coordinated researchers.”

Raico finds more value in Mises’s explanation: “Often Mises emphasizes invidious personal motivation – resentment and bitter envy – as the source of this attitude.” He is even more moved by Mises’s other insight – that “the contempt of money-making [is] deeply ingrained in western culture,” leading to “hostility towards capitalists, trade, and speculation.”

Revitalizing a grand tradition

Raico is a great historian but also a player in the history of libertarian ideas. At one time or another, he was associated with the three men regarded by many as the 20th century’s greatest Austrians and libertarian scholars: Mises, Hayek, and Murray Rothbard.

To the extent our tradition of liberalism has faded, Raico serves as an eloquent bearer of bad news. In an essay on Eugen Richter, he gives his eulogy for German liberalism. In America the decline of liberalism has in large part been due to militarism, which Raico addresses in his discussion of Arthur Ekirch’s book The Civilian and the Military.

If liberalism has failed to challenge the modern state, perhaps part of the reason is that it has not been radical enough. Reviewing Mises’s great work Liberalism, Raico takes issue with his mentor’s failure to be more hard-line in opposing colonialism and imperialism. If ever there was a great mind to whom every libertarian owes an intellectual debt, it is certainly Mises. Yet even he went astray at times. Raico finds the problem in Mises’s antiseptic conception of the state. For him, the state is simply “the apparatus of compulsion and coercion.” He contemptuously rejects Nietzsche’s dictum that “the state is the coldest of all cold monsters.”

Yet being radical is not enough. We must understand our role in the history of ideas, including what came before us!

Reprinted from The Future of Freedom Foundation.

Anthony Gregory [send him mail] is research fellow at the Independent Institute. He lives in Oakland, California. See his webpage for more articles and personal information.

The Best of Anthony Gregory

Finally, some sanity, and from a somewhat unexpected source. The ACLU is concerned about the civil liberties implications of the new Harry Reid Senate bill to establish so-called “universal background checks” for firearms purchases. The organization has tended toward silence on gun rights, but at least now it recognizes aspects of the problem with this terrible proposal.

Ever since Sandy Hook, the Obama administration and its progressive choir have demanded a new Assault Weapons Ban (AWB). Now it looks like that plan is toast. California Senator Dianne Feinstein blames gun owners and the NRA, and in a sense we should have expected all along that this proposal would get nowhere. Such a ban would mostly target “semi-automatic” rifles – which, despite all the hysterics, simply refers to any standard rifle that fires one round each time the trigger is pulled – that happen to have esthetic elements like the pistol grip that do not in fact add to the weapons’ lethality. This is the nonsensical standard used to ban some classes of weapons instrumentally identical to the ones banned in 1994.

The first AWB devastated the Democrats politically, and probably contributed as much as anything to the Republicans’ crushing victory in the 1994 congressional elections after forty years in the legislative minority. It also hurt Al Gore in his run against George W. Bush in 2000. The ban generally prohibited ordinary but scary looking rifles, which are used in about two percent of violent crimes committed with firearms. The law did not apply to, say, most of the weapons used at the Columbine school massacre in 1999. But it did interfere with Americans’ basic right to own what we can fairly call the modern version of the musket. Millions of Americans own such weapons like the AR-15, the most popular rifle and one targeted by the Democrats’ proposal for a new, robust AWB. These weapons are used for hunting, sport, and self-defense. They are not, despite all the misinformation to the contrary, repeating, military-style rifles.

In any event, the unpopularity of an AWB always doomed this proposal, especially under a Democratic president as distrusted on the right as Obama. The Republicans have the House and too many Democrats in the Senate are loyal to their gun-owning constituents.

So this whole time, the real threat to our firearms freedom has been these less debated, peripheral proposals – proposals that strip people the state deems “mentally ill” of the right to bear arms, proposals that violate the civil rights of released convicts, proposals to increase penalties for violations of current law, and, as disturbing as anything, proposals to institute “universal background checks.”

The gun restrictionists have pointed to polls showing more than 90% approval of such background checks, including among a vast majority of conservatives, Republicans, and gunowners. Liberty is always attacked on the margins, and most Americans don’t go to gun shows and so don’t see the big deal. Surely the state should know who is armed. Surely we don’t want people buying and selling guns freely.

But, in fact, universal background checks are arguably even more tyrannical than banning whole classes of weapons. Why should the government know who is armed? Why shouldn’t people be allowed to freely buy and sell private property without government permission? Half of Americans see background checks as the first step toward full registration then confiscation. Many fear that the new law would create records of these deals that would not immediately be destroyed, which could form databases or enable government in further nefarious purposes. The progressives have tended to regard any of these worries as paranoia, but it looks like the ACLU is now among the paranoid.

Read the rest of the article

Recently by Anthony Gregory: The Right and the Drug War

Finally, some sanity, and from a somewhat unexpected source. The ACLU is concerned about the civil liberties implications of the new Harry Reid Senate bill to establish so-called “universal background checks” for firearms purchases. The organization has tended toward silence on gun rights, but at least now it recognizes aspects of the problem with this terrible proposal.

Ever since Sandy Hook, the Obama administration and its progressive choir have demanded a new Assault Weapons Ban (AWB). Now it looks like that plan is toast. California Senator Dianne Feinstein blames gun owners and the NRA, and in a sense we should have expected all along that this proposal would get nowhere. Such a ban would mostly target “semi-automatic” rifles – which, despite all the hysterics, simply refers to any standard rifle that fires one round each time the trigger is pulled – that happen to have esthetic elements like the pistol grip that do not in fact add to the weapons’ lethality. This is the nonsensical standard used to ban some classes of weapons instrumentally identical to the ones banned in 1994.

The first AWB devastated the Democrats politically, and probably contributed as much as anything to the Republicans’ crushing victory in the 1994 congressional elections after forty years in the legislative minority. It also hurt Al Gore in his run against George W. Bush in 2000. The ban generally prohibited ordinary but scary looking rifles, which are used in about two percent of violent crimes committed with firearms. The law did not apply to, say, most of the weapons used at the Columbine school massacre in 1999. But it did interfere with Americans’ basic right to own what we can fairly call the modern version of the musket. Millions of Americans own such weapons like the AR-15, the most popular rifle and one targeted by the Democrats’ proposal for a new, robust AWB. These weapons are used for hunting, sport, and self-defense. They are not, despite all the misinformation to the contrary, repeating, military-style rifles.

In any event, the unpopularity of an AWB always doomed this proposal, especially under a Democratic president as distrusted on the right as Obama. The Republicans have the House and too many Democrats in the Senate are loyal to their gun-owning constituents.

So this whole time, the real threat to our firearms freedom has been these less debated, peripheral proposals – proposals that strip people the state deems “mentally ill” of the right to bear arms, proposals that violate the civil rights of released convicts, proposals to increase penalties for violations of current law, and, as disturbing as anything, proposals to institute “universal background checks.”

The gun restrictionists have pointed to polls showing more than 90% approval of such background checks, including among a vast majority of conservatives, Republicans, and gunowners. Liberty is always attacked on the margins, and most Americans don’t go to gun shows and so don’t see the big deal. Surely the state should know who is armed. Surely we don’t want people buying and selling guns freely.

But, in fact, universal background checks are arguably even more tyrannical than banning whole classes of weapons. Why should the government know who is armed? Why shouldn’t people be allowed to freely buy and sell private property without government permission? Half of Americans see background checks as the first step toward full registration then confiscation. Many fear that the new law would create records of these deals that would not immediately be destroyed, which could form databases or enable government in further nefarious purposes. The progressives have tended to regard any of these worries as paranoia, but it looks like the ACLU is now among the paranoid.

Read the rest of the article

Anthony Gregory [send him mail] is research fellow at the Independent Institute. He lives in Oakland, California. See his webpage for more articles and personal information.

The Best of Anthony Gregory

Pat Robertson began publicly criticizing the drug war in December 2010, and he has become more vocal since. Unlike the vague critiques often heard from prominent figures – even Barack Obama has called the drug war a failure – Robertson’s insights have been precise, and consistent, and deeply-rooted. “We here in America make up 5 percent of the world’s population, but we make up 25 percent of jailed prisoners,” he noted in March, appearing genuinely moved by the issue. “I really believe we should treat marijuana the way we treat … alcohol,” he told the New York Times. Beyond the practical argument, Robertson sees the moral dimension: “I believe in working with the hearts of people, and not locking them up.”

In light of his key role in the religious right, Robertson’s comments take on special significance. The man speaks to a particular strain of social conservatives, not straying from their rhetorical comfort zone even as he champions drug legalization for principled reasons. He even blames the left for a burgeoning police state: “Every time the liberals pass a bill – I don’t care what it involves – they stick criminal sanctions on it.”

Should “theocons” adopt a more tolerant view on drugs, it would shake the entire right-wing on the issue. They would be the last prominent faction to demonstrate skepticism. The American right has long had its share of drug-war critics. William F. Buckley articulately defended legalization on a half-hour PBS special in 1996. George Will has often explained the unintended consequences of prohibition, although he still falls short of calling for decriminalization. Barry Goldwater expressed skepticism toward the criminal-justice approach.

Neocons have either not cared much about drugs and other domestic matters or have sometimes embraced drug decriminalization as a nod to their social liberal side. Fusionist and libertarian-leaning conservatives have tended toward decriminalization. Right-wing talk radio, the information source for millions, has also featured many voices skeptical of drug laws, from the sensationalist Michael Savage to Jeffersonians like Mike Church. The common-sense center-right has often decried the futility of marijuana prohibition in particular.

Missing in the conservative approach to the issue has been an understanding of the grave threats prohibition poses to the social institutions that cultural conservatives, including the Christian right, hold dear. If Robertson foreshadows a coming shift in the Silent Majority’s sentiments, this void will finally be filled. Despite the prominent critics among their ranks, everyday conservatives have consistently revealed themselves in polls as more hostile to decriminalization than liberals and moderates. A socially conservative turnaround on the issue would change everything. Just as many moralists who championed temperance turned against alcohol prohibition after seeing the social destruction it unleashed in the 1920s, today’s social conservatives could play a defining role in ending drug prohibition.

The drug war embodies secular leviathan like few other government efforts. The federal anti-drug crusade began with Woodrow Wilson’s signing of the Harrison Narcotics Act in 1914, escalated with Franklin Roosevelt’s signing of the Marijuana Tax Act in 1937, and tyrannically expanded to cover previously legal psychedelics and other substances during Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society. Bill Clinton increased marijuana arrests and drug task force spending, greatly accelerating the Reagan-Bush drug war. Under Obama, the policies have once again enjoyed a boost: his 2009 stimulus bill included major hikes in drug enforcement spending that had dwindled under George W. Bush.

If alcohol prohibition qualified as the progressives’ greatest domestic triumph in the early 20th century, drug prohibition has achieved even more as a usurpation of traditional morality and the social order. Constitutionalism, states’ rights, subsidiarity, community norms, traditional medicine, family authority, and the role of the church have all been violently pushed aside to wage an impossibly ambitious national project to control people in the most intimate of ways. For years, the federal DARE program encouraged children to rat out their parents for minor drug offenses, an intrusion into family life all too reminiscent of Soviet Russia.

Prohibition-fueled gang warfare has not only inflicted violence upon the social fabric; the crime wave has also served as a rationale to weaken the very civil liberties that conservatives most cherish – particularly Second Amendment rights. Bloodshed on city streets attributed to the 1920s liquor trade spawned the National Firearms Act of 1934. Congress specifically targeted drug users in its Gun Control Act of 1968. The 1990 Crime Control Act focused on creating drug-free school zones, but semi-automatic rifles also came under its ambit. Even the 1993 Waco standoff, rationalized by the Clinton Justice Department as an anti-assault-weapons operation, started with search warrants dubiously directed at finding a meth lab. In the 1980s drugs had served as the excuse to carve out exceptions to the 1878 Posse Comitatus Act forbidding military involvement in domestic law enforcement. The radicalized grassroots patriots in the post-Cold War 1990s who saw national police power as a threat to their liberty, their guns, and their families should have recognized America’s drug laws as a principal culprit.

Today drug money finances not just domestic gangs but foreign thugs as well. In the last decade many reporters have commented on how opium profits have enriched the Taliban – a nearly unavoidable result of America’s drug policies, which keep narcotics highly profitable. But today the most conspicuous violent foreign threat comes from Mexico. The cartels, whose killing spree has taken tens of thousands of lives in just the last couple years, have shattered the peace on the border and become the subject of the Obama administration’s most notorious scandal. Some conservatives have wondered aloud whether the “Fast and Furious” program of arming Mexican drug gangs was intended to create an excuse to crack down on American gun ownership. Regardless of the ATF’s intentions, the drug violence has indeed served as a rationale to restrict American liberties, including the right to bear arms. But very little of this would be possible if these cartels could not fund themselves with the amplified profits that drug prohibition produces. (No wonder all of the conservative movement’s heroes of economic science – Ludwig von Mises, F.A. Hayek, and Milton Friedman – were unambiguous in opposing the drug war, on practical as well as moral grounds.)

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Anthony Gregory [send him mail] is research fellow at the Independent Institute. He lives in Oakland, California. See his webpage for more articles and personal information.

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Nineteen years ago, just outside Waco, Texas, the FBI demonstrated once again that the state at its core is a killing machine. Monarchy, democracy, or republic — any government as conventionally defined is a legal monopoly on violence. The state is always inclined toward oppression, division, conquest, and bloodshed, because these are its tools of trade.

Matters are no different here. The myth of a free America was always seen with bitter irony by those not blessed by such freedom. In the founding generation, as half a million labored in slavery, many who fought in the Revolution genuinely believed in liberty, but for the ruling elite who chided them on, liberty was hardly more than a slogan. This has always been true of our political leaders. The Father of the Country was a centralizing slaveowner. Old Hickory talked up freedom as he threatened war on South Carolina and forced the Cherokee to flee from their ancestral land on a barbarously murderous walk of shame. The Great Emancipator turned America into a military dictatorship and abolished the revolutionary right of secession. Wilson's New Freedom was cover for a Prussianized war machine generating revenue for his profiteering buddies on Wall Street. Roosevelt's Four Freedoms failed to include the freedom not to be drafted or interned in a concentration camp. Ronald Reagan threw the word freedom around as he trained Latin American torturers and raped the Bill of Rights in the name of fighting drugs. The United States has never lived up to its rhetoric.

But the events from February 28 through April 19, 1993, still stand out in my mind as a watershed. It was the post-Cold War regime's coming of age, signifying a major event in cultural history.

Everything about Operation Showtime was brazen, and it seemed like an overreach even by some of the government's establishment defenders. Yet today Washington's fixers must look back at these embarrassments as a hiccup at most, as growing pains on the way to establishing a militarized law-and-order apparatus of nearly unlimited power. That this stepping stone was reached on the eve of the Internet era, right before the old media began its decline in influence, was most convenient for the police state and its solidification.

The propaganda against the Branch Davidians was perfectly tuned to appeal to the masses, each adjustment in frequency coming just in time to keep the people listening. Religious fanatics with a meth lab, armed and dangerous, abusing their children — few wanted to stand up for these people during the siege. Even fewer wished to identify the Davidian response to the original raid for what it was: self-defense. The Davidians fired on the ATF so long as the ATF fired upon the Davidians, and when the ATF ran out of ammo, the Davidians held their fire. The government's officials were the aggressors. What followed were fifty-one days of psychological warfare designed to isolate the Davidians — from water, from food, from the press, their lawyers and family — and break them down like any wartime enemy.

So preposterous was the standoff that eventually even the mainstream media began asking questions. A New York Times exposé on March 28 raised all sorts of troubling issues, which only multiplied in the days that followed. Federal agents said that supervisors had known they had lost the element of surprise, but decided to go ahead with the February 28 raid anyway. Agents were reportedly unhappy with their equipment and communication methods. The poor planning and lack of contingency options were exposed. No medical assistance had been prepared for the ATF’s raid. Reports emerged that some of the ATF agents had injured or killed one another in friendly fire. There were hints that other agents might have even been captured and let go by the Davidians. The ATF intelligence chief stopped holding press conferences as the heat continued to mount.  

On April 19, tired from the boredom and bad publicity of just standing around outside the "compound," the FBI drove a tank through the Davidians' home, pumped it full of CS gas, launched incendiary devices at the building, and watched it go up in flames. As soon as the stakes became higher, as soon as questioning the feds meant implying they had committed mass murder, the media stopped barking defiantly and jumped back to the government's lap.

The Democrats, home of America's center-left, oversaw this exceedingly important event in the development of the police state. Unsurprisingly, every respectable liberal defended the government and believed Clinton's people when they demonized the Davidians. The entire respectable right went along with the bloodletting, too. Why wouldn't they? It was a raid planned by George H.W. Bush's ATF, carried out by the Clintonistas, and ultimately rubberstamped by the Republicans in Congress, and so everyone could get behind it. Some libertarians wavered, including Randians and other proponents of violent national secularism, and much of the radical left went limp too.

The Oklahoma City incident two years later was spun by the media as an example of anti-government extremism somehow being a greater threat than the government itself. It became increasingly un-PC to bring up what had happened in Texas. The election of Dubya and 9/11 washed away the paranoid anti-statist instincts of much of the Clinton-hating right.

Waco, from the raid's planning to the cover-up and show trials, taught the U.S. government what it could get away with — which is to say, practically anything. It can gas innocent children with internationally banned chemicals. It can hoist a federal flag atop a torched American home, claim victory, and see its public image improve. It can throw grenades at people trying to escape a building and claim they are being held hostage. In the name of protecting these "hostages" and children, it can watch as they burn and keep the firefighters away. And the massacre will be tolerated, even applauded.

Dozens of people of color died at the hands of the federal government, and the official Civil Rights movement hardly spoke up. Dozens of people were targeted for their religion, and it hardly bothered many of the very conservatives who allege a war on religion waged by DC. The largest federal-military killing of civilians on U.S. soil in a century has now become one more notch on the progressive left's timeline of major events in anti-government extremism, as opposed to a principal example of government extremism where a tiny minority community was virtually exterminated.

Indeed, in 1993 the Davidians were only the most conspicuous and recent example in America's long history of the demonized Other, the marginalized underclass in the official hierarchy of human worth. Slaves, Indians, Mexicans, Southerners, Catholics, Irish and German-Americans, Chinese immigrants, Japanese-Americans, Mormons, homosexuals, alleged Communists, rightwing extremists, and many others have played the role, often for their imagined association with the wartime enemy, but always for being out of step with the government's accepted definition of legitimate humanity. Many look back at incidents of intolerance with disbelief that Americans could be so blind to oppression. Yet when the topic of Waco comes up, they will think only of those nutcases who, according to the government and media, attacked federal agents and then killed themselves.

In the nineteen years since Waco, we have seen the police state explode in every direction and now we are all ensnared. Some groups are always more threatened than others, but no one is truly safe. The prisons have swollen to the largest detention system since Stalin's gulags. The police conduct three thousand SWAT raids a month. The war on terror has made a total mockery of what remained of the Fourth Amendment. Torture has lost its taboo. So has indefinite detention. The feds irradiate and molest airline passengers by the millions. People are jailed for taking medicine, buying Sudafed, sharing songs, and selling milk. The Kafkaesque regulatory state threatens people of all economic classes with crushing fines and a fate in a cage. The public schools, always authoritarian institutions, have become explicit adjuncts of the criminal justice system and military recruitment offices. Every major police department has tanks and battle rifles and drones are being used for surveillance and God knows what else. Each federal department has enough firepower to conquer a small third-world country. DHS alone has ordered enough ammo to shoot every American man, woman, and child. The president claims the right to kill American citizens anywhere on the planet on his say-so alone. And he exercises that power.

Why do some of us continue to fixate on Waco? If for no other reason, because April 19, 1993 was a squandered opportunity if ever there was one. The people could have risen up and said, "Enough!" They could have demanded the military occupation retreat from their own neighborhoods — both the federal presence and its satellite jackboots in the city police. They could have demanded an end to the gun laws, drug war, and federal war on crime, each of which was instrumental in ending the lives of more than twenty children at Waco. They could have turned against the media whose elites stood and applauded the White House as it announced and defended its latest killing spree. They could have seen the federal government for the clear and present danger it obviously poses — the only government that had militarily mass murdered American civilians on American soil since the collateral damage at Pearl Harbor. They could have turned their backs on the killers in DC, refusing ever to believe in their lies again, saving the lives of uncountable Americans, Serbians, Afghans, Iraqis, Libyans, Yemenis, Palestinians, and so many others who would bear the wrath of an unhampered imperial executive in the nineteen years to come, sparing the priceless liberties we have seen shredded on the altar of state power.

Instead, they looked the other way, they yawned, even cheered. There might still be time to turn things around. But the tanks are closing in.

Anthony Gregory [send him mail] is research editor at the Independent Institute. He lives in Oakland, California. See his webpage for more articles and personal information.

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A free society is impossible under an empire. Even the most just war you can imagine is a disaster for liberty and prosperity, as Ludwig von Mises pointed out. An unjust war amounts to murder, mayhem, and mass destruction. And a perpetual state of war guarantees that liberty will never be achieved. James Madison said it very well:

Of all the enemies to public liberty war is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded, because it comprises and develops the germ of every other. War is the parent of armies; from these proceed debts and taxes; and armies, and debts, and taxes are the known instruments for bringing the many under the domination of the few. In war, too, the discretionary power of the Executive is extended; its influence in dealing out offices, honors, and emoluments is multiplied; and all the means of seducing the minds, are added to those of subduing the force, of the people. [There is also an] inequality of fortunes, and the opportunities of fraud, growing out of a state of war, and … degeneracy of manners and of morals…. No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare.

Indeed, from a purely consequentialist point of view, America has lost most of its freedom during its wars. Even the American Revolution itself had negative effects — martial law, massive debt that ushered in Hamiltonian control of the new republic, and consolidation of power in the national capital.

The War of 1812 resulted in martial law in Louisiana, where people were jailed without habeas corpus simply for criticizing military law. A judge was jailed for issuing a habeas corpus writ.

During the Mexican War the executive branch unilaterally adopted taxing powers over U.S.-controlled ports in Mexico.

The Civil War brought with it mass conscription, corporate welfare, the death of real federalism, the suspension of habeas corpus, the jailing of thousands of dissenters, the censoring of hundreds of newspapers, the creation of a national leviathan with such new agencies as the Department of Agriculture, military commissions, and the use of the army against civilian draft rioters in New York.

With World War I, thousands of new agencies were created, millions were enslaved to fight in a royal European family feud, American citizens were jailed for saying things I say every day, income-tax rates skyrocketed into the 70s, and the federal government implemented economic controls that were later brought back in peacetime during the New Deal. In fact, the New Deal was basically the revitalization of the wartime economy from World War I.

World War II saw the conscription of 11 million Americans, the detention of hundreds of thousands of "enemy aliens" without due process, Japanese internment, martial law in Hawaii, a quasi-fascist command economy complete with comprehensive price controls, tax rates above 90 percent, censorship, and the prolonging of Herbert Hoover's and Franklin Roosevelt's Great Depression, which didn't end until the U.S. government stopped consuming 40 percent of America's income to wage the war.

The Cold War gave us drafts, especially during the hot wars with Korea and Vietnam, and surveillance and psy-ops directed against peaceful activists by U.S. intelligence agencies. With the war on terror we have lost the last remnants of the Fourth Amendment, habeas corpus has taken another beating, we are treated like prison inmates every time we fly, peaceful activists have been spied on, media have been manipulated by Washington, torture has become normalized, soldiers are not allowed to quit after completing their first or even third tour of duty, and Americans' telecommunications have been exposed to surveillance by the military.

War gave us the welfare state — first for veterans then for the rest of us. It gave us Prohibition — it was during World War I that beer was targeted, both for its German origin and its popularity on military bases — and Prohibition led to gun control and the continued destruction of the Bill of Rights. War, under Lincoln and Wilson, gave us the corporate state, which is now a permanent feature of American life. War gave us federal meddling in education. It created virtually every precedent by which our liberty is robbed.

It is no exaggeration to say that had America not found itself in those wars, we would be much, much freer — even if a New Deal were passed every decade, even if the Progressive Era had never ended, even if the Great Society were three times as grandiose, even if Obama had been president for the last century. There are many threats to liberty, and all are worth taking seriously. But nothing has approached war when it comes to destroying American liberty. And abroad, war has created conditions that almost always lead to less freedom and security, not more, for most people involved.

The CIA talks about "blow-back" — the idea that U.S. intervention leads to unanticipated and unpredictable results that harm America and its interests. Few people take it far enough.

If it were not for the Mexican War, the question of the expansion of slavery into the new territories might never have exploded into the political conflicts that culminated in the Civil War. If it were not for the Civil War, the U.S. nation-state would have not had the manufacturing power and mercantilist interests of the North combined with the expansionist sentiments of the South, which became united, by force, in the national project of imperialism. If it were not for the Spanish-American War, the colonies seized by America at the time would not have been targets for a Japanese attack in World War II.

World War I and beyond

But World War I was the true starting point of all the trouble we've seen since. If not for U.S. intervention in World War I, the Germans would not have lost so decisively, the Allies would never had been able to impose such crushing conditions on Germany, and Hitler would have probably never come to power. Meanwhile, the United States also pressured the Russian democrats who had overthrown the tsars to stay in the conflict, leading to the conditions that allowed Lenin to take power. The Nazi and Soviet states — two of the most infamous totalitarian regimes of modern times — were born at least in good part because of U.S. meddling in World War I. At the same time, the Allies carved up the Middle East, messing up that region in ways that affect us to this day.

World War II was simply a consequence of World War I, although it too could probably have been avoided had Britain not declared war to save Poland — which it never did save. But given the line between World War I and World War II, many assume the latter, the "Good War," was a clear victory for peace and democracy.

It's hardly that simple. World War II resulted in the amassing of far more territory under Stalin, who was certainly not much of an improvement over Hitler. Indeed, Hitler's greatest crime of all — the Final Solution — was a wartime measure. War was bad for the freedom of everyone ruled by Hitler, just as with any other government.

Moreover, in addition to Stalin's territorial grabs, the defeat of imperialist Japan opened the door to communist domination of Asia. Aside from the socialist takeover of China, it was during World War II that the United States supported Ho Chi Minh, who would later take over the communist government of Vietnam. World War II simply paved the way to communist control of almost half the planet, as well as the Cold War.

During the Cold War, the United States supported any regime poised against communism. That included the Ba'athists in Iraq, led by Saddam Hussein; the shah in Iran, which led to the textbook blowback of the Islamic Revolution; and, in the late 70s and early 80s, the mujahideen in Afghanistan, whose successors still plague most of that poor country. Eventually, the United States would side with Saddam against Iran (while sending Iran weapons illegally) and then turn on its ally, waging war with Iraq under George H.W. Bush. All of this meddling, of course, led to 9/11 and the resulting war on terrorism.

World War I led to World War II, which led to the Cold War, which led to the war on terror. It is a vicious cycle, and it needs to end, or else we will always be in a state of war, all sides believing they didn't start it, and peace and the freedom that depends on it will always be a dream.

The immorality of America's wars

But there is an even more fundamental reason to oppose wars as a general principle. Wars are almost always unambiguously immoral. War is, after all, mass killing conducted by government.

The great 13th-century Catholic theologian St. Thomas Aquinas and the Dutch Protestant Hugo Grotius of the 17th century etched out a Just War Theory to determine the moral status of a given war. For a war to be just, it has to be defensive. It has to eschew the targeting of innocents. It has to protect wartime prisoners. It has to be declared by a properly constituted authority. It has to be winnable — a state can't just devote the population to a suicide mission with no chance of victory. It cannot result in more evils than it eliminates. Only those directly responsible for aggression can be punished. It has to have good intentions — revenge itself will not do. It has to spare civilians. It has to be publicly declared. It has to be a last resort. Both the cause in the war and the conduct in executing it have to be just.

America has waged virtually no just wars. Some wars might have been in retaliation for a direct act of aggression — such as World War II in the wake of Pearl Harbor, but even that did not justify the firebombing or nuclear destruction of Japan's civilian centers, or the firebombing of Dresden and more than a hundred other German cities. Most American wars fail the Just War test on almost every count. And the morality of a nation that embraces immoral wars is more threatened than by all the social deviancies one could imagine combined.

It is for all those reasons that the classical liberal movement — the movement of liberty — has always had a particular abhorrence for war. The Levellers hated war. Jefferson and Madison wrote about it passionately. Lysander Spooner, although a radical abolitionist, opposed the Civil War. Most prominent pro–free market and pro-liberty Americans — from Mark Twain and Edward Atkinson to Grover Cleveland and Andrew Carnegie — opposed U.S. intervention against Spain in Cuba and the Philippines (where hundreds of thousands of civilians were killed by U.S. forces), and later in World War I. The Old Right coalition in the era of Franklin Roosevelt was concerned with the New Deal, but despite their disagreements one thing united them more than anything else: opposition to foreign war. The modern libertarian movement grew, not only in opposition to regulation and socialism, but also in opposition to the conservatives' embrace of the draft and the Vietnam War. And of course, if one issue unified and energized the Ron Paul revolution starting in 2007 it was opposition to George W. Bush's criminal foreign policy and war on terrorism.

Many issues are very important and cut right to the nub of what it means to be free. Such issues as censorship, gun control, drug prohibition, income taxation, fiat money and central economic planning are all crucial, and we should never flinch in opposing such depredations on liberty. But if there's any one issue on which all of liberty hinges, any one policy whose moral implications warrant the greatest urgency at all times, any one political question that determines whether you live in a semi-free country or a nation that is categorically preempted from becoming free, it is, as James Madison and many others before and after him have said, war. A noninterventionist foreign policy is the cornerstone of a free society. It is certainly not sufficient to allow for freedom, but without it, freedom is but a dream.

This originally appeared at the Future of Freedom Foundation.

Anthony Gregory [send him mail] is research editor at the Independent Institute. He lives in Oakland, California. See his webpage for more articles and personal information.

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So-called political compromise is upheld as a high virtue. To be an ideologue is a great vice. The old mantra that the problem in American politics is everyone is an extremist and no one is willing to meet halfway persists, despite its transparent inapplicability in the real world. The distance between the two political parties is small enough to smother a gnat.

For many libertarians there is no worse a sin than to stick stubbornly to purity of principle, to make the perfect the enemy of the good. We never get anywhere because we refuse to budge. We want the whole loaf. This is an old theme.

I wish to address those who fancy themselves libertarians of one kind or another. For these purposes I will define the term broadly. Whatever kind of libertarian you are, I contend that there is a question you should be asking yourself every day: "Am I libertarian enough?"

This is obviously something that moderate libertarians — pragmatics and the mere libertarian-leaning — should consider. For this group, the danger of straying too far toward statism is obviously present, since moderation is built into their self-identity. And it should be a concern to these folks no less than to others by virtue of the fact that they consider themselves libertarian-leaning at all. If you find liberty worthy enough to endorse much or most of the time, how do you know you've struck the right balance? You obviously think statism is a problem and libertarianism is a proper orientation, even if in moderation. If this is the case, you are well aware of the danger of sliding toward the statist extreme, and thus you should be asking yourself constantly if you're libertarian enough. Even a moderate libertarian thinks the government is too big, presumably, and so he wishes for society as a whole to question its own dedication to libertarian principle. It would be unfair to expect others to consider moving toward libertarianism without constantly being willing to consider it for oneself.

Whatever reasons someone has for leaning libertarian — economic, practical arguments, moral attitudes toward personal freedom and the state — they certainly at least potentially apply to situations and issues previously unconsidered. A soft libertarian might recognize that drug laws don't work, but will still hold out for ID checks to buy marijuana. But why? All the arguments against the one apply to the other.

Yet another group does not always ask itself whether it is libertarian enough — radicals. To be a radical libertarian is to be in a small minority. And when someone finds himself in this company, it is all too easy to become complacent, to assume that one's radicalism relative to others, including other libertarians, is perfectly sufficient. The attitude becomes: "I have paid my dues; my radicalism is beyond reproach." Yet again the same arguments apply: If the economic and moral principles that brought you this far are valid, at what arbitrary point do they no longer apply?

If libertarianism is a virtue, or if it is correct, or however you want to put it, then how could there be too much of a good thing? I suppose one could respond with the tired Emerson quote — "a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds" — yet this could easily be leveled against moderate libertarianism as well, in service of national health care, gun control, or the war on terrorism.

For a practical consideration, I'd like to point out that our rulers are constantly asking themselves — or appear to be acting as though they are — the opposing question: "Am I statist enough? Is there any remaining avenue of human life I haven't worked to subjugate under the authority of my central plan?"

We American libertarians live in a time when the U.S. is at perpetual war, the airports have become dystopian, the prison system is the most populated on earth, the president claims the authority to kill anyone, torture persists, surveillance is unrestrained by the Fourth Amendment, Keynesianism has its grip on the entire establishment, and both political parties push an agenda worse than the one pushed last election cycle. People are jailed for selling milk. Nothing is off limits.

In this time, as the statists are continually asking themselves if they are statist enough, we must keep asking ourselves the opposite: Are we radically libertarian enough so as to mount the proper intellectual resistance to the statist ideology on which the growing state thrives?

In practical terms, this means asking oneself such questions as:

1. Is there any war — in all of history — that I have a romantic attachment to, and is it possible that this war was nothing but a murderous and fraudulent escapade, like all the rest? Perhaps I have been right about which state was the greater aggressor in this war — am I being too soft on the other state?
2. Is there any state action I defend that is morally indefensible? Anyone's rights I'm ignoring?
3. Is there any gradualist position I take, on maintaining the police, or the military, or the welfare state, that lacks moral legitimacy or is otherwise an equivocation with evil?
4. Do I put way too much hope in electoral politics yielding a good result, when hundreds of years of U.S. history provide virtually no examples of it doing so?
5. Are there areas of political theory — national borders, militarism, police powers, parental and children's rights, public schooling and compulsory attendance, regulation, Social Security, monetary affairs, sexual liberties, drug freedom, intellectual property — that I have been lazy in considering deeply in light of the radical implications of libertarianism?
6. Is there any political structure or figure in human history that I am too soft on — Thomas Jefferson, English common law, the Constitution, and so forth?
7. Just because something would be OK for the private sector to do, does it mean we can countenance the state doing so in the meantime? (To this question, I break with the implicit reasoning of the minarchists. I find the more violent expressions of state power — policing and militarism — to be more important to abolish instantly than many "illegitimate" functions such as roads and parks.)
8. Which state services is it permissible to exploit, and which is it immoral to use?

These questions don't always have easy answers, but we should always be seeking them. Sometimes it is difficult to find the proper application of libertarianism to tough situations. But if your impulse is to take the libertarian position, then whatever the correct answer is will probably be consistent with libertarianism, rather than inimical to it.

It is true that always questioning one's own radicalism will likely yield the conclusion that the state itself is an unnecessary evil that ought to be abolished immediately. Of course this is true. But even taking that position does not ensure you are libertarian enough.

Should anyone believe I am sitting atop a high horse, viewing myself holier than all the world, I beg that you reconsider this appraisal. I myself worry about my tendencies to adopt moderate, conservative, and socialistic positions all the time. Am I libertarian enough? Perhaps not. I always welcome corrections and arguments as to how I have failed to take the right position.

Anthony Gregory [send him mail] is research editor at the Independent Institute. He lives in Oakland, California. See his webpage for more articles and personal information.

The Best of Anthony Gregory

Ralph Raico, Great Wars & Great Leaders: A Libertarian Rebuttal (Auburn, Alabama: The Ludwig von Mises Institute, 2010), 246 pages.

The greatest leaders, according to conventional appraisals, are usually those who draw the most blood. Most opinion makers distance themselves from Hitler, Mao, Stalin, and their ilk, although even here who can doubt they tower over modern history precisely because of their bloodletting? But in the West and especially the United States, historians, journalists, pundits, and especially politicians tend to admire leaders in proportion to the powers they claimed and exercised, which almost always corresponds with war making and killing.

"One of the most pernicious legacies of Hitler, Stalin, and Mao," writes Ralph Raico, "is that any political leader responsible for less than, say, three or four million deaths is let off the hook. This hardly seems right, and it was not always so" (163). This is an astute observation, and it has relevance even in considering the "civilized" leaders of the United States and its allies, to say nothing of the second tier communist butchers who continue to enjoy a cult following.

Historians, conservative and liberal, when asked to rank U.S. presidents, consistently put war presidents around the top and the ones who oversaw relatively peaceful years for the republic near the bottom. Across the spectrum, commentators adore both Presidents Roosevelt and swoon over the idea of another Truman in the White House. Poor Warren Harding, whose years were prosperous and relatively free, is universally ranked as one of the greatest disappointments. Woodrow Wilson, his predecessor, whose reign yielded over a hundred thousand dead Americans, a pulverized First Amendment, a nationalized economy, not to mention cataclysmic diplomatic consequences throughout the world, was one of the best, everyone seems to agree.

In the 20th century, it was Democrats who did the most to expand power, from the Progressive Era and New Deal to the Great Society. And, perhaps not coincidentally, they were most responsible for America's biggest wars — the World Wars, Korea, and Vietnam. Yet certainly by the time of the George W. Bush administration, if not much earlier, the Republican line was to claim the most power-hungry of Democratic presidents as their own proper antecedents, and in fact to criticize modern Democrats for betraying their 20th century roots as the party of power.

Right after Bush gave his second inaugural address in January 2005, championing an active Wilsonian role for U.S. foreign policy in the new century, conservative talk radio host Rush Limbaugh had this to say:

[W]hat the president did today was make the case for spreading human liberty, defending human dignity, which were once largely the preserve of liberalism. If you go back and look at FDR’s speeches and look at the number of times he mentioned God in his inaugurals. Go back to JFK. "We will fight any foe. We’ll go anywhere. We will do whatever it takes to spread freedom and liberty." Hey, he couldn’t be a liberal Democrat today. JFK couldn’t be. Truman couldn’t be. They were committed to the triumph of liberty in the world, and that’s what this speech was about today, the triumph of freedom and liberty in the world — and it is now conservatism that is propelling this.

For years, libertarians were accustomed to describing this brand of conservatism as "neoconservatism" — a bastardization of the breed that had adopted its interventionist thirst for democratic revolution from the left, and particularly from Trotskyite Marxists. Yet throughout the Cold War, official conservatism from William F. Buckley on down was not particularly inclined toward the Old Right antiwar position, and in today's world most conservatives do seem much more attracted to FDR-style governance, especially abroad, than they do toward anti-interventionism. Even when the price of war is domestic liberty, and conservatives are presented with this trade-off, most choose the glories of war and empire over the simple serenity of peace and republicanism, as witnessed in the fact that nearly all prominent conservative pundits would prefer one of the warmongering big-government Republicans to Ron Paul in the Republican primary.

There is no question that one's comprehension of the nation's history determines one's outlook on foreign affairs. The United States is currently involved in nearly half a dozen wars, and it is widely seen as nothing unusual. A whitewashed understanding of U.S. history is in play in Americans' acceptance of their empire. All the major wars are sold to the public with warnings about the need to stop the world's next Hitler. In the mythology of American war-making, Hitler is at once the greatest enemy of human decency ever to walk the earth and yet also the perennial threat who will resurrect in the form of a Noriega, a Milosovic, a Saddam, or a Gaddaffi, if America does not stand guard. Hitler is simultaneously beyond comparison and yet the demon against which to compare all other dictators.

Yet just as important as the demonization of America's greatest arch nemesis in history is the glorification of America's greatest superheroes on the world stage. Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, and — perhaps we can call him an honorary American at the least — Winston Churchill stand as giants in the usual narrative of international progress, and despite their flaws, some of which historians quickly concede, proud of the balance and sophisticated nuance of their work, these men represent goodness nearly so much as Hitler represents evil. Just as important, the great wars these allegedly great men presided over have come to represent virtue and redemption nearly inasmuch as the Nazis have come to symbolize barbarity.

Ralph Raico dissents. In his terrific book Great Wars & Great Leaders: A Libertarian Rebuttal, the venerable historian acquaints the reader with the dark side of such revered great leaders. His volume could be called an anti-hagiography, yet that is perhaps a grandiose descriptor for what is in ways not so presumptuous a project. All it takes is a fair account of what these men in power actually did to destroy the textbook interpretations. But Raico has done this deed masterfully, with a keen grasp of an enormous amount of literature and a deep understanding of the domestic history, foreign entanglements, shifting alliances, power politics, and sound economics. This combined with the author's obvious fondness for the great traditions of Western civilization and his alluring writing style, which is accessible, artful, and scholarly while being just often enough polemic, makes for a terrific addition to the bookshelf of anyone interested in modern history, U.S. foreign policy, or the story of human freedom.

Making the World Safe for Death and Destruction

World War I was the defining moment in the modern era, marking the death of monarchical Europe, the introduction of modern warfare to the global scene, the dawn of a frightening new system in war making and governance. For the United States, it was more transformative than any other event, other than perhaps Lincoln's war or maybe World War II. It was as unspeakable tragedy, consuming almost 20 million lives and opening the door to the totalitarian takeover of Russia and later Germany. Nothing in history is more important to study, which is why it is particularly sad that in America's government schools, it tends to be poorly taught or deemphasized in comparison to its more popular sequel.

Raico calls World War I "The Turning Point" in the first chapter of his book. At just fifty-two pages, this chapter is the best World War I summary of its length I have read. For everyone very familiar with the war, this chapter is still worth reviewing, with many rich footnotes, containing nuggets that are bound to be new for almost anyone. Yet for someone who hasn't read many full books on the war, this chapter provides as good an overview that can be read in one sitting as one is bound to find, particularly with an emphasis on the American experience.

Raico traces the roots of World War I back to the rise of the German empire in the age of Bismarck, describes the emergence of the mutual defense pacts that soon proved horribly disastrous, discusses the evolving diplomacy between Germany, France and Russia, as well as German's naval arms race with Britain, the importance of war in the Balkans, and the tensions among the various European powers playing out in colonial exploits in Africa. He touches on the violent rise of the Karadjordjevic dynasty in Serbia and its territorial hostility toward Austria-Hungary culminating in the assassination of the Archduke France Ferdinand and a game of chicken between Russia and Germany where, tragically, neither side flinched.

In the immediate aftermath of the war, all guilt was pinned on Germany, a blame game that continues in some scholarly circles to this day. Yet Raico finds that "there is no evidence whatsoever that Germany in 1914 deliberately unleashed a European war which it had been preparing for years — no evidence in the diplomatic and internal political documents, in the military planning, in the activities of the intelligence agencies, or in the relations between the German and Austrian General Staffs" (14).

The belligerent goals of Russia, on the other hand, have been much less emphasized. Yet Russia was at least as bent on war: "Russia regarded Germany as an inevitable enemy, because Germany would never consent to Russian seizure of the Straits or to the Russian-led creation of a Balkans front whose object was the demise of Austria-Hungary" (8). Nor do many focus on Great Britain's role in widening the bloodshed and determining the outcome. "Britain's entry into the war was crucial. In more ways than one, it sealed the fate of the Central Powers. Without Britain in the war, the United States would never have gone in" (17).

What's more, Britain's brutality in the war at least rivaled that of Germany. Due to the propagandistic Bryce Report, grossly exaggerating German atrocities in neutral Belgium, the impression at the time — and one that continues to linger — was of a Germany out of step with the civilized world in its engagement in the Great War. Yet London was responsible for "the single worst example of barbarism in the whole war, aside from the Armenian massacres" — the starvation blockade directed against Germany, which killed perhaps fifty times as many people, particularly civilians, as Germany's more often discussed submarine warfare against Britain (198, 202). This all occurred in a context where Britain had designated the whole North Sea a war zone "in blatant contravention of international law" (24). In a book review on this topic, Raico notes that in "December 1918, the National Health Office in Berlin calculated that 763,000 persons had died as a result of the blockade by that time" (201).

All in all, the war amounted to an unfathomable massacre on the European continent. In another chapter, Raico writes:

In 1916, "the butcher's bill," as Robert Graves called it, came due at Verdun and at the Somme. Ill-educated neoconservatives who in 2002–2003 derided France as a nation of cowards seem never to have heard of Verdun, where a half-million French casualties were the price of keeping the Germans at bay. On the first day of the battle of the Somme, the brainchild of Field Marshal Haig, the British lost more men than on any other single day in the history of the Empire, more than in acquiring India and Canada combined. (232)

About half of the World War I discussion focuses on the United States. As usual, here Raico puts the lie to the two-dimensional casting of events as typically given, dispelling the common myths. For examples, although not a proximate cause of U.S. entry, one of the key rationales was and continues to be Germany's sinking of the Lusitania, which carried American passengers. Yet in a plea to the United States, "the Germans observed that submarine warfare was a reprisal for the illegal hunger blockade; that the Lusitania was carrying munitions of war; that it was registered as an auxiliary cruiser of the British Navy; that British merchant ships had been directed to ram or fire upon surfacing U-boats; and that the Lusitania had been armed" (27).

Despite the urgings for peace by such luminaries as William Jennings Bryan, the president happily entered the war on the side of his beloved Britain. Wilson, who once said, "I cannot imagine power as a thing negative and not positive," used war as an opportunity to expand vastly power in the center (18). The whole time he did so with the bizarre Colonel Mandel House — "Wilson's alter ego" — hanging in the backdrop. Raico serves his readers well by acquainting them with this rascal. "Never elected to public office, [House] nonetheless became the second most powerful man in the country" (20). Wilson himself verified the centrality of this mysterious figure: "Mr. House is my second personality. He is my independent self. His thoughts and mine are one" (21).

During World War I, the U.S. debt climbed from about $1 billion to about $25 billion, a whole assortment of industries were nationalized, thousands of government bureaus were erected, and top income tax rates hit seventy-seven percent. American economic liberty would never again be restored to pre-war levels. Civil liberties took the greatest hit since Lincoln's War. Raico discusses the imprisonment of Eugene Debs and others merely for criticizing the war or draft or America's ally Britain. Free speech took a beating in many nations during the war, but there were unique aspects to Wilson's crackdown on dissent: "In 1920, the Untied States — Wilson's United States — was the only nation involved in the World War that still refused a general amnesty to political prisoners" (41).

The Treaty of Versailles, a Germany burdened by war guilt and a resentful, demoralized, brutalized population, and the territorial changes resulting from the peace resulted not in worldwide democracy or an end to war, as promised, but more conflict, brutality, authoritarianism, and eventually a war even much worse than World War I. Even more politically incorrect to mention, the old order of Europe, as inequitable as it might have been, was swept away, allowing for far greater evils:

Had the war not occurred, the Prussian Hohenzollerns would most probably have remained heads of Germany, with their panoply of subordinate kings and nobility in charge of the lesser German states. Whatever gains Hitler might have scored in the Reichstag elections, could he have erected his totalitarian, exterminationist dictatorship in the midst of this powerful aristocratic superstructure? Highly unlikely. In Russia, Lenin's few thousand Communist revolutionaries confronted the immense Imperial Russian Army, the largest in the world. For Lenin to have any chance to succeed, that great army had first to be pulverized, which is what the Germans did. So, a twentieth century without the Great War might well have meant a century without Nazis or Communists. Imagine that. (1–2)

Raico's discussion of this turning point in the history of humanity alone makes the book worth reading. His review essay on several new books on World War I, and his favorable review of T. Hunt Tooley's The Western Front, are also included in Great Wars & Great Leaders, and demonstrate his appreciation of this crucial topic.

The Celebrated Killers of World War II

Franklin Roosevelt is surely more lionized than Wilson. The liberals love almost everything about him. The conservatives can't help but admire his leadership in America's bloodiest foreign war. Raico's book has no extended discussion of Roosevelt. For more of Raico's insights on FDR, I must recommend his great series of articles for the Future of Freedom Foundation, "Fascism Comes to America."

Peppered throughout the book, however, are some gems for the FDR-hater. One chapter is a tribute to John Flynn, liberal hero of the Old Right through the story of whose opposition Raico undercuts the myths of the New Deal. Originally a progressive, Flynn became horrified by the centralization of power in the 1930s. "Instead of opening up the economy to competitive forces, Roosevelt seemed bent on cartelizing it, principally through the National Recovery Act (NRA), which Flynn regarded as a copy of Mussolini's Corporate State" (209). In response to criticism from Flynn, that man in the White House morphed into a shameless despot: "The President of the United States wrote a personal letter to a magazine editor declaring that Flynn u2018should be barred hereafter from the columns of any presentable daily paper, monthly magazine, or national quarterly'" (210). Citing Robert Higgs and others, Raico explains that the New Deal did not, indeed, end the Great Depression, thus validating Flynn's contemporary critiques of his president.

Raico discusses Roosevelt's behind-the-scenes trickery to engineer American intervention in World War II when the American people wanted nothing to do with it, particularly through the backdoor via war with Japan, as well as FDR's nefarious intention to be in the war even before he was reelected on the platform of keeping Americans out of it: "On June 10, 1939, George VI and his wife, Queen Elizabeth, visited the Roosevelts at Hyde Park. In private conversations with the King, Roosevelt promised full support for Britain in case of war" (73). One chapter discusses the America First movement — the country's largest antiwar movement ever, which mobilized to prevent a repeat of Wilson's calamity. Many had suspected FDR of deceit in the run-up to U.S. entry, and they were smeared at the time for it. But "[t]oday Roosevelt's record of continual deception of the American people is unambiguous. In that sense, the old revisionists such as Charles Beard have been completely vindicated. Pro-Roosevelt historians — at least those who do not praise him outright for his noble lies — have had to resort to euphemism" (222).

Although Roosevelt is more adored than his successor, he is probably also more despised. Yet if there are any modern presidents worse than FDR, one of them would have to be Harry Truman. Raico does a great service in shining light on this president's reign of tyranny.

The author explains how Truman's Fair Deal was a fascistic advancement of FDR's ruinous policies. He discusses Truman's attempt to draft striking railroad workers into the Army and his dictatorial seizure of the steel mills. He compellingly explains how Truman's legacies in foreign aid, the development of NATO, and the postwar U.S. stance toward Israel are all blights that continue to burden America.

But Truman's greatest sins have to be in the arena of war. First, we must consider how he ended the conflict with Japan: by introducing nuclear warfare to the world. Raico's treatment of Hiroshima and Nagasaki is excellent, dispensing with the usual arguments about how these were cities of military import and focusing on the utilitarian and terroristic calculus of mass murder. We continue to hear the nukings saved lives. Raico notes:

The ridiculously inflated figure of a half-million for the potential death toll — more than the total of U.S. dead in all theaters in the Second World War — is now routinely repeated in high school and college textbooks and bandied about by ignorant commentators. (136)

But Raico hones in on the moral principle: "Those who may still be troubled by such a grisly exercise in cost-benefit analysis — innocent Japanese lives balanced against the lives of Allied servicemen — might reflect on the judgment of the Catholic philosopher G. E. M. Anscombe, who insisted on the supremacy of moral rules" (138).

In any event, Raico explains that the Japanese were ready to surrender, only wishing to retain their emperor, which they got to keep anyway. He cites the top officials who opposed the act as unnecessary and barbarous. He concludes: "The destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was a war crime worse than any that Japanese generals were executed for in Tokyo and Manila. If Harry Truman was not a war criminal, then no one ever was" (142).

Also in the end of World War II did the world witness Truman's despicable cooperation with Stalin in conducting an unfathomable atrocity: "In the early months of Truman's presidency the United States and Britain directed the forced repatriation of many tens of thousands of Soviet subjects — and many who had never been Soviet subjects — to the Soviet Union, where they were executed by the NKVD or cast into the Gulag. (132)"

Yet it was not enough for Truman to gruesomely end one world conflict, butchering hundreds of thousands in alliance with Stalin. He then had the audacity to turn against Stalin and use his former ally as a pretext to launch the next global crusade. A fact that is obvious to Raico but that liberals sometimes forget is, Truman was responsible for starting the Cold War and securing the modern American empire and military-industrial complex:

Most pernicious of all, Truman's presidency saw the genesis of a world-spanning American political and military empire. This was not simply the unintended consequence of some supposed Soviet threat, however. Even before the end of World War II, high officials in Washington were drawing up plans to project American military might across the globe. To start with, the United States would dominate the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans and the Western Hemisphere, including through a network of air and naval bases. Complementing this would be a system of air transit rights and landing facilities from North Africa to Saigon and Manila. This planning continued through the early years of the Truman administration. But the planners had no guarantee that such a radical reversal of our traditional policy could be sold to Congress and the people. It was the confrontation with the Soviet Union and "international Communism," begun and defined by Truman and then prolonged for four decades, that furnished the opportunity and the rationale for realizing the globalist dreams. (105–6)

In the midst of America's bloodiest foreign war, instead of restoring a stance of peace, Truman solidified America's global role as an imperial one. His aid to Greece and Turkey occasioned the declaration of the Truman Doctrine, which haunts us to this day. And then there was the first major hot war undertaken by the United States, not five years after the cessation of World War II.

The Korean War established the modern imperial presidency even more than previous wars. For one thing, Truman didn't consult Congress but launched the war on his own. Before Truman, the principle that Congress, not the president, declared war was "[s]o well-established. . . that even Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt, no minimizers of executive prerogatives, bowed to it and went to Congress for their declarations of war" (120). Ever since Korea, the president has unilaterally opted to wage war after war after war.

Truman's war in Korea was among the deadliest of America's foreign adventures, unleashing horrible short-term effects and carrying terrible long-term consequences. Raico sums it up:

The Korean War lasted three years and cost 36,916 American deaths and more than 100,000 other casualties. Additionally, there were millions of Korean dead and the devastation of the peninsula, especially in the north, where the U.S. Air Force pulverized the civilian infrastructure — with much "collateral damage" — in what has since become its emblematic method of waging war. Today, nearly a half-century after the end of the conflict, the United States continues to station troops as a "tripwire" in yet another of its imperial outposts. (122)

Even more than either Franklin Roosevelt or Harry Truman, another Allied leader in World War II has risen as the most admired man of the hour, if not the century. This of course would be Winston Churchill, who to this day is adored by Americans, particularly nationalistic conservatives, as some sort of emblematic example of bold and heroic leadership. The central myth surrounds his willingness to stand up to Hitler, in comparison to the supposedly weak Chamberlain whose capitulation allegedly emboldened the Nazi regime. But in all admirable talk of Churchill there is a more basic assumption: that he was an insightful, courageous, and decent human being. Once again, we have to thank Raico for coming to the rescue.

"Winston Churchill was a Man of Blood and a politico without principle," Raico writes. The British leader's "apotheosis serves to corrupt every standard of honesty and morality in politics and history" (101). Moreover,

That Churchill was a racist goes without saying, yet his racism went deeper than with most of his contemporaries. It is curious how, with his stark Darwinian outlook, his elevation of war to the central place in human history, and his racism, as well as his fixation on "great leaders," Churchill's worldview resembled that of his antagonist, Hitler. (59)

Harsh words. Raico backs them up.

Churchill started as a conservative, became a liberal, and then went back to being a conservative, yet throughout his political career, his one constant principle was bolstering power. First, to explain to conservatives why they should question the Churchill legacy, Raico points out that, even before World War I, "Churchill was one of the chief pioneers of the welfare state in Britain" (61). In league with Fabian socialists Sidney and Beatrice Webb, Churchill went on to oversee the Board of Trade, where, "[b]esides pushing for a variety of social insurance schemes, Churchill created the system of national labor exchanges: he wrote to Prime Minister Asquith of the need to u2018spread . . . a sort of Germanized network of state intervention and regulation' over the British labor market'" (64). Decades later in the early 1950s, Prime Minister Churchill continued to shore up the welfare state and placate the unions.

Yet war was Churchill's greatest love, and, becoming First Lord of the Admiralty in 1911, "he quickly allied himself with the war party" (65). He was an enthusiastic leader in the starvation blockade, candidly boasting, in his own words, that the goal was to "starve the whole population — men, women, and children, old and young, wounded and sound — into submission" (198). In recalling an episode concerning Herbert Hoover's food aid to Poland, Raico notes Churchill's move to cut aid to the Poles to manipulate them: "Churchill's cherished policy of inflicting famine on civilians was thus extended to u2018friendly' peoples. The Poles and the others would be permitted food when and if they rose up and drove out the Germans" (203).

Some scholars suspect that Churchill engineered the sinking of the Lusitania. But "what is certain is that Churchill's policies made the sinking very likely. The Lusitania was a passenger liner loaded with munitions of war; Churchill had given orders to the captains of merchant ships, including liners, to ram German submarines if they encountered them and the Germans were aware of this" (67).

A generation later, Churchill was involved in dragging America into war with Germany again. British leaders considered a negotiated peace with Germany, once hostilities began, which might have conceivably spared many lives. This wasn't good enough for Churchill, whose "aim of total victory could be realized only under one condition: that the United States become embroiled in another world war. No wonder that Churchill put his heart and soul into ensuring precisely that" (74). In 1940, Churchill sent his intelligence agent, codename Intrepid, to New York to wiretap and infiltrate the anti-war movement. He sponsored pro-British and anti-German propaganda in American films. He also "threw his influence into the balance to harden American policy towards Japan, especially in the last days before the Pearl Harbor attack" (78).

This shouldn't seem the least bit implausible, given Churchill's complete insensitivity toward human life, particularly non-British life, during the war. This lack of compassion extended to allies:

After the fall of France, Churchill demanded that the French surrender their fleet to Britain. The French declined, promising that they would scuttle the ships before allowing them to fall into German hands. Against the advice of his naval officers, Churchill ordered British ships off the Algerian coast to open fire. About 1500 French sailors were killed. (89)

But Churchill was much more enthusiastic in killing Germans, particularly in "the terror-bombing of the cities of Germany that in the end cost the lives of around 600,000 civilians and left some 800,000 seriously injured" (89). Raico's account of the deliberate destruction of dozens of German cities is potent and heart-wrenching.

As for Churchill's alleged bold foresight and boldness compared to Chamberlain's presumed craven foolishness:

For all the claptrap about Churchill's "farsightedness" during the '30s in opposing the "appeasers," in the end the policy of the Chamberlain government — to rearm as quickly as possible, while testing the chances for peace with Germany — was more realistic than Churchill's. (71)

As with the other great leaders, Churchill always admired power more than liberty. During World War II, only Churchill possibly rivaled Roosevelt in the sickening admiration for history's worst murderer, Stalin. "The symbolic climax of his infatuation came at the November, 1943, Tehran conference, when Churchill presented Stalin with a Crusader's sword. Those concerned to define the word u2018obscenity' may wish to ponder that episode" (57).

At the end of the war came the ethnic cleansing, the divvying up of the war spoils, the tightening of Stalin's grip over his newly expanded empire. Churchill was complicit in the Soviet expansion and forced relocations. Many atrocities transpired.

Worst of all was the expulsion of some 12 million Germans from their ancestral homelands in East and West Prussia, Silesia, Pomerania, and the Sudetenland, as well as the Balkans. This was done pursuant to the agreements at Tehran, where Churchill proposed that Poland be "moved west," and to Churchill's acquiescence in the plan of the Czech leader Eduard Beneu0161 for the "ethnic cleansing" of Bohemia and Moravia. Around one-and-a-half to two million German civilians died in this process.

Facts like these bring into question the morality of World War II, the "good war," and they also undermine the typical treatment we see of such great leaders as Roosevelt, Truman, and Churchill, whose actions enabled such war crimes and mass slaughters.

Slamming Marxists and Defending German Culture

As the victorious Russian forces swooped in at the end of World War II, they conducted one of the greatest and least discussed wartime atrocities in modern times. "The riot of rape by the Soviet troops was probably the worst in history. Females — Hungarian, even Polish, as well as German, little girls to old women — were multiply violated, sometimes raped to death" (95–6).

We all know that Stalin's regime was brutal, and yet among the academic and journalistic circles there has long been a favoritism toward the communists that cries out for explanation. It is almost as though Soviet acts of mass murder are weighed on a different scale as Nazi atrocities. Certainly, Americans with sympathies for the Soviet regime have generally been given a pass compared to those thought to have sympathies for the Nazi regime. Raico compares the way historians today regard the McCarthy era to their treatment of the Roosevelt-era demonization of America Firsters:

For many conservatives who supported Senator McCarthy in the early 1950s, it was essentially payback time for the torrent of slanders they had endured before and during World War II. Post-war conservatives took deep satisfaction in pointing out the Communist leanings and connections of those who had libeled them as mouthpieces for Hitler. Unlike the anti-war leaders, who were never "Nazis," the targets of McCarthyism had often been abject apologists for Stalin, and some of them actual Soviet agents. (226)

No defender of the American Cold War, as is evident in his trenchant critique of Truman, Raico runs against the popular grain in his wholesale critiques of communism. In the era of Lenin, American intellectuals frequently whitewashed the Bolshevic regime. And during and after World War II, war propaganda fostered a common tendency to view even Stalinism in a more nuanced light than Hitlerism. But Communism, in theory as well as in practice, is an all-out attack on liberty. "Marxism, with its roots in Hegelian philosophy," writes Raico, "was a quite conscious revolt against the individual rights doctrine of the previous century" (144). Thus it is no surprise that the first communist state became totalitarian immediately.

Raico dispenses with the implicit notion, pushed by left-liberals and neoconservatives (and certainly Marxists), that Stalin had betrayed the socialist project, rather than simply continuing where Lenin left off. There is a soft spot for Lenin in the writings of many modernists, who seem to think he represented, at least in some way, an improvement over the old Tsarist order. This is nonsense. The brutality of Communism was seen right away:

The number of Cheka executions that amounted to legalized murder in the period from late 1917 to early 1922 — including neither the victims of the Revolutionary Tribunals and the Red Army itself nor the insurgents killed by the Cheka — has been estimated by one authority at 140,000. As a reference point, consider that the number of political executions under the repressive Tsarist regime from 1866 to 1917 was about 44,000, including during and after the Revolution of 1905 (except that the persons executed were accorded trials), and the comparable figure for the French Revolutionary Reign of Terror was 18,000 to 20,000. Clearly, with the first Marxist state something new had come into the world.

And this was not all:

In the Leninist period — that is, up to 1924 — fall also the war against the peasantry that was part of "war communism" and the famine conditions, culminating in the famine of 1921, that resulted from the attempt to realize the Marxist dream. The best estimate of the human cost of those episodes is around 6,000,000 persons. (150)

Speaking of war communism, it "was no mere u2018improvisation,' whose horrors are to be chalked up to the chaos in Russia at the time. The system was willed and itself helped produce that chaos," Raico writes in a great chapter on Leon Trotsky (169). Trotsky "has always had a certain appeal for intellectuals that the other Bolshevik leaders lacked" (165). But Raico explains why, just as Lenin was only better than Stalin as a matter of degree, Trotsky too represented an ideology of evil and should not be looked upon favorably.

Despite the attempts by many to defend his vision as one of intellectualism rather than brutality, Trotsky had no excuse not to understand what communism in practice would yield. "[T]hat Marxism in power would mean the rule of state functionaries was not merely intrinsically probable — given the massive increase of state power envisaged by Marxists, what else could it be? — but it had also been predicted by writers well known to a revolutionary like Trotsky" (168). He knew a ruling class would have come to dictate society in the name of the workers, and he saw himself as part of that ruling class. "When Trotsky promoted the formation of worker-slave armies in industry, he believed that his own will was the will of Proletarian Man" (175). He was a killer and tyrant who only slaughtered fewer than Lenin and Stalin for lack of opportunity. Nevertheless, Stalin does take the cake: "The sum total of deaths due to Soviet policy — in the Stalin period alone — deaths from the collectivization and the terror famine, the executions and the Gulag, is probably on the order of 20,000,000" (155).

If even Soviet killers have been treated rather charitably, Raico does not see this to be the case for the Germans, who as an entire people have often been unfairly smeared due to the twelve-year period of Nazi rule. In "Nazifying the Germans," Raico humanizes one ethnic group that it remains politically correct to ridicule and dehumanize.

[T]here are a thousand years of history "on the other side" of the Third Reich. In cultural terms, it is not an unimpressive record (in which the Austrians must be counted; at least until 1866, Austria was as much a part of the German lands as Bavaria or Saxony). From printing to the automobile to the jet engine to the creation of whole branches of science, the German contribution to European civilization has been, one might say, rather significant. Albertus Magnus, Luther, Leibniz, Kant, Goethe, Humboldt, Ranke, Nietzsche, Carl Menger, Max Weber — these are not negligible figures in the history of thought.

And then, of course, there's the music. (158)

"Nazifying the Germans" is but one jewel in a glittering crown of great writing. Raico's book reviews are all well worth reading, as is the Foreword by Bob Higgs. The bulk of the book, however, focuses on the great state criminals of the modern era, in particular the first half of the 20th century, in many ways the darkest period in human history. Demystifying World War I, taking Churchill down a notch, summing up the case against Truman, and explaining the practical horrors of communism in light of its theoretical degeneracy, are each very worthy endeavors warranting a great scholar, well-versed in history, fluent in economic theory, familiar with the words of the court intellectuals as well as the revisionist dissenters, morally committed to human dignity and freedom and willing to defend them against their great historical enemy: war and state power. Raico very uniquely qualifies on all these fronts and his book is a treasure.

Anthony Gregory [send him mail] is research editor at the Independent Institute. He lives in Oakland, California. See his webpage for more articles and personal information.

The Best of Anthony Gregory

In Oakland, California, where I live, the Occupiers have been struggling to keep their ground on Ogawa Plaza, a piece of public property in front of City Hall. On the night of Tuesday, October 25, I saw from my apartment, miles northeast of the action, dozens of police cars zoom in from a neighboring jurisdiction. I looked at an online police scanner where the Oakland police department described the situation as a riot and requested a multi-county tactical response. Hundreds of police, donning intimidating riot gear, swept in to confront the crowd on the streets. There was no riot, however, as almost all the protesters were peaceful, the only ones acting out with petty violence being loudly chastised by the crowd. The most belligerent participants by far were law enforcers, who responded to thrown bottles and civil disobedience with tear gas and rubber bullets. One man, Scott Olsen, was hit with one of the police's projectiles, his skull fractured. Thankfully, he is now reportedly in fair condition. You can tell from the videos that the police were not exactly using restraint with these weapons. They even threw percussion grenades at the protesters who came to Olsen's aid. What began as a typical overbearing government response to protesters in the name of public health now offers a peak into the full threat to liberty that we face in modern America.

It's official. The American dystopia is here. Obama administration officials admit that the CIA assassination program that snuffed out Anwar al-Awlaki last Friday is guided by a secret panel that decides who lives and dies. According to Reuters:

American militants like Anwar al-Awlaki are placed on a kill or capture list by a secretive panel of senior government officials, which then informs the president of its decisions, according to officials.

There is no public record of the operations or decisions of the panel, which is a subset of the White House’s National Security Council, several current and former officials said. Neither is there any law establishing its existence or setting out the rules by which it is supposed to operate.

Let that sink in. The U.S. presidency, supposed leader of the free world, has a clandestine committee that chooses American citizens to assassinate. This from the administration that promised unprecedented transparency and a ratcheting back of Bush-era civil liberties abuses. This from the president who vowed to restore habeas corpus and subject executive war powers to judicial scrutiny. This from the Nobel Peace Prize laureate.

What's more striking, however, is the deafening silence. Sure, the ACLU opposes all this, as do a smattering of public voices. Yet it seems for everyone expressing proportional concern about this, there are a thousand leftist protesters whining about the top one percent, and a thousand conservatives whining about the leftist protesters.

How fitting that the presidency that Tea Partiers accused of planning to convene death panels to handle health care rationing has openly admitted to having created such a panel whose declared purpose is not simply to withhold socialized medical resources, but to direct the cold-blooded murder of citizens who are sufficiently bothersome enemies of the regime. Yet in a majestic irony, many of the conservatives who feared Obama's life-and-death bureaucracies are cheering on his most explicit and frightening seizure of dictatorial power in all his presidency, and perhaps one of the greatest of all presidential power grabs in the sweep of U.S. history.

Meanwhile, Obama's millions of supporters still think the idea that this man is a fascist, a tyrant, a threat to liberty, is hysterical hate speech and itself a danger to American democracy. Yet Barack Obama appears dedicated to out-Bushing Bush when it comes to shredding the Bill of Rights and sticking his middle finger at the very idea that he ought to be accountable to anything but his own power.

Make no mistake. We are witnessing a defining moment in America's transformation into a totalitarian nation. Not because the murder of al-Alwaki, or even the death panel that sealed his fate, is some sort of anomaly in terms of morality or even presidential power. The U.S. presidency has already sentenced millions to death with its wars, its sanctions, its bombings, its terrorism, its covert ops, its torture chambers. The nukings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, to take a couple of famous examples, long ago revealed the awesome and murderous power of the Oval Office, whether or not these bombings were as "illegal" as the offing of al-Alwaki. And the families of thousands of innocent Afghans and Pakistanis killed in drone strikes had no doubts about Obama's imperial touch, even before this latest atrocity.

But the circumstances surrounding this particular hit job, and the death panel behind it, deserve more than a footnote. There is the brazenness of it all — the audacity, as a younger Obama might say — of the administration just coming clean about its mysterious council that serves as judge and jury behind closed doors. There is the frank admission of its existence with all else being kept secret. There is also the precision — the fact that this program is one focused on offing political enemies, rather than just bombing neighborhoods in an ad hoc attempt to weaken another government in a war. There is also the open-ended nature of this conflict, a war on terrorism that can last even longer than the clash with the USSR, a war whose immortality seems even more possible now that Barack the law professor is in charge, rather than George the rancher.

Taken together, this is just the kind of creepy atmosphere befitting of a total state, a Communist or fascist government or a nightmarish bureaucracy contrived in the mind of a Cold War-era novelist imagining what America would look like in the 21st century after taking one too many wrong turns. It is almost as if the administration is trying to preempt the conspiracy-minded by giving them something that would be unbelievable only fifteen years ago, but is today easily taken for granted because of course the president has a secret death panel that deliberates on the secret, unchecked executions of American citizens, to be conducted by robots flying in the sky.

Needless to say, anyone who defends this, especially if given the opportunity to think through the implications, is surely no friend of liberty, whether they be fair-weather "civil libertarian" liberals who would rather cheer for their president than wake up and smell the fascism, or conservatives who claim to distrust government except when it exercises the most lethal powers in the most lawless way imaginable. We must recognize that the movement for freedom and against true oppression is clearly no majority, regardless of what Tea Party Republicans and Wall Street occupiers might say.

There is a more fundamental lesson to be learned, however, and one to remember for the ages: This is the nature of the state. It is, by its institutional nature, always and everywhere seeking to expand power in any way it can. To claim and practice the power to kill on its own unreviewable prerogative is simply the fulfillment of its very design. At times of crisis, especially concerning national security, states almost always tend toward aggrandizement toward their realization as totalitarian entities.

For all who find Obama's death panel frightening — and all of us should — let us remember that this is simply what governments do when they can get away with it. We are only now seeing the American state achieving its maturity. At the founding of the Federal Government, the Framers unleashed a monster that could never easily be restrained, even creating a presidency with all too much power over military affairs. Then came Jackson, Polk, Lincoln, Wilson, Roosevelt, Truman, LBJ, Nixon, Bush and Obama, each one building on the horrible precedents of past American despots, each reaching further toward the ideal of a completely unencumbered presidential hand, one that could snap its fingers and order death to anyone anywhere on the globe.

There is a silver lining, however, albeit one circumscribing a large and dark cloud indeed. A government can develop and come of age, but it is a mortal institution. As it grows it puts strain on the public ideology it requires to live, wrecks the economy it feeds on, and alienates the allies that allow it to be a global empire. To be a total state is the dream of all regimes, but it is an unsustainable reality, and certainly so at the size the U.S. government has become. The more the U.S. presidency and American nation-state morph into an Orwellian version of themselves, the closer they will come to finally expose themselves as being no different from the tyrannies that have enslaved mankind for millennia. For generations much of the world has been under the spell of the lie of American democracy, the propaganda that the brutality of power politics can be tempered through elections and an eloquent piece of parchment. We can hope that the day this great lie is universally seen as a tragic joke, the true significance of Obama's CIA death panel will be remembered.

Anthony Gregory [send him mail] is research editor at the Independent Institute. He lives in Oakland, California. See his webpage for more articles and personal information.

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On September 10, 2001, many who thirsted for liberty smelled hope in the air. The Clinton era was over and the new Bush era showed signs of being less eventful, even more peaceful. The Republican had won on a platform of a humbler foreign policy than Clinton-Gore's, and had by late 2001 pushed through his tax cut. More to the point, he already seemed an impotent president, having just barely won after one of the most contentious rounds of recounts and court challenges in electoral history. The Senate was split down the middle. Much of Bush's domestic policy, itself an unconvincing continuation of Clintonian moderation, seemed doomed, and on foreign policy — such as in his handling of the China spy plane affair — he was refreshingly calm compared to the more hawkish elements of his party.

Clinton hadn't even been that bad, even considering the steady expansion of regulations, a horribly unjust war (though not one as terrible as Operation Desert Storm), and the largest single federal law enforcement atrocity in living memory. But he was not the LBJ or FDR he wanted to be, and yet he helped awaken a new distrust in government, especially on the right, that had been asleep throughout the Reagan-Bush wrap-up of the Cold War years. For people to hate even Clinton's generally milquetoast tyranny so much was a wonderful thing to witness. All in all, throughout the 1990s, government had grown at a manageable pace compared to the economy, there was even a nominal surplus in 1998, and the growing Internet pointed to new opportunities for technology and freedom. U.S. foreign policy had been steadily aggressive, especially in the Middle East, but this did not pose the direct threat to liberty at home that would come to distinguish the years that followed.

On September 10, 2001, I was a 20-year-old American history student in my junior year at UC Berkeley, hopeful that the next decade would be as relatively placid as the Clinton years. My friends and I sat and watched This Is Spinal Tap that night, embodying that pre-9/11 mentality that has been so viciously derided ever since.

A phone call from my dad woke me up the next morning. A few of my roommates were already watching the news. Talking heads on Fox, which I had preferred to the statist liberals on CNN, were calling for blood, saying it was time to let loose "the dogs of war." It was the beginning of a nightmare that has so far lasted ten years.

Although my college buddies and I lived in the pre-9/11 bubble, having come of age in the boom times of the 1990s, we were not ignorant of the conditions that likely led to this attack — one-sided support for Israel, the U.S. troops stationed in Saudi Arabia, the sanctions that killed half a million Iraqi children. Libertarians and others had warned for years about the threat of blowback. Berkeley was a fairly safe place to be a peacenik and that month I was glad to be where I was. Nevertheless, it was depressing that virtually no one in the wider culture was drawing the clear connection between terrorism and America’s brutal policy of wars, sanctions, and occupations.

With very few exceptions, war fever swept the nation in September 2001. The entire right, barring a few voices in the wilderness, reverted to full-blown jingoist nationalism. Most progressives were at the best ambivalent on the prospect of war against the Taliban. Even many libertarians clung to the state for protection. Prominent Objectivists demanded that the U.S. nuke ten countries as a show of force.

All of a sudden Bush was a hero. His approval rating shot up dramatically, even though all he did, at the very best, was fail to stop 9/11. This massive failure on the part of U.S. intelligence and security policy would never be looked at seriously in the mainstream media or in the top echelons of U.S. politics. The fact that the FBI had been infiltrating al Qaeda in the United States since 1989 and had tracked Zacarias Moussaoui in the summer of 2001 is barely remembered, along with the Taliban's offer after 9/11 to hand over bin Laden if proof of his guilt was offered.

The immediate aftermath was surreal to observe. Throughout September I was still under the impression that Gore would have reacted worse to the crisis — and to this day I'm not 100% convinced otherwise, although it's much harder to believe. The anthrax scare came — another incident that has since gone down the memory hole. The bombs began falling on Kabul in October, and victory over the Taliban was declared. (Nearly ten years later, we are still hearing about how the Taliban will eventually be defeated once and for all.) Then came the Patriot Act, the destruction of almost all that remained from a Fourth Amendment previously abused for years in the war on drugs. Support for the onslaught on our freedoms was almost unanimous on the Hill.

I hoped this hysteria would soon subside, but throughout 2002 we heard the war drums beating, at rising intensity, for Iraqi blood. It was a most ominous year, a sense that we were trapped in an alternate universe permeating everything, because anyone paying the least bit of attention could have told you that Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11. Even Afghanistan was virtually unrelated, at least in any way that would make the war there logical. But Iraq? Saddam was Osama bin Laden's enemy. The regime was secular. Its WMD were non-existent, we had good reasons to believe, and the only reason we should fear any that did exist was if the U.S. were to invade — as the CIA reminded us up until the unleashing of Shock and Awe.

In March 2003, the U.S. government opened a whirlwind of terror upon the people of Iraq, duplicating the destruction of 9/11 many times over. Thousands of bombs were dropped, including some weighing in at a ton, such as the celebrated Joint Direct Attack Munition that got all the press that week. The obscenity of war ecstasy gripped the nation even greater than it had when the U.S. invaded Afghanistan. I vividly remember a homeless guy on a bus attentively studying a newspaper article featuring photographs and descriptions of the major weaponry deployed by the U.S. He pointed it out to a fellow derelict, who was disgusted by this morbid fascination. "Don't show me that. All they have is rocks and shit! We're gonna go in there and kill them. They're poorer than us. They ain't no threat to us. We're just gonna go and run them over." This exchange was intellectually superior to almost anything on the networks in those days.

Another odd thing I noticed was how much the political dynamic had shifted, not just temporarily in the brief aftermath of 9/11, but all the way through the opening of the Iraq war, with the metamorphosis seemingly progressing by the day. The conservative movement no longer saw government as a major threat at all. The socialists, meanwhile, protested the war. As a libertarian in Berkeley, I was greatly frustrated by this situation. But the way that the War Party was even more enthusiastic about Iraq than Afghanistan demonstrated that the problem was a long-term cultural one that would likely persist for generations.

By 2004 there were some signs of hope. Fahrenheit 9/11 was an antiwar movie with popular reach. The torture scandal that erupted in April, when photos from Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison, a notorious torture facility run by Saddam and now reopened for business by Americans, demonstrated the depths of U.S. depravity, there was a silver lining: Many were genuinely disgusted. Around the same time the Supreme Court began questioning some of Bush's most presumptuous claims of unlimited detention power, at Guantánamo and at home. Maybe these excesses would be reined in. Maybe the war on terror itself would end.

That was over seven years ago. Everyone at the top responsible for those atrocities have been shielded by the current administration, and most of their injustices continued.

In August of 2004, the 9/11 Commission published its superficial report, the last such federal investigation of any significance. Almost all of its recommendations were for a more active federal role in stopping terrorism, rather than ratcheting back or even seriously rearranging its failed intelligence approaches.

The Democrats put up John Kerry, quite the hawk compared to Howard Dean, but at least he was raising some good questions in the debates on Iraq, even if he was essentially a dedicated interventionist, especially on Afghanistan. When Bush won reelection in 2004, every American peacenik's heart sank. It was a horrible pill to swallow. He had proudly run promising to stay the course after the worst four years for American liberty since Richard Nixon, and won by a larger margin than in 2000.

More scandals emerged in 2005. An increasing number of Americans saw the Iraq war for what it was — a crusade fought in vain built on a mountain of lies. The new Iraq constitution was obviously not a triumph for freedom, given its socialism and blow against secularism. The terrible response to Katrina in September 2005 made the Bush administration fair game for mainstream criticism. In December 2005 we found out that the Bush administration had been using the NSA to spy on telecommunications without even the lackadaisical warrants authorized by FISA. For a few days, there was outrage, and it continued to be a talking point among Bush's political opponents for a couple more years. It was good to see that the newly reelected presidential team was discredited a year into their second term. By the end of 2005, pundits were even musing about the possible downfall of Dick Cheney, although it never happened.

In 2006 Congress passed the Military Commissions Act, essentially authorizing the president to do what he had been doing with detention policy at Guantánamo. The Supreme Court had struck his detention policy down a couple times, instructing him to go to Congress before he continued on his extraordinary course. He did so, and the Republican Congress rubberstamped one of the greatest erosions of habeas corpus in American history.

In was also in 2006 that we saw the last gasp of hope that the post-9/11 flurry of statism and war would take a step back due to a shake-up of the establishment, the last hint that the neocon stampede toward totalitarianism was something of an aberration. The Democrats won Congress that November, in many cases running against the Republicans' record on war and civil liberties. But in 2007 the betrayal became clear. The Democrats came to power and continued to finance the wars enthusiastically, no strings attached. Bush was rewarded for his warrantless wiretapping with the passage of the Protect America Act of 2007.

Americans were particularly tired of the Iraq war, and so Bush and co. responded throughout 2007 with "the surge" — a ridiculous strategy that "worked" in quelling violence mostly due to bribery and the fact that the Iraqi civil war sparked by the U.S. invasion was finally ending. Yet the American people came to see this policy as a huge success, the lesson being that when a U.S. war isn't doing so well, the answer is indeed to step up the killing.

In the 2008 campaign season, thanks especially to Ron Paul, there was some serious talk about the problems with America's policy of permanent, mindless war. In particular, for the first time since 2001 Americans heard the dispassionate suggestion that perhaps Americans are attacked because the U.S. government bombs, invades, and occupies foreign countries; and bribes, props up, and overthrows foreign regimes. Bush had gotten away with this preposterous propaganda that 9/11 had awoken a sleeping giant, rather than being a painful but relatively small hornet bite resulting from the giant actively stamping on nests all day and night.

Yet the elections also marked the Republicans' and mainstream conservative movement's final consummation of their marriage to the warfare state. Celebrating imprisonment without trial became the measure of a good conservative. Movement conservatives questioned McCain's credentials because he had slight compunctions about torture. No longer could anyone pretend Bush was some kind of anomaly in his party.

When the election came down to McCain and Obama, many saw in Obama some hope that on foreign policy and civil liberties we would finally see something resembling a return to normalcy. But Obama had already shown his hand, by voting to legalize warrantless wiretapping, calling the surge in Iraq a success "beyond our wildest dreams," and repeatedly promising to expand the war in Afghanistan.

As president, in his first month, Obama gave a nod to civil libertarians with some executive orders shutting down black sites, suspending military commissions, and setting a schedule to close down Guantánamo. Two and a half years into his presidency, we see this was all a trick: Obama has completely entrenched the worst of Bush's policies into permanence. Warrantless wiretapping is the law of the land. Torturers are protected by the president; whistleblowers are jailed without charge. Indefinite detention without trial or meaningful habeas corpus review is bipartisan, official policy. The notion that the president can unilaterally declare someone an enemy combatant, even a U.S. citizen, and order him killed, is no longer very controversial, if it's even recognized. Obama signed the renewal to the Patriot Act without most people even taking notice.

The president has also expanded the war on Afghanistan — the first major element to Bush's war on terror abroad — by about three-fold, with no end in sight. As for the doctrine that the president can decide to go to war with a country even without congressional approval or a clear threat to the United States, Obama did it without shame in Libya. Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands of corpses later, the war in Iraq continues, on much the same schedule as we might have expected from McCain. One of Obama's only crumbs thrown to the progressives who campaigned for him is the overturning of Don't Ask, Don't Tell — opening up the franchise for America's armies to wage pointless, aggressive wars.

And the civil libertarian left's disapproval of the rapid disintegration of our constitutional rights? An indicator of the decline came last November, when most progressives sided with Big Brother against civil disobedience concerning the Transportation Security Administration. Created by Bush, the TSA has been one of the most insidious developments of the last decade, not just for its direct attack on our liberties but also for its transformative effect on our culture. Today's young Americans will grow up not remembering a time when being groped or irradiated by a federal official seemed the least bit unusual. The police-state regimentation at our airports foreshadows a frightening fascist trajectory in this nation. And although a Republican invention, birthed in the midst of left-liberals warning about the Bush administration's erosions of our civil liberties, it is now a bipartisan component of the state whose biggest defenders are now left-liberals condemning any who protested as rightwing Tea Party opponents of Obama.

Along with all the restrictions on our rights and all the destructive wars (including ones in Pakistan, Yemen, and elsewhere of which Americans are virtually unaware), the post-9/11 atmosphere of statism has been characterized by a huge expansion of government generally. This often happens, as it did during Vietnam: Logrolling and political expediency make it harder for the opponents of big government at home to put up a fight when their commander in chief is sending the young out to die. And so in the wake of 9/11 we have seen the passage of Medicare Part D, great expansions of farm subsidies, the TARP bailout (itself coming in the midst of a financial crisis in no way mitigated by the war spending), and Obamacare. The federal government enforced martial law in New Orleans after Katrina, and there was hardly a peep of protest. U.S. drug policy has chewed up tens of thousands of lives in Mexico, which might be on the media's radar if not for the fog of war. The police at all levels of government have become increasingly belligerent, incompetent, and militaristic. The federal budget has doubled, from $1.9 trillion for fiscal year 2001 to $3.8 trillion ten years later. Even in the one-third of my life since 9/11 I have seen freedom in almost all quarters take a major hit.

Garet Garrett referred to America's paradoxical "complex of fear and vaunting" — the U.S. empire's tendency to pump itself up as the greatest nation in the history of the world, dwarfing the mere mortal nations that dot the globe, only to shrink back into a state of hysteria, worried hopelessly that someone, somewhere, will destroy the country if not every precaution is taken. Both orientations, the hubris and the paranoia, make for a belligerent foreign policy and an unfree people, and Garrett's insight rings even truer today. Americans are so quick to pat themselves on the back for defeating the Taliban, or Saddam, or Gaddafi, or hearing that bin Laden was shot in the head as he stood unarmed. Yet we will take our shoes off at the airport and walk through an invasive pat-down procedure out of concern that the grandma at the next line over is really a terrorist. Americans see all motivation to hurt us as proof that we are the best, the freest, the bravest, the strongest, the invincible. Yet the prospect of some dictator without a navy flying balsa wood planes over and bombing us with anthrax will lure us into supporting a multi-trillion-dollar war that grinds up thousands of bodies.

The decade since 9/11 is the real lost decade for America. We lost the chance to maintain relative peace and quiet in the years since the Cold War, respond to 9/11 sanely and thoughtfully, and spare trillions of dollars, many thousands of lives, and an immeasurable wealth of our liberties. The full opportunity cost of how the U.S. under both parties' leadership has responded to the events ten years ago is chilling even to ponder. The recession we still suffer could have possibly been avoided if ten years ago peace were chosen rather than war — a choice very few were willing to defend then, and too few are willing to consider today.

We are still told that we can never revert back to our ways before that Tuesday morning one decade ago. Americans still romanticize that day. Left-liberals call it a squandered opportunity for thoughtful albeit forceful diplomacy and central planning. Conservatives join the September 12 Coalition, wanting to forever remember that blasted week when 90% of Americans thought the state and especially the president could do no wrong.

For many years to come, Americans will ask one another: Where were you when the planes hit the Twin Towers? But I want to know, Where were you on September 10? I was watching Spinal Tap with my friends. And our state of mind — that pre-9/11 mentality, even in that naïve and isolated blur of college-aged frivolity — was certainly no less thoughtful or mature than the fear and vaunting that have characterized America's bloody and lost decade ever since.

Anthony Gregory [send him mail] is research editor at the Independent Institute. He lives in Oakland, California. See his webpage for more articles and personal information.

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Five years ago, antiwar liberals calling the Bush administration fascist were labeled as kooks, marginalized by their own party leadership, accused by conservatives of treasonous thoughts worthy of federal punishment, even deportation. A few years pass, the policies hardly change, and the political dynamic turns upside down: Tea Party conservatives accusing the Obama regime of fascist impulses are compared to terrorists, accused of being racists, told that their hyperbole is a real threat to the country's security.

The establishment derides both groups for their fringe outlook on America, convinced that the United States is anything but a fascist country. After all, isn't America the nation that defeated fascism in the 1940s? Sensible conservatives and liberals agree with that.

The unappreciated reality is that when the patriot right and radical left refer to the U.S. system as fascistic, they have part of the truth but not the whole analysis. This is due to the blinders both sides wear as it concerns state power. Moreover, the criticisms sometimes fail to take account of America's very unique strain of fascism. This political program is distinct in every nation, always taking a different form but with some general themes in common. U.S. fascism is a most insidious mixture of the key ingredients while maintaining the necessary nuance to snooker the masses, the media, and the respectable folks across the spectrum.

The FDR-Bush Program of Economic Corporatism

First, and this is key, we must look at the economic system. The liberals are proud to have had a role in creating its socially democratic elements. The conservatives are proud of America's towering financial and military institutions. Republicans and Democrats all pretend America has a free enterprise system, attacking greedy profiteers while crediting themselves for the benefits of capitalism, blaming laissez faire for all our problems while dissonantly congratulating themselves for having supplanted it with sensible regulation and safety nets once and for all.

The dirty little secret is that there has been a bipartisan project of corporatism, the economic underpinning of fascism, for almost a century. The regulatory bureaus, the banking establishment, agricultural policy, telecommunications planning, even the welfare state all enrich corporate interests, but at the ultimate direction of the state. One could say this arrangement was foreshadowed in Lincoln or even Hamilton. But it was during the World Wars and New Deal that the nation embarked upon something decisively fascistic.

Hitler, Mussolini, and the other fascists all employed a general approach of co-opting the market through huge governmental takeovers of industry while maintaining the pretense of private property. Along with this came interventions that would be considered socialistic in other contexts. Lew Rockwell very nicely summed up the economic programs of Hitler, which mirror the great prides of Progressive politics of the 20th century:

He suspended the gold standard, embarked on huge public works programs like Autobahns, protected industry from foreign competition, expanded credit, instituted jobs programs, bullied the private sector on prices and production decisions, vastly expanded the military, enforced capital controls, instituted family planning, penalized smoking, brought about national health care and unemployment insurance, imposed education standards, and eventually ran huge deficits. The Nazi interventionist program was essential to the regime’s rejection of the market economy and its embrace of socialism in one country.

Much of this agenda was adopted in the United States during World War I, and then brought back to life in the New Deal. John T. Flynn, a leftist who initially supported Franklin Roosevelt then became disenchanted with the president's program of central planning, described the 1930s atmosphere of political ideology in his seminal work, The Roosevelt Myth:

There was indeed a good deal of tolerance for the idea of planning our capitalist system even in the most conservative circles. And a man could support publicly and with vehemence this system of the Planned Economy without incurring the odium of being too much of a radical for polite and practical society.

There was only one trouble with it. This was what Mussolini had adopted — the Planned Capitalist State. And he gave it a name — fascism. Then came Hitler and adopted the same idea. His party was called the Nazi party, which was derived from the initials of its true name, but it was dedicated to fascism. . . .

Whatever it was, it was the direct opposite of liberalism. It was an attempt, somewhere between Communism and capitalism, to organize a stable society and to do it by setting up a State equipped with massive powers over the lives and fortunes of the citizens. . . . Yet this curiously un-American doctrine was being peddled in America as the bright flower of the liberals. Of course they did not call it fascism, because that had a bad name. . . . They called in the Planned economy. But it was and is fascism by whatever name it is known.

In specific, FDR's National Recovery Administration was fashioned after the industrial policy of Mussolini. Flynn explains:

[Mussolini] organized each trade or industrial group or professional group into a state-supervised trade association. He called it a corporative. These corporatives operated under state supervision and could plan production, quality, prices, distribution, labor standards, etc. The NRA provided that in America each industry should be organized into a federally supervised trade association. It was not called a corporative. It was called a Code Authority. But it was essentially the same thing. These code authorities could regulate production, quantities, qualities, prices, distribution methods, etc., under the supervision of the NRA. This was fascism.

Such an analysis of the New Deal as fascism is not only found in the Old Right or their libertarian successors. Historian Thaddeus Russell's great chapter "Behold a Dictator: Fascism and the New Deal" in his new book A Renegade History of the United States comes from a leftist perspective and arrives at much the same conclusions. Many of the greatest progressive intellectuals and business elites of Roosevelt's time were especially enamored of Mussolini's regime. "The men who made the New Deal were driven by dreams of a machinelike society, in which all members, from the leaders of government to the lowliest workers, would be parts designed, built, and employed entirely for their function within the whole apparatus. But to their dismay, these men found that most Americans rejected such dreams, except during times of crisis. The First World War was the first such crisis. . . . But then came the peace and prosperity of the 1920s, a long time of waiting for another national emergency that could make their fantasies of social order come true."

This mirrors Robert Higgs's ratchet effect thesis and the insights found in his books Crisis and Leviathan and Depression, War, and Cold War, in regard both to the general expansion of state power during crises and the particular ways World War I and the New Deal solidified a state that Higgs has, with a nod to Charlotte Twight, referred to as "participatory fascism."

What makes FDR's role in American fascism so insidious is that as the greatest 20th century liberal president who led America to war with the Nazis, he is often characterized as the prototypical U.S. anti-fascist. The great Smedley Butler, a brilliant critic of America's merchants of death, was very concerned that reactionary forces along with the military came close to dethroning FDR and creating a fascist regime. But one must ask, could anyone tell the difference? What would the anti-FDR fascists do — wage total war? Nationalize the economy? Put American citizens into concentration camps based on race? Create a permanent military-corporate establishment? To discuss a possible fascist coup in the years of Franklin Roosevelt is to ignore that it in fact happened — a "revolution within the form," as Garet Garrett described it.

Also insidious is the great respect most Republicans have for FDR, whether it's acknowledged or not. Reagan was a devout New Dealer who never abandoned this orientation when he became governor or president. George W. Bush's entire economic program was also thoroughly Rooseveltian — expanding Medicare to the benefit of the pharmaceutical companies, an Ownership Society (how fascist does that sound!?) intended to shore up the real estate and finance sectors, an attempt to corporatize Social Security (thereby saving FDR's domestic triumph, itself a copy from a Prussian program of the 19th century), the bipartisan bailouts of financial institutions, steel tariffs, further nationalization of education, and all the rest.

The Democrats, for their part, continue with the fascist economics they adopted four generations ago, and it leads to a good deal of confusion as they are the "liberal" party. Yet when Obama plans to force individuals to buy private health insurance, picks corporate giants to head up regulatory offices, schemes to create a phony market in carbon credits, and widens the revolving door between Wall Street and the Oval Office, he along with his party is only continuing down the road of their Mussolinian predecessors.

One of the most horrifying parts of fascist economics, autarky, has even been mimicked by all presidents since Nixon in their crazed calls for "energy independence." We also see it in the hysteria about jobs being oursourced. Today it often has an environmental spin, and there is not the beating on the podium and screaming of Lebensraum, but the protectionism and codependency between favored American businesses and the omnipotent state, all with a nationalist focus, are nevertheless there for anyone to see.

It could be countered that many other nations have corporate states as well. Perhaps they too have fascist tendencies. Yet there are a few corporatist features singular to the United States. As the holder of the world's reserve currency, and given that money is half of most economic transactions, the United States boasts one of the most significant corporatist arrangements in the world in its alliance between the Federal Reserve and the big banks. The U.S. government, in absolute terms, claims the largest of all regressive welfare programs in the form of Social Security. It is likely the global leader in intellectual property enforcement, both in domestic and international terms, with most nations trailing considerably behind in this increasingly draconian form of corporate privilege. As the grandest leviathan preying over the world's richest nation, the U.S. corporate state is in its own class.

Flynn's insight that the economic structure of America's planned economy is fascist whatever label we affix to it is echoed in a much more recent and popular authority. In an episode of South Park, Kyle the idiosyncratically precocious kid has this great exchange with his father:

Kyle's dad: “You see Kyle, we live in a liberal-democratic society, and democrats make sexual harassment laws, these laws tell us what we can and can’t say in the work place, and what we can and can’t do in the work place.”

Kyle: “Isn’t that Fascism?”

Kyle's dad: “No, because we don’t call it Fascism.”

Up and down the economy, at all levels of government, bureaucrats and planners dictate details in nearly all areas of economic behavior, with the principle that some sectors should simply be free of government intrusion having been totally discarded. If we have large swaths of economic liberty in America, and we do, this is by accident, or merely due to the state's institutional limits in being able to run everything. The ideological thrust of U.S. economic policy is that we may live our commercial lives freer than in many places, but all upon the good graces of the state, its cartels, licensing boards, and regulatory apparatuses. Even our homes are private property only insofar as it serves the interest of the state, which claims the right to seize anything we own if it bolsters the tax receipts garnered through the state-business nexus. The business environment adheres to a rapidly expanding litany of commercial codes, many of them designed not even by legislature but by executive or judicial fiat. Taken together, this is the essence of economic fascism.

Warmongering Nationalism

A major feature of the fascist powers in the 1930s and 1940s was their belligerence. Without the militarism and war making, these regimes may have never drawn the ire of the U.S. and its allies, we are often told, and it's probably true. It is thus bizarre to hear conservatives voice concern about America's slide toward fascism without acknowledging this central aspect. The United States is the most militarily belligerent nation since World War II, with a very competitive résumé from decades before that. The U.S. appears to have been at war with more nations than any other. The U.S. has dominated the world in bombings, with no other nation coming close, certainly not in the last six decades. Taking the estimates of civilians killed due to U.S. wars of aggression, strategic bombings, and sanctions on food and medicine, the death toll easily surpasses ten million.

The U.S. spends more on national offense than the rest of the world combined. There are now five wars raging — in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Yemen, and Libya — and it is treated as normal, not an extraordinary state of affairs at all. And it isn't one. About every generation the U.S. has had a major war — 1812, Mexico, Lincoln's War, Spanish-American, World War I, World War II, Korea, Vietnam, the Gulf War and war on terrorism.

In the overwhelming majority of the world's nations we can find U.S. bases. Virtually no state is treated neutrally; all are favored and bribed, bullied and manipulated, or invaded with the goal of conquest. Many of the most bloody regimes and insurgent forces in the world have been allied to the U.S. government, from Stalin's Russia to Pol Pot's Cambodia, from the proto-Taliban in Afghanistan to Saddam Hussein's Iraq. The U.S. has trained dozens of states and armies in the arts of torture and terror. One year the U.S. will opportunistically side with a ruthless dictator, only to backstab him often at the very moment he is least menacing to the rest of the world. These foreign activities are all characteristic of a fascist power.

At home, American culture is saturated by militarism, and it is not a modern anomaly. The flag, national anthem, presidency, Constitution, relationship between the federal government and the states, the major welfare programs, prohibition, police policies, weaponry and conduct, the very territory that defines U.S. boundaries – it can all be clearly traced to war. America is not the only state infected by this militarist taint, but it is the most prominent such nation today with pretensions of peace-loving to have an undisturbed history of war making, virtually none of which the current national culture looks upon with shame.

Although the U.S. has long had a militaristic fever, we have seen it reach absurd proportions in recent years. Robert Higgs, in his recent interview with Jeff Tucker, put it very well:

One hears lately, unfortunately, at sporting events, at baseball games, at football games, certain interludes of worship for the Armed Forces. I find it disgusting myself because I like baseball and I don't want my baseball to be spoiled by intrusions of nationalistic fervor and worship of the Armed Forces. To me baseball is glorious for being a peaceful activity. We don't have to kill people to find excitement in life.

It is the same way in the churches, in the media, in the business sector. The Armed Forces are honored and privileged, enjoying a very high official status, even as the injured who return from war are typically mistreated by the very institutions on whose behalf they risked their lives. A returning soldier is a higher form of life than a common citizen. But in the midst of the state's institutions, he is still just a used-up cog, the repair of which is often not worth it to the machine.

Militarism is not as nakedly on display as in Germany at the height of the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union, yet we must also consider the continuity. The U.S. has been steadily militaristic for most of the last century, and much of the previous one. It is unapologetically so, even when there is some subtlety to it. Although the cultural right is much more militaristic, the left is also dominated by love of the Armed Forces. Franklin Roosevelt, hero to most of the left, was father of the modern military industrial complex as well as nuclear weaponry. Liberals love claiming the legacy of America's most beloved war, and they love the myths that surround that state undertaking for having unified the culture and brought America out of the Depression. World War II supposedly demonstrates the efficacy of central planning, as well as the necessity to kill untold numbers of innocent people, on occasion, which is why both statist wings of the American political class love it so dearly.

It is almost impossible to get very high in the national culture with a radically antiwar outlook, to say nothing of an anti-military one. There is much that is taboo to say in American life, but principled critiques of war making, based on the common-sense morality concerning questions about the taking of innocent life, are probably at the top of the list.

Economically, the so-called defense industry stands as a giant. Major defense contractors have infrastructure in nearly every state, and their hands in virtually every sector of government — from TSA and the Department of Agriculture to the IRS and Homeland Security, from NASA and the Food and Drug Administration down to the New York police department. Very few critics of this regime get very far in the mainstream.

The Leader Principle with a Twist

In the United States, any natural-born citizen can grow up to be the president, we are often reminded, demonstrating once more, as if any more evidence were needed, that America is the greatest nation in history, its people the chosen people to lead the world. America is proud to advertise itself as the king of democracies. There is no religious test to be president. There is no familial restriction. Every four or eight years, we see the peaceful transfer of power — unprecedented, demonic power — and Americans can thus say with pride that more than any other nation in the world, "the people here really are the government — the greatest government there ever was."

Yet when that American citizen is in office, he (or she, as I'm sure we'll see soon enough) is basically god on Earth. Is there a minor or major problem with America's economy, or the world's? The president shall respond. Is school violence or sex on television becoming a problem? The president will send one of his officials to fix it. Is injustice transpiring overseas? The president shall see to it immediately. Health care, energy, immigration, social peace, crime, marriage, international trade — nothing is to be tackled without the consultation or active involvement of the president.

One would think the president works a 75-hour day, given his supposed capacity to heal the sick, fix the market, bring democracy to Afghanistan, stamp out drugs in Mexico, secure the auto industry, stand as a role model, unify the nation, end racism, teach all children — not a one left behind — to read, decide when to launch nuclear weapons and which other nations are worthy of having them, save Americans from natural disasters, fix the weather, and get everyone into homes with ever increasing sale values at ever declining costs.

This is such an important, holy office, that the president never travels anywhere without a vast legion of bodyguards, medical personnel, executive officials, and dozens if not hundreds of others. No one else in the world has ever had such a personal army. Wherever the president travels, the local population must surrender its petty business and witness entire neighborhoods overtaken by the head of state's coterie of pampering assistants and armed guardians.

Americans are enamored of the flawed, everyday persona of the president. They loved Reagan for losing his temper. They adored Clinton for his foibles. They liked it that Bush was a guy with whom you could have a beer, that Obama listens to the same music that they do. They love the idea that, unlike in other fascist regimes, the president can be anybody. And that person can then opt to torture and kill anyone on Earth, or destroy any Third World nation on his (or her – it must be emphasized) say so.

When it comes to power — the actual control the president has over resources and his capacity to destroy human life — no other fascist leader has ever approached what is at the president's fingertips. No other political office has lasted so long with so much Caesarian prerogative. No other political position was ever credibly believed by so many to have the power to do so much good. In America, the president is a deity — which, paradoxically, is why so many political opponents take it so personally when someone they dislike has the office. Some Americans don't want to see the greatness of their country tarnished by a perjurer like Clinton or a doofus like Bush. They might even question the officeholder's legitimacy, as with Obama. But this is because the office is so revered. The presidency itself is upheld as the commanding office of the nation, the secular savior of the world. It is the godhead of America's democratic omnipotence. It is a sacred position. The fact it is an elected office occupied by imperfect souls only bolsters its unparalleled grandeur. To say the Leader Principle isn't alive and well in this country is to define the concept too narrowly.

A Peculiar Blend of Multicultural and Racial Statism

But the United States doesn't round people up on the basis of ethnicity and gas them, the protests come, and so surely it is not fascist. The U.S. isn't based around the concept of racial superiority. Although the Nazis were surely obsessed with racist nationalism, not all fascist systems are. Nevertheless, fascism has been associated with racism and so it is important to acknowledge how this plays into our analysis.

In the United States, PC multiculturalism can at times be as overbearing as old-fashioned bigotry. People have lost their jobs for harmless comments. Others are denied opportunities in academia because they don't have minority status. This does not arise to the level of Nazi hatred, for sure, although we can remember that the anti-Jewish crusade began as an affirmative action program, based on the concern that Jews were overrepresented in places of influence.

More important in U.S. fascism is the role multiculturalism plays in guarding against the accusations of violent prejudice. The U.S. government already addressed racial strife, our textbooks say. If racism remains, it is a problem with the culture and private sector — not the egalitarian state. The war machine and federal government were the saviors of blacks. LBJ, the same man who slaughtered millions of Asians, signed the Civil Rights Act, and so the federal government has been elevated to the status of being the Final Solution to racism, the redemption of America's past sins. The all-out assault on property rights involved in Civil Rights legislation is itself a form of anti-racist fascism, yet to say so is to be met with incredulous perplexity, at best.

Under the official code of American ideology, almost nothing is worse than being a racist, which is why the Tea Party is smeared this way and why Al Gore is comparing global warming skeptics to the racists of a previous generations. It is why the conservatives, too, try to use racism accusations to discredit liberals who dare criticize Clarence Thomas, Condoleezza Rice, or Herman Cain.

At the same time, the American state continues to divide people by race. It imprisons blacks at an alarming rate so that there are now more black men in the correctional system than there were enslaved in 1850. The state is still the greatest oppressor of ethnic minorities, who still get the worst of the police state's violence. Because much of the state's war on blacks and other minorities is in the form of regulatory and welfare practices wrongly thought to help the poor and minorities — welfare, public housing, government schools, licensing, minimum wage laws, coercive unionism and so on — very few Americans identify the problem of racist statism comprehensively. Leviathan is a bad deal for whites as well as blacks, only elevating the political class at the expense of all.

Although the U.S. is more culturally tolerant of immigrants than most nations, here too we see racial politics mixed with statism to produce violence against individual rights. Indeed, the specter of mass deportation of peaceful people, the effort to crack down on all business relationships involving an illegal, and the underlying nationalism involved in the demarcation between the rights of legal residents and aliens all speak to the fascism involved in the U.S. system. Immigration was once a much more locally handled, market-regulated matter. With the central state in charge of racial politics and the creation of national identity, liberty for all suffers.

It is the warfare state, however, where American racism is the worst, the most sanctioned, and the most dangerous. Interestingly, the empire uses both political correctness and racism to enhance its power: for example, criticizing U.S. ties with Israel is smeared as anti-Semitism while disregard for the rights of Arabs feeds U.S. wars abroad. Although anti-colonialism and even anti-racism have long been part of war propaganda, the outright hate of foreigners has always served the interests of the militarists, from the vilification of the Spanish and the dehumanization of the Filipinos to the demonization of the Germans in World War I to the gruesome caricatures of Japanese found everywhere in the 1940s and today's disgusting treatment of Muslims.

Americans actually take seriously ideas to forbid the construction of mosques in some areas, proving that intolerance of groups based on race and religion is a very real threat. On a related note, religion plays a fascinating part of American fascism, as both devout Christians and secular liberals see the state as a divine institution. For the fascist left the state is its secular God. For the fascist right the U.S. government is an arm of God's holy will. Fear of godlessness was key in the Cold War, just as fear of fundamentalist Muslims fuels the war on terror and fear of unusual Christian sects has led to their deprivation of rights at Waco and elsewhere.

The worst is seen in the U.S. treatment of foreigners, blown apart in war as if they are vermin. An important point here is the other fascist regimes have been historically discredited, and the modern incarnations of these nation-states don't speak with pride about their past. Modern Germany is not at all boastful of its National Socialist era. With America it is different. This is the state and statist culture that wiped out the Indians, kept blacks enslaved, dropped atoms bombs on Japanese civilians and put their American counterparts in concentration camps — and yet these historical injustices, however much lamented today, do not bring into question the overall legitimacy of the American state that boasts an uninterrupted lineage of sovereignty that encompassed all these atrocities. The U.S. smacks of pride for its centuries of governance, despite the many millions enslaved and crushed under its boot. We should not be surprised that modern American political culture continues to treat foreigners as though they are subhuman. When Pakistani children die in U.S. drone wars, or Mexicans die by the tens of thousands purely because of U.S. drug policy, it is all seen as a price well worth paying — if even it is acknowledged at all. The prevailing dichotomy that there are Americans, worthy of rights, and there are others, totally dispensable in achieving U.S. goals, is a construct easily befitting of national socialism.

American fascism has managed a wondrous trick, using old-fashioned racism as well as officially defined anti-racism to shore up its power. Washington's Civil Rights crusade as well as inhuman disregard for "the other" in perpetuating its totalitarian violence overseas reinforce each other in a most nefarious way, blinding people to the danger of mixing racial politics with total power no matter what the aim. Its wars abroad are always for equality, democracy, humanity. Its domestic state balloons with power to combat social strife. But from Wounded Knee to Guantánamo, the truly disenfranchised have another story to tell.

A Socially Moderate Police State

Social conservatives generally find accusations of U.S. fascism to be preposterous — offensive when Republicans reign and absurd when Democrats rule — partly because from their perspective almost all manner of cultural liberalism, decadence, political correctness, sexual permissiveness, and so forth cannot be escaped, not in the public schools, the FCC-licensed big media, the government-endorsed view of mainstream society. They see Christianity pushed out of the schools and public sphere, including in local city Christmas events, and believe if there is any tyranny in America it is of a leftwing variety.

Although bourgeois American culture has been co-opted by state institutions, particularly through militarism, it is true that the counterculture too has been absorbed by American civic ideology. It is a good thing that state harassment of people outside the mainstream of sexuality has been minimized, but it is important to note that just because the U.S. is more "socially tolerant" than in past times doesn't mean it's freer, even when it comes to personal rights. It is crucial to note that just because presidents admit to trying pot and the government finances condoms for students and museums devoted to rock music does not mean liberalism of a genuine sort has triumphed.

The public schools are a microcosm of the issue. Many see in them cesspools of deviancy, libertinism, a total disrespect for old culture, conventionally defined family values and hierarchy, or even the traditional conception of the role for schooling: reading, writing, arithmetic. Yet these institutions are thoroughly fascistic, hierarchical according to ageism and an arbitrary placement of authority in teachers and administrators. They have come to resemble low-security prisons, complete with metal detectors, armed guards, and summary searches. Students are spied upon and regulated even in their time away from class. Young children are suspended and punished over the smallest of offenses, even handcuffed and told they're heading to prison, never to see their parents again. It is no coincidence, probably, that America's school system and the Nazi regime both had vital origins in Bismarck's Prussia. The right looks at our schools and sees decadence and debauchery. Yet there is also spirit-crushing authoritarianism.

To emphasize the socially liberal flavor of the American police state is not to say that the fringe is always tolerated by society, much less government. The persecution of sex workers continues and those involved in certain verboten consensual sexual activities — such as teenagers caught sending each other nude photos in class — can face years of jail and the institutional shame of being labeled "sex offenders" for their victimless behavior. The greatest cause of prison growth and one of the worst abuses of liberty in America has been the war on drugs. Although America prides itself for being more liberal than its Muslim enemies on the question of alcohol, it incarcerates hundreds of thousands of people whose only substantive offense was against the state-imposed norms of pharmacologically induced brain chemistry. And even as the prospect of marijuana legalization seems bright, those who continue to be marginalized — psychedelic, heroin, and illegal stimulant users — will continue to be subjected to imprisonment, which in America often effectively means frequent beatings, inter-inmate slavery, and rape. Moreover, the reach of the U.S. drug war is global — there is nothing really like an international crusade against victimless crimes akin to America's bullying of most of the world to go along with its drug policy, as it has done in increasing levels of intensity for a century.

Drug oppression doesn't stop at recreational users and outcast addicts, either. The Food and Drug Administration has devastated millions of families with its totalitarian dictates, depriving hundreds of thousands of needed and effective medicines, cutting countless lives short. Its cozy relationship with some of the big pharmaceutical firms reminds us of the economic component of this fascist arm of the American state. But the underlying principle that in America you do not own your body sufficiently to decide whether to take a substance, whether cocaine or experimental cancer medications, is a fascist pretension if ever there was one. Meanwhile, those deemed "mentally ill" also face numerous severe restrictions on their civil liberties, although Thomas Szasz has done a wonderful thing in greatly reducing this element of American fascism.

The state doesn't break down our doors to lock up all political dissidents or liquidate racial minorities by the thousands, so it is sometimes assumed our system is nothing like fascism, although we should remember that Mussolini's state wasn't as bad as Hitler's, and even Hitler's regime didn't develop into an exterminationist project right away. Although the U.S. government isn't as totalitarian in practice as some states have been, we must look at the potential power just waiting to be unleashed. In a mundane sense, America's police state tentacles are indeed more ubiquitous and grandiose than anything that has ever existed on the planet. The surveillance state is unprecedented, without even the façade of due process involved in spying that existed before 9/11. The government seeks to monitor all. Anti-government critics are indeed tracked and at times arrested. Whistleblowers are detained and mistreated. Torture is normalized. Indefinite detention without cause is a bipartisan, unchallenged policy. America boasts the largest incarcerated population, both per capita and in absolute terms, on Earth. The death penalty persists, rare among industrialized, modern nations, and a policy without which, we must remember, industrial-style genocide is essentially impossible. The police presence increases year by year, and becomes ever more dangerous. Thousands of American citizens have been killed by police in the last decade alone. Ethnic minorities, the youth, illegal immigrants, and other classically alienated groups are especially vulnerable. But no one is safe. There are a hundred SWAT raids a day. No matter what someone's station in life, there is the threat of being jailed for an unbelievably petty offense, injured during a traffic stop, or shot by a police officer. No matter how wealthy someone is, there is a threat that a regulatory technicality or contrived offense like "Obstruction of Justice" can land one in a federal pen. Incidents such as the Waco massacre and the round-up of weapons at Katrina reminds us of how universal the threat to liberty is, regardless of demographics.

Just because you can watch half-nude women on afternoon television or gay men kissing on the streets of nearly any major city does not mean America is free, as complacent liberals might think, much less too free, as conservatives often suggest. Just because most dissidents are left alone doesn't mean there is no police state, for that would be convenient indeed for the police statists: the idea that people ought not complain so long as they have the right to do so.

America's Unique Fascism

American fascism is one of a kind. Its economic system is neither free enterprise nor pure egalitarian socialism, but more akin to a buffed-up, modernized, globally dominant Mussolinian corporate state. Its militarism rivals and in many senses exceeds any of history's fascist regimes, in power, uninterrupted belligerence, and sheer size. Its presidency is the most revered and powerful Fuhrer in world history, despite and actually due to its democratic nature. America's racial nationalism is unusual but very real, combined with pretensions of anti-racism. Its police state enslaves and punishes, at home and abroad, in ways that would make Franco or Perón envious, even as it allows for a relatively wide range of social liberty.

When Keith Olbermann called Bush a fascist in 2008, the conservatives thought it seditious and threatening. When Glenn Beck began sounding the alarm in 2009 that America was moving toward fascism, the progressives thought it crazy and dangerous. Both of these statements were not hyperbole, however. If anything, antiwar lefties and populist rightists only know the half of it when they use the dread "F" word, since they fail to note how intimately much of their own favored agenda falls in line with what they despise.

Anthony Gregory [send him mail] is research editor at the Independent Institute. He lives in Oakland, California. See his webpage for more articles and personal information.

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Last summer Angelo Codevilla’s American Spectator essay “America’s Ruling Class and the Perils of Revolution” made waves in conservative circles for its compelling treatment of the minority ruling class (the political elite and its partisans) versus the “country class” (the rest of us). It was a sophisticated exposition but also broke down the class conflict in simple terms: “The rulers want the ruled to shut up and obey. The ruled want self-governance.” Rush Limbaugh praised the article for helping to explain the struggle of the Tea Party’s populists against the political establishment.

The Tea Party’s rhetoric of defending the little guy against the powerful has always seemed discordant to the left, which regards such class consciousness as its own domain. The left has long identified itself with the idea of two classes in society – the common people and the power elite – each with its own, usually conflicting, interests. When left-wingers speak this way, conservatives like Limbaugh accuse them of “class warfare.” But neither side grasps the full picture: in fact, it was the classical liberal tradition that first employed the class analysis that has survived to this day in altered forms.

“There was a theory of class conflict developed by classical liberals before Marxism and on which Marx himself drew,” libertarian historian Ralph Raico has argued. This theory was associated with such 19th-century French scholars as historian Augustin Thierry and economist Charles Dunoyer, as well as Jean-Baptiste Say and his followers Charles Comte and Jérôme-Adolphe Blanqui. As Raico noted in a January 1991 essay in Liberty, Blanqui wrote “what is probably the first history of economic thought, published in 1837,” in which the French liberal explained:

In all the revolutions, there have always been but two parties opposing each other; that of the people who wish to live by their own labor, and that of those who would live by the labor of others. … Patricians and plebeians, slaves and freemen, guelphs and ghibellines, red roses and white roses, cavaliers and roundheads, liberals and serviles, are only varieties of the same species.

Class analysis was thoroughly incorporated into classical liberal rhetoric by the time Richard Cobden and John Bright were fighting against Britain’s Corn Laws. Bright saw this struggle as “a war of classes. I believe this to be a movement of the commercial and industrial classes against the Lords and the great proprietors of the soil.” The dichotomy between a plundering political class – the rulers and their favored interests – and the masses victimized by state power is further seen in the 19th-century writings of Frederic Bastiat, Herbert Spencer, and John C. Calhoun, among others.

According to Raico, Marx expropriated class analysis from the classical liberals and transformed it from a libertarian framework into a socialist one: the historically inevitable clash between profiting capitalists and exploited workers. Marx regarded the state as the capitalists’ tool. The most wealthy merchants tended to be in bed with the political class, and so it was not difficult for Marx to adapt class analysis from a theory based on legally defined categories – those who had state privileges and those who did not – to one where class was defined according to status in the process of economic production. Instead of rulers versus their subjects, Marx gave us owners vesrus workers.

This permutation of class analysis seduced many thinkers of a liberal, humanitarian inclination and aided the statist makeover of liberalism, which made peace with the state as a means of elevating the masses. By endorsing the proletarian capture of state power, Marx, his followers, and the entire left side of the spectrum have in a sense inverted the original purpose of class analysis. In seeing the state as the people’s best hope, and viewing the wealthy as being opposed to the interests of the democratic state, left-liberals have turned the anti-statist, anti-taxation, anti-monopoly thrust of class analysis on its head, converting it from a case against the state into a case for it.

Modern libertarians, as heirs to classical liberalism, have attempted to reclaim the original vision – while still, like the Marxists, “following the money” to see how the state provides monopoly benefits and direct subsidies to corporate interests. Radical libertarian class analysis maintains the classical liberal focus on the taxing state as the chief enemy, while agreeing with leftists on many particulars of how big businesses – especially the banking industry and defense contractors – use the state to line their pockets at the expense of the people.

The man most responsible for libertarian attention to this subject was economist and historian Murray N. Rothbard. Likely the most significant theorist of modern libertarianism – he built a system integrating natural-rights ethics, anti-imperialism, Austrian economics, and individualist anarchism all under the rubric of one political theory – Rothbard was a dedicated practitioner of classical-liberal class analysis. In a 1967 critique of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society, Rothbard drew on the work of sociologist Franz Oppenheimer to describe the distinction between the minority ruling class and the victimized majority: “By seizing revenue by means of coercion and assigning rewards as it disburses the funds, the state creates ruling and ruled ‘classes’ or ‘castes’; for one example, classes of what Calhoun discerned as net ‘taxpayers’ and ‘tax-consumers,’ those who live off taxation.”

In his 1974 essay “The Anatomy of the State,” Rothbard finds the state’s origins in plunder – the state was born when bands of marauders decided to stick around and extract regular tribute from their victims, rather than taking all they could at once and killing their prey. The state is “the systematization of the predatory process over a given territory.” And since the state’s relationship with the people is parasitical, it can only maintain its grip through subterfuge. “[T]he chief task of the rulers is always to secure the active or resigned acceptance of the majority of the citizens” through “the creation of vested economic interests” as well as by “promoting [statist] ideology among the people.”

Hans-Hermann Hoppe, a disciple of Rothbard in economics and political theory, elaborates on these principles in his 1990 paper “Marxist and Austrian Class Analysis,” in which he explains the major disagreements as well as similarities between the two schools:

[T]he basic proposition of the Marxist theory of the state in particular is false. The state is not exploitative because it protects the capitalists’ property rights, but because it itself is exempt from the restriction of having to acquire property productively and contractually.

In spite of this fundamental misconception, however, Marxism, because it correctly interprets the state as exploitative (unlike, for example, the public choice school, which sees it as a normal firm among others), is on to some important insights regarding the logic of state operations. For one thing, it recognizes the strategic function of redistributionist state policies.

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Anthony Gregory [send him mail] is research editor at the Independent Institute. He lives in Oakland, California. See his webpage for more articles and personal information.

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This is a transcript of a lecture given at the Austrian Scholars Conference, March 7, 2011

The real critique of the wars certainly goes beyond the numbers. It is good, however, to look at the figures. Most people in the country know that Obama hasn’t exactly ended the wars. I’m sure people say, Yeah, but Obama is ending the wars.

This claim is not obviously 100 percent false in every respect, perhaps. And so we need to be careful when we get into the details.

So, during the run-up to the ascension of Obama to the throne, he was critical of the Iraq war. He said things like This war’s lasted longer than World War I, II, the Civil War; 4,000 Americans have died (and of course Americans are the only people that matter in the war). More than 60,000 have been injured; we spent trillions of dollars; we’re less safe.

These were very sound critiques of the Iraq war. A lot of us made these kinds of utilitarian critiques. They’re almost utilitarian anyway. I don’t think they are the most important reasons to oppose the Iraq war, but they are important reasons; they are sufficient reasons on their own, certainly. And Obama did sound better on the Iraq war than Bush or McCain.

At the same time – and this is forgotten – he always was worse on Afghanistan. The Democrats, from Kerry to Obama, were always worse on Afghanistan. Obama’s position paper said he’s been calling for more troops and resources for the war in Afghanistan for years; he would divert resources from Iraq to Afghanistan. To his everlasting shame, he has not broken this promise.

Another point I want to make is on Iraq. He wasn’t antiwar; he was always slippery on this war. I want to just relay a couple of interesting points.

In 2004, the position of the Democrats was always We shouldn’t have gone in; now we’re in, we’re going to have to get out one day, but it sure isn’t responsible to talk about getting out now, because we need to be responsible; we need to fix the country, and then we’ll get out.

In ’04, in the Chicago Tribune, Obama said, "There’s not much of a difference between my position on Iraq and George Bush’s position at this stage."

Throughout the years, he voted for war funding once he was senator, and he defended his votes. Presumably it would be wrong to defund an immoral war. And in 2008, Obama hailed the Iraq surge – a controversial policy harshly criticized by many Democrats the year before – going so far as to tell Bill O’Reilly that the surge "succeeded beyond our wildest dreams."

In December of ’08, when he was the lame-duck president, Bush signed the Status of Forces Agreement with the Iraqi leadership, which set the timetable for withdrawal. It was almost precisely the timetable for withdrawal that Obama had proposed, within a couple months.

So the official US policy, by the time Obama took office, was that the United States would withdraw the troops from the cities by June of 2009; and by the end of this year, 2011, the troops would leave Iraq entirely. That was the policy when Obama took power. He did not expedite that.

To his credit, he hasn’t put all his political capital into stopping it, although even there I would qualify my statements.

Boots on the Ground

In Iraq, at the height of the surge, which worked beyond our wildest dreams, there were 170,000 US troops in Iraq, and now there are fewer than 50,000. Which, by the way, is about the number that Rumsfeld and those clowns said that we would need for the war. So, now that the war is kind of wrapping up, we’re at the level that they thought we’d need to invade and conquer and occupy and win.

In Afghanistan, meanwhile, Obama has fulfilled his promises, unfortunately. Before 2006, except for a blip in July, there were about 10 to 20,000 troops. And then by the time Bush left office, unfortunately he ramped it up to 33,000 troops. By mid-2010, there were almost three times as many – 91,000 troops. Throughout 2009, Obama has almost tripled the presence in Afghanistan.

Obama’s first defense secretary, Robert Gates, who by the way was Bush’s defense secretary too, floated the idea the United States might have to stay beyond 2011. And some Democrats on the Armed Services Committee have said, Yeah, we can’t just withdraw. (I suppose you can’t just go into a country and bomb it and stay there for only eight years – that would be reckless.)

Figure 1. US Military Fatalities in Afghanistan and Iraq, Per Year Source: Calculated from data gathered at icasualties.org

The total number of troops fighting wars under Obama has been higher than it was under Bush except at the end of Bush’s term. At the first half of the Bush administration, which is when there were people in the streets shouting, "Bush is a war criminal" – when the Left was correct about something – there were fewer troops.

There were more US fatalities in Iraq under Bush, although the total number of US fatalities in 2009 and 2010 was higher than it was in 2003, and higher than it was in 2008, the last Bush year.

Let’s say we had a third Bush term. If he was planning to withdraw gradually from Iraq and leave Afghanistan alone, I think the trajectory would have been much better than it is today, where Iraq is about where I think it would have been, and Afghanistan is much worse.

Obama also boosted private contractors by about a quarter in both Iraq and Afghanistan. As of January 2011 – of course, this is government data and you’d be surprised how much they don’t know what they are talking about – there are 87,000 contractors in Afghanistan; 71,000 in Iraq.

There were more civilian contractors (including foreigners) that died in the first half of 2010 than there were soldiers. And some people are pointing out that shifting some of the burden to contractors obscures what is going on.

Costly Wars

Obama always said that we are spending way too much; we’re going to go line by line in the budget. And one of the only good promises he made was to save money on Iraq. That’s how he was planning to support everyone from cradle to grave. It doesn’t really add up that way, but at least he wanted to cut spending on something big.

And he did cut the spending in Iraq. But the spending has gone up enormously in Afghanistan. Even adjusted for inflation, we see that, other than Bush’s last two years with the surge, total spending was lower for most of the Bush term on the two wars.

Figure 2. Estimated War Funding by Operation FY2001–FY2011 (in billions of dollars, adjusted for in!ation in constant 2011 dollars, as of Feb 2011) * Calculated using FY02 metrics. Note: CPI years and budget fiscal years might be off by a few months, but this chart is still illustrative of trends with inflation. Source: Amy Belasco, “The Cost of Iraq, Afghanistan, and Other Global War on Terror Operations Since 9/11,” Congressional Research Service, March 29, 2011, p. 3. Consumer Price Index inflation calculated using the Bureau of Labor Statistics’s Inflation Calculator, available online.

Obama criticized Bush for financing wars off budget. In his first year Obama had a big supplemental-funding bill – another broken promise.

The Afghanistan war has expanded out of control, and the war makes no sense. The government says there are 100 Al-Qaeda members in Afghanistan, and so the troop levels are higher, more people are dying and they want to stamp out the opium trade. They can’t even stop people from buying crack four blocks from the White House, not that they should try. This is the most ridiculous war. It’s even a more ridiculous war than the Iraq war in terms of the idea behind it.

Meanwhile, Obama is drone-attacking Pakistan. He’s expanded this war greatly. One or 2 million Pakistani refugees have had to leave the Swat Valley. It’s one of the greatest refugee crises since Rwanda. Obama’s bombed Yemen; he’s bombed Somalia; he even threatened Eritrea, this tiny little country near Ethiopia, with invasion.

In a normal country, when your government says it might invade another country, people have a clue, but we’re at war so much with so many countries no one even knows any of this stuff.

And on Iran, Obama continues to be belligerent when he caught Iran "red-handed" with that Qom nuclear facility. Iran reported that they had this facility that they hadn’t really started working on yet, according to the Non-Proliferation Treaty, in which the National Intelligence Estimate, the administration, and the International Atomic Energy Agency all say Iran’s basically following the law.

Civil Liberties

Warrantless surveillance has continued, and it’s been normalized. The TSA outrages have gotten worse. Now the Left thinks that you’re crazy if you oppose the police state, and the Right is finally realizing the federal government shouldn’t get to touch us like this.

Detention without charge has continued. Habeas corpus is gutted. Obama was supposed to close Guantanamo within a year; now it looks as if they are never going to close it. And even at their best they’ll say we’ll have a "Guantanamo Lite" within the United States.

Even when they said they would try Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in civil court, the administration’s position was We’ll try him, and we’ll convict him, and if we don’t convict him we’ll still detain him. So of course the American Right goes crazy because how dare he be soft on terrorism.

Renditioning, this outsourcing of people to be tortured, has continued, at least on some level. In 2009, they renditioned a guy who wasn’t even accused of terrorism. He was accused of knowing about supposed fraud related to defense contracting.

So they tied him to a chair; they deprived him of sleep; they told him his family was in danger, that he’ll never see them again – all the horrible stuff that happened under Bush, but he was basically a white-collar criminal at worst.

The drone attacks are through the roof; there’s robot killing. Bradley Manning, the likely whistleblower with WikiLeaks, has been detained. And Obama used to say his administration would protect whistleblowers. I guess he meant protect them with steel cages.

We have the same basic trajectory on war, on spending, on civil liberties, on foreign policy; the Defense Department is as bloated as ever. People forget that both parties are the same on pretty much everything, and foreign policy maybe more than anything else.

For the full research, including a discussion of the Libya war, see the policy report, "What Price War?: Afghanistan, Iraq, and the Costs of Conflict."

Reprinted from Mises.org.

Anthony Gregory [send him mail] is research editor at the Independent Institute. He lives in Oakland, California. See his webpage for more articles and personal information.

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I've long been impressed by Murray Rothbard's discussion of the rights of non-human beings in The Ethics of Liberty, in which he even explores the rights of alien races. "If our hypothetical u2018Martians' were like human beings — conscious, rational, able to communicate with us and participate in the division of labor," Rothbard writes, "then presumably they too would possess the rights now confined to u2018earthbound' humans." But what about the predatory undead? Rothbard continues:

[S]uppose, on the other hand, that the Martians also had the characteristics, the nature, of the legendary vampire, and could only exist by feeding on human blood. In that case, regardless of their intelligence, the Martians would be our deadly enemy and we could not consider that they were entitled to the rights of humanity. Deadly enemy, again, not because they were wicked aggressors, but because of the needs and requirements of their nature, which would clash ineluctably with ours.

Indeed, if vampires behaved as they have been portrayed in every folklore tradition to feature such a creature, at least as far as I can recall, this would be correct. But what if, instead, vampires were not intractably our enemies — what if the market and civil society could produce a harmony of interests between bloodsuckers and humans?

L. Neil Smith's new novella, Sweeter Than Wine, addresses this question while telling an exciting story in the process. J. Gifford, the vampire in his tale, is a productive member of society — a private eye. He gets all the blood he needs through consensual exchange.

Smith, a sci-fi writer, offers a very clever explanation for Gifford's affliction. It is not a supernatural explanation. As with all science fiction, the reader must suspend his disbelief, but it is far easier here than it is concerning the scientific explanation for Jedi powers given in the Star Wars prequels. If you're going to take away the mysticism of a fantasy story and replace it with fictionalized science, it had better be compelling, as it is in Sweeter Than Wine.

Neil's prose is sharp, and the libertarian lessons are presented compellingly without being preachy, a tough balance to strike in this kind of writing:

A wise man once asked, "What shall we have accomplished when we have made a law?" . . . . He goes on to point out that those who agree with the new law are most likely "obeying" it already, before it's ever passed. Meanwhile, those who don't agree with it will either obey it grudgingly, which is very dangerous in the long run, especially in a democracy, where nothing is ever really settled, or they will break it surreptitiously. . . .

What we will really have accomplished, says the wise man, is to have given more jobs to cops, and bought more guns and clubs. . . . If law really worked, there'd be no need for it.

Governments are described as "more voracious and implacable than any vampire could be." And as usual in Smith's works, we get a shout out to the serious thinkers of our tradition. Some of the action takes place across the street from the "Ludwig von Mises Memorial College campus."

Reading this story has reminded me of Smith's imaginative power and narrative artistry, which were instrumental in radicalizing me in my libertarianism years ago. His book The Probability Broach, a modern classic, has been hailed on these pages before. By painting a picture of a libertarian world free of state interference of virtually any type, Smith inspired me with a positive ideal vision of a possible future, the liberal utopia that Hayek often stressed we needed in addition to our radical critique of the state. Just imagine a Congress with virtually no power whatsoever, a world where all policing was done with respect to individual rights, where the glories of medicine and science flourished beyond our dreams due to the infinite creativity unleashed by the free market. Reading the graphic novel version of the Probability Broach recently reminded me of its fantastic alternative American history, in which George Washington was a villain, which helped pique my interest in revisionist history early on and probably set me on the path to reading lots of it to this day.

One major point that came to mind in reading Sweeter than Wine was the importance of fiction in fomenting a cultural shift of any sort. Science fiction has long had an important role in the classical liberal and libertarian heritage, from C.S. Lewis's Space Trilogy and Robert Heinlein's works to Robert Anton Wilson and Withur We, the new novel by Matthew Alexander. More broadly speaking, we can include Douglas Adams, given his brilliant take on bureaucracy in Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy; Ayn Rand, George Orwell, and nearly every other dystopian author as having relevance to the libertarian mind. Although not a libertarian, Kurt Vonnegut has long had an important place in my heart as well as my anti-state thinking for his great antiwar books Slaughterhouse Five and Mother Night as well as his terrific short story "Harrison Bergeron," probably the best artistic refutation of egalitarianism imaginable in less than ten pages. Surely the theme that power corrupts seen in the Lord of the Rings, one of the most famous epic stories of our time, should resonate with all libertarians. Smith himself gave a talk in the 1990s, "You Can’t Fight a Culture War If You Ain’t Got Any Culture," that argued both for the importance of libertarian artists and a general libertarian awareness of the arts. I completely concur, and there is a lot of great libertarian fiction out there, but we can always use more.

To broaden the discussion even further, fiction is a most important medium, serving a crucial role in the humanization of other people, providing a peek into different cultures and attitudes that is crucial for a libertarian, who is, after all, seeking to defend humanity from the state, a humanity that we learn about through reading fiction as we can through nothing else. I'm not always sure what the exact libertarian themes are in my many favorite storytellers of the English language, whether it's Shakespeare, Mark Twain, Chesterton, or Stephen King. Nor do I always read my favorite translated works by those writing in another language, such as the masterful Italo Calvino, through an ideological lens. But fiction's unique contributions in identifying and depicting cross-cultural universals as well as exploring the individual character as the primary unit in human action are essential to having a well-rounded appreciation of that which we're fighting for. It also never hurts to read fiction if you wish to write, whether fiction or non-fiction, or even speak in defense of the ideas of freedom.

Neil's latest story reminds us of the important part storytelling plays in the contemplation of ethical principles. It shows us that the peripheral concerns of theory can sometimes best be explored through an unusual protagonist's tale. Neil has always been an unashamed libertarian and this comes across clearly in all his work. His is a difficult role to play, the polemicist who defends ideals through flawed characters and plots complicated by the nuance of human imperfections. There is always the risk of coming off preachy and hurting the very message meant to be conveyed, undercutting that precarious balance between potent art and ideology. There is always the danger of turning off readers and shrinking one's audience by sticking tightly to principles, especially in a postmodern age when people would often prefer their novelists and other artists not take a stand on anything, much less eternal and old-fashioned concepts of individual liberty. Neil has kept the libertarian tradition in fiction alive for over thirty years, and Sweeter Than Wine is a great notch on his belt and a fine addition to the wide-reading libertarian's library.

Anthony Gregory [send him mail] is research editor at the Independent Institute. He lives in Oakland, California. See his webpage for more articles and personal information.

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In Oakland, California, where I live, urban homesteading — growing food on private land for small-scale trade and consumption — has become so common the city government has backed off a bit. In a rare triumph for sanity and freedom, anachronistic zoning ordinances from 1965 are being liberalized to accommodate the city farmers. Molly Samuel writes at KQED:

"The city has already made some changes; it’s now legal to grow and sell vegetables on an empty lot with a conditional use permit. . . . Oakland North reports one of the hotly debated topics [at a city meeting] was animal husbandry: Should Oaklanders be permitted to raise, slaughter, and sell animals? Or not?"

Despite the remaining government bureaucracy, we have to cheer on the homesteaders. They are so impossible to ignore, hundreds of them flooding a city meeting, that the tyranny of zoning is being ratcheted back for once.

And although it has a leftish quality, libertarians ought to take notice of this countercultural movement, whose localizing agenda poses profound implications for the future of liberty. With the economic forecasts dire and the corporatist system of mega-farms firmly gripping the Obama administration and all federal politics for the foreseeable future, our rights and perhaps very lives may depend on the freedom to farm at home.

Libertarians often straddle radically different, sometimes seemingly opposed, stereotypes. We are simultaneously atomist rugged individualists and slaves to the anonymous division of labor found in modern cosmopolitanism. This seeming paradox is reconciled in our simultaneous love of political localism and integrated economics, self-sufficiency and the contemporary blessings of a thriving voluntary community. And as admirers of both the frontier and the integrated city life, we can see much to relate to in the urban homesteaders and their hybrid lifestyle of city-slicking, strenuous agrarianism.

The urban farmers too suffer from being pigeonholed as the type you'd find in quasi-socialist hippie communes. Their community's language and cultural habits can be jarring to a free market radical, but they need not be as dissonant as they first sound. When a libertarian hears the term "sustainable living" — another common theme in urban homesteading — he might first think of the central planning-nightmare called "sustainable development" or EPA-mandated encumbrances on his track housing. But we can as plausibly interpret the meaning to be: "freedom from the vagaries of the public utilities system and state-subsidized mass agriculture."

Even in the larger sustainable living communities, we see a diversity of social organization. "Most cohousing communities with gardens use organic gardening practices, but just as the culture of cohousing groups varies widely, organizing and running a cohousing garden is a highly individualized project," writes Jenise Aminoff in the Fall 2010 issue of Urban Farm magazine. Indeed, while voluntary communalism is totally compatible with libertarianism, even shameless capitalists can find much to love. Eno Commons, "a suburban cohousing community on the outskirts of Durham, N.C.," initially ran its "garden on a standard allotment model, where each unit was assigned a garden plot," but this led to problems: "there was a disconnect between a small handful of people doing work but the whole community picking," explains garden manager Katherine Lee. And so what did they do? Aminoff explains:

"Last fall, Lee proposed a radical change: a market model. With Lee as the manager doing most of the gardening work, residents now pay for their garden produce. On the night of the community's weekly common meal, Lee harvests the garden's produce and brings it u2018to market' in the common house."

Surely, most other approaches to communal gardening involve a bit less commercial exchange, but from a quarter-acre urban homestead or an integrated sustainable living community to a produce co-op and the farmers' markets that have gloriously emerged in every major city, we see there is no conflict between the market economy and sustainable farming in a municipal context. The way of life is no less libertarian than living in a condo or homeownership association.

Agricultural Independence and Urban Farms vs. the State

What are in conflict, however, are sustainable living and city pastures up against the agricultural bureaucracy, the USDA, FDA, and government at all levels. Certainly, those who offer major competition to Big Ag are targeted. There have been at least fifteen raids of raw milk farms during this administration alone. The federal government has cracked down on independent farmers in gruesome ways. Huge corn and soy subsidies have distorted our food supply, putting corn syrup in nearly every processed food, warped migration patterns and impoverished third-world economies. Even patents play a role in the farming hegemony: Monsanto, the corporate food giant with influence in the last three presidential administrations (including the current one), owns genes that can be found in 90% of America’s soy. Wind inevitably blows the seeds from Monsanto crops to those owned by smaller farmers, after which the company claims intellectual property rights over the land and forbids farmers to save seeds — a traditional agricultural practice — and even sues farmers for merely “encouraging” the violation of these patents.

But even for the small, non-commercial city farmer, the state has become a threat. Even the mildest displays of homegrown produce have run into legal trouble. In July news traveled fast of the plight of Julie Bass of Oak Park, Michigan, who was threatened with 93 days of jail time for the crime of planting vegetables in her front yard. A mere five raised beds featuring corn, tomatoes, squash and other vegetables constituted her great offense. Amid a massive public uproar, the city dropped the charges. In most areas of everyday life, the state has become ever more intrusive and invasive. On growing our own food, however, Americans appear sick of being on the defensive. The mainstream adoption of urban homesteading can lead to one of the great retrenchments of state power and influence in our times, echoing the homeschooling movement that has grown so impressively in recent years.

Much of the urban farm movement can be traced to the World War-era victory gardens — what we might call a market response to a statist emergency. The phenomenon of growing your own food (among other consumables) took off in the 1960s and 1970s and is now back in the cities, taking them by storm. Once again, they are coming in response to institutional crisis. In cities suffering in every other way, urban farms might save the day. The Detroit Agriculture Network's Kristine Hahn points to the city's "113 community gardens. . ., 18 school gardens, and 220 family gardens" as signs of hope for that suffering city's future, writes Elizabeth Wahl.

It is a global phenomenon: The USDA estimates that urban areas grow about 15 percent of the food worldwide. In some countries, socialist regimentation has made private gardens absolutely necessary for survival. The Soviet government's attempts to feed the masses were infamously disastrous, particularly in the calamitous era of Lyskensoism from the 1920s to early 1960s, when the Russian government imposed bizarre standards of agriculture along "proletarian" lines — the forced collectivization of farming and the rejection of genetics and mainstream botanical practices as being based in bourgeois pseudo-science. As the government began looking the other way, its citizens were finally able to feed themselves. By the late Soviet era, 90% of the nation's fresh vegetables and a good deal of its animal products were from "unofficial sources" — " meaning dacha gardens and the small private plots that collective farmers were permitted to work in their spare time," according to the Christian Science Monitor. These private gardens became crucial in the post-Soviet upheaval as well. A 2008 survey conducted by the Public Opinion Fund found that 56% of urban Russians had a dacha or "kitchen garden." The American government is still not as dysfunctional as Russia's but the laws of economics apply universally. Should another financial collapse come, American dachas could be our lifeline.

At least implicitly distrustful of Washington, the urban homesteading movement gets bigger every day. With bigness, however, comes the threat of politicization, and in particular the threat of these farms being harvested by government, the co-ops being co-opted by the state. As with the bureaucratic nationalization of the word "organic" and the trouble we see with farmers running into Monsanto's patent police, the voluntarism of sustainable living may one day be supplanted by regimented control and corporatism.

A Diversity of Meanings and Conflicts

A hint at one might come, and how urban homesteaders, without some guidance on the ethics of liberty, might make themselves vulnerable to a corporate-state takeover, arrives in the story of a trademark skirmish from this February. The Dervaeas Institute, an organizational arm of the Dervaeas family well known throughout the community for its pioneering work, its respected farm in Pasadena, and its website UrbanHomesteading.com, sent out cease and dissent letters to sixteen groups warning them about their appropriation of the term "Urban Homesteading." According to Jess Watson, writing in the Summer 2011 edition of Edible East Bay, the letters immediately resulted in "the Facebook pages of IUH, the Denver Institute of Urban Homesteading (a farmers market), and several homesteading-related books [being] taken down."

According to a Dervaeas press release, their cease and desist letters were only meant to inform the sixteen organizations of "the proper usage of the registered terms. No threat was made against anyone’s first amendment rights; yet, there has been a heated argument in the media against what should have been the Dervaeses’ normal rights to protect their trademarks."

But perhaps "normal rights" must be rethought if they involve controlling how others use such a phrase as "urban homesteading." Libertarians have unique insights on intellectual property's incompatibility with traditional property rights, and maybe some radical free market thought is what this community needs. There is also the practical consideration: "Urban homesteading" yields 610,000 finds on Google. Some entries concern not just sustainable farming but actual homesteading — squatting on seemingly unclaimed property. This squatting can be both farm-related and libertarian: with the state neglecting huge swaths of so-called "public property," community farming can be an act of revolutionary Lockeanism.

In 2006, the city government moved in to seize a plot of public land that had been effectively homesteaded by 350 farming families in central Los Angeles. The city had caved to public pressure not to place a garbage incinerator there in 1987. "The lot remained abandoned for seven more years, when [around 1994] working folks from the neighborhood set up on the unused land, established gardens and cultivated the land in the lot," writes Charles Johnson. Ten years after they began homesteading the lot, the city sold it to a wealthy businessman who had owned a fraction of it before it was stolen by the government through eminent domain in the 1980s. Here again we see the state creating a mess of property rights and producing conflict where none need exist.

Thankfully, most urban homesteads simply involve city farming and sustainable living practices that rest comfortably on private land that isn't disputed, putting aside the invasive limitations of zoning law. "Urban homesteading" can also refer to government programs of home ownership — this is of the least interest to the libertarian. Given all these various meanings of "urban homesteading," perhaps we ought to reject the whole notion of controlling the term through intellectual property law.

We Must Cultivate Our Garden

The trademark heat did not deter Ruby Blume, a recipient of one of the letters, from moving ahead with the book she helped Rachel Kaplan write. Skyhorse publishing this year printed Urban Homesteading: Heirloom Skills for Sustainable Living, a little manifesto that explores the principles of permaculture, gardening methods, the intimate bond between what we grow and what we eat, and how to build sustainable homes. The politics, economics, and environmental values that creep in the text might be a bit hard for a libertarian to take, but there are a few insights we can relate to:

"If we wait for government action before jumping on board, it will be too late. Change like this has to begin. In Congress. In the boardroom. In your home. You only have control over one of those things. Exert it." (p. 9)

Indeed, today's urban homesteaders are acting directly, taking responsibility in their own sphere of influence, to improve their lives and escape the limitations of the state-infested world — and they do so without isolating themselves, but rather by expanding upon their ties to their community.

Kaplan and Blume give a sense of the individualism of this movement, one not necessarily loyal to enviro-leftist conformity. San Francisco permaculture teacher Kevin Bayuk is quoted with something mightily similar, in substance if not tone, to one of my favorite George Carlin routines on the futility of trying to "save the planet":

"I've seen people approach this type of lifestyle or message as something they must do. Climate change, species extinction! Do something now! We must! I've had those feelings of urgency, but when people approach this kind of lifestyle with a sense of [urgency], it's just a few years before burnout. That type of energy leads directly to failure; it doesn't fit with the economy of a healthy system. I advocate for a different metaphor for why you'd live like this. I remember a story that comes from science that says the G-type star we're flying around on is five or six billion years old, and it might live another twelve billion years. If humanity makes it, twelve billion years down the road all the hydrogen will have fused into helium in that star and it's going to erupt and expand and envelop the Earth and all the life on it will be gone. In this story, you can't save the Earth or humanity, so there's no must about it. The story's written; it's just a matter of time. Is it twelve billion years from now, fifteen years from now, 100 years from now? It doesn't matter to me; I just know the story of trying to u2018save' the Earth is foolish." (p. 20)

In the long run, we're all dead, said Keynes. Nevertheless, the Austrian school of economics to which I subscribe suggests we should think about the future, at least as far as we can see ahead. With a financial system in tatters, utility systems poorly maintained and due for a major disaster, a government neither inclined nor able to handle emergencies natural or manmade, and a corporatist food system bringing us continually lower quality sustenance at ever higher prices, the state-approved way of life can sometimes appear to be a race to the bottom. For the sake of surviving, to say nothing of protecting our freedom from the state, those of us who have yet committed to a flight from the cities must begin taking urban homesteading seriously. Meanwhile, those already in that movement, disenfranchised from the nationalist system and thriving as a growing, localized economic force, need to hear about the intellectual revolution of peace, voluntary economics, and liberty known as libertarianism. It's a match made in heaven. Let the courting process begin.

Thanks to Nicole Booz for her help and inspiration on this article. An earlier version of this ran at Freedom's Phoenix

Anthony Gregory [send him mail] is research editor at the Independent Institute. He lives in Oakland, California. See his webpage for more articles and personal information.

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How appropriate that California is home to the newest ban on caffeinated beer. This haven of busy-body progressivism has long been a national leader in the war against liberty and property. Talk-radio conservatives are mocking Governor Jerry Brown's crusade against the dread alcohol-caffeine combo, lamenting the implications for our dwindling personal responsibility, freedom and common sense. This is classic California, they seem to agree.

But they do not appear to realize the origin of these terrible anti-liberty attacks, even when the answer is most obvious. Indeed it was in California that the war on drugs began. The 1875 Opium Dens Ordinance, mostly targeting Chinese immigrants, forever marked San Francisco as a pioneer among prohibitionist municipalities. A state-level law in 1891 mandated warning labels for opium. In 1907 California required prescriptions for opium sales and the drug and paraphernalia were banned statewide in 1909. The same year the U.S. sent Hamilton Wright to the Opium Commission in Shanghai to contemplate a global ban.

On a national level, the United States was a radically free country, as far as drugs were concerned, until the early 20th century. A 1906 federal law involved small interventions into the drug market but it wasn't until 1914, in the middle of the horrible Wilson administration, that the Harrison Narcotics Act was signed, signifying the beginning of the end for American drug freedom and so many other liberties that have fallen as collateral damage. For almost a century it's been a nearly uninterrupted avalanche of prohibitionist nonsense and despotism.

The 1914 Act regulated opium and cocaine and banned heroin outright. Before that, even a child could walk into a pharmacy and buy heroin in measured doses, and there was virtually no associated societal problem to speak of. The next drug nationally prohibited was alcohol, which was constitutionally possible thanks to the 18th Amendment, after many decades of agitation by social reformers, progressives, puritans, and others who incredibly believed they could eliminate sin through the state's salvation. Throughout the 1920s the Noble Experiment only proved that neither human nature nor economic law could be overturned by federal legislation. Violent crime skyrocketed. The prison population doubled. Almost half the law enforcement apparatus became dedicated to stamping out liquor. Police departments became even more corrupt than usual. Hundreds of federal officials were fired over bribery and misconduct. By the end of the decade even some former abolitionists saw that prohibition was destroying the country and worked to end it through the 21st Amendment.

That should have been the end of the prohibitionist impulse forever, but it wasn't. Some of the same social reformers and bureaucrats stuck around and began a new crusade against marijuana. This time another progressive of Woodrow Wilson's ilk, Franklin Roosevelt, signed the prohibition into law. The Constitution was left unaltered and from then on the national government recognized no limits on its general power to ban substances.

The propaganda surrounding the ban on marijuana was so unbelievably ludicrous that we should be embarrassed of our forebears for buying into it — almost as embarrassed as we should be of today's Americans repeating the government's drug war propaganda as though there's any significant truth to it. Marijuana was said to make people uncontrollably violent, while somehow also pacifying them and thus rendering them poor candidates for the military. It was said to turn its users into irredeemable crazed rapists and murderers. In truth this is probably the most benign popular drug in human history. Surely alcohol and tobacco are far more dangerous.

But reformers who focus on the relative harmlessness of pot and thus argue for legalizing it while keeping other drugs illegal are missing the point. It was the ban on heroin that led to this huge decline in our liberty. Every drug that was outlawed from then on was simply the next domino in line. Psychedelics like LSD were targeted in the mid-1960s (yes, they were actually perfectly legal before that). In 1970 the federal government adopted the tyrannical Controlled Substances Act, a comprehensive scheduling scheme to give the government carte blanche over every substance. A 1984 law banned any drug "substantially similar" to Schedule I or II drugs in either effect or molecular configuration. Ecstasy, or MDMA, one of the most demonized chemicals in recent years, was used legally for over seventy years since it was first synthesized in 1912, then banned by the DEA in the mid-1980s over the protests of many in the medical community who cited its beneficial therapeutic effects. Even though no one else is allowed to buy or use it, the U.S. military began experimenting with it a few years ago as a remedy for post-traumatic stress disorder afflicting returning troops from Iraq and Afghanistan.

Hysteria akin to the reefer madness of the 1930s has struck again several times in recent memory. GHB, a substance not so different in its effects from alcohol, with some additional risks but also some comparative benefits over liquor, is a chemical found naturally in the human brain. It was perfectly legal but then banned by the FDA in 1990. Ephedra, a stimulant with both advantages and disadvantages compared to caffeine, was banned in 2004. In recent years the drug warriors have targeted Salvia divinorum as a threatening party drug — a complete fantasy for anyone who knows anyone who's tried it. They've also been fretting day and night about the great threat of Qat — a relatively harmless thing used by millions worldwide. Even as the establishment happily subsidizes prescription drugs that kill many thousands of Americans a year, they are attempting to stamp out the last substances that can't be patented, no matter how little risk they pose.

Slippery slope arguments don't always convince, and yet history bulges with examples of the logic behind one bad policy leading to another. For many years opponents of the drug war have argued that prohibitionist reasoning would conquer one freedom after another until the many pleasures of mainstream life were under attack.

Of course there is the attack on cigarette smokers — from bans on smoking in bars to the paternalistic prohibition of flavored cigarettes that happened just two years ago. Now the politicians are targeting whatever food they deem unhealthy. This has brought us restrictions on salt and transfats, attacks on commercial freedom in the form of un-American Happy Meal bans, and, perhaps most obscene of all, police-state measures to stamp out raw milk and other nutritious and natural foods. People are being jailed and shut down for growing natural, normal food on their own land. We have slid right to the bottom of the slippery slope.

After 9/11, Americans put up with a massive assault on their civil liberties that would have been impossible without the conditioning and warming up to the police state that transpired during decades of the war on drugs. Now we see that in every area of our lives we are losing liberties faster than we can take account of the loss. The prohibitionist mindset — the principle that the government can outlaw whatever it determines should be verboten — has infested everything: commercial activities, firearms, lightbulbs, foods, and dozens of other pleasures of life enjoyed by average Americans.

Every year tens of thousands of Mexicans die and hundreds of thousands of peaceful Americans are jailed all to sustain a fundamentally evil and totally unwinnable crusade against drugs. This political program of nearly unparalleled destruction has infected every corner of public policy and, just as important, has destroyed the American spirit of freedom inside and out. We are not allowed to buy as much pseudoephedrine as we want — one of the only over-the-counter drugs that we all know works — because of the war on meth. We are restricted from carrying our own cash in and out of the country. We are always at risk of being shot by a paramilitary police force, roaming the streets or conducting one of America’s dozens of unconstitutional daily raids. In a million ways our freedom has been undermined and incrementally we see everything in society we love face the threat of being stripped from us. Everything is in danger of being rationed, prohibited, seized. Where did this all begin?

Bourgeois Americans see the walls caving in, the last bits of pleasure and their favorite, mostly harmless sins being targeted for eradication by the planners lurking in the state capitals and Washington. They see we are losing something important every time plastic bags are banned or driving while chatting on a cell phone is attacked. They find it absurd that alcohol and caffeine are both permitted but the combination is made illegal. I feel for all of them but must plead them to see the real problem here.

This is what happens when you ban heroin: A state that can stamp out one person's liberty, however peripheral he and his activities may seem to mainstream society, can and will continue to trample on all of us until all our freedom is a mangled corpse, a translucent shadow of what it once was. You want to restore civil society? Call for the legalization of all drugs. Only a society that does not seek something as irredeemably stupid and wicked as a drug war has any hope for liberty. Only those who are willing to defend the liberty of the junkie fully deserve to see their own liberty restored.

Anthony Gregory [send him mail] is research editor at the Independent Institute. He lives in Oakland, California. See his webpage for more articles and personal information.

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The left loves to talk about humanitarianism, putting people above profits, and saving the poor and disadvantaged from the inequity of private enterprise. Yet behind the rhetoric of all economic interventionism is the iron fist of the state.

The statists will usually try to obscure this fact, or even deny it. They will perform philosophical gymnastics to argue that, in fact, they do not favor state violence at all, since we all live in a community ruled by a government by consent.

Sometimes, however, the naked brutality they endorse is clearly on display for everyone to see. Witness Michael Moore, paragon of modern progressive liberalism and egalitarian social democracy. The target of his hateful demand for violence? The CEO of S&P. For the crime of running a company that lowered its credit rating for the United States, this man should be punished, thunders Moore: "Obama, show some guts [and] arrest the CEO of Standard & Poors. These criminals brought down the economy in 2008 [and] now they will do it again."

Moore is calling on the president, the head of the American ruling class, the man occupying the most powerful office in the history of the world, to use executive prerogative to throw a businessman in a cage. Is S&P a questionable operation in bed with the corporate state, whose ratings cannot be trusted? Surely, and yet at worst S&P is a junior partner in crime. If anything, its sin has been exaggerating the solvency of the establishment. Its credibility is today questioned since it gave high marks to Lehman Brothers three years ago, yet this was due to the exact kind of political pressure and intimidation that Moore is demanding in the wake of S&P's belated and mild chastising of the American state for its obvious lack of trustworthiness.

The demonization of S&P is a scary sight to behold. Paul Krugman has contributed to the left's hate-fest in an article that Jeff Tucker astutely calls "the most evil column ever." Krugman almost seems to blame S&P’s rose-colored glasses for the whole recession:

America's large budget deficit is, after all, primarily the result of the economic slump that followed the 2008 financial crisis. . . . Notoriously, S.& P. gave Lehman Brothers, whose collapse triggered a global panic, an A rating right up to the month of its demise. And how did the rating agency react after this A-rated firm went bankrupt? By issuing a report denying that it had done anything wrong.

"If there's a single word that best describes the rating agency's decision to downgrade America," writes Krugman, "it's chutzpah — traditionally defined by the example of the young man who kills his parents, then pleads for mercy because he's an orphan." Of course, these credit-rating agencies were always the welfare state's darlings in giving unrealistically high ratings to mortgage-backed securities, with the federal government and most vocal Democratic politicians right there with them, cheering on these totally reckless loans, saying the Keynesian balloon economy was fundamentally healthy. For years, such agencies have doubtless been too sanguine about the U.S. government's debt addiction as well. Turning to the budget deficit, was it really "primarily the result of the economic slump" — or does the welfare-warfare state that Krugman cheers and loves deserve some share of the blame? No domestic spending program ever seems to fail to meet his approval, and Krugman famously said the Iraq war was good for the economy. As for the financial crisis itself, I guess we are to pay no attention to the Nobel laureate behind the curtain who repeatedly called for Alan Greenspan to create a housing bubble to replace the Nasdaq bubble.

In the deficit madness and the midst of the downgrade, we see in all its glory the progressives' nearly invincible faith in the state, the only problem they identify being the state's detractors. There is no slump that more deficit spending can't fix. There is no deficit crisis that more taxing can't remedy. Bailouts are to be blamed on those being bailed out, never the looters and distributors. If a rating agency downgrades the U.S., this is a problem with the agency, not the politicians. If the economy is not recovering, it is to be blamed on the people who hate the president's domestic policies, not those policies themselves. If the president does have any fault, it is that he has been insufficiently active, has not bullied business nearly enough, or spent enough trillions we don't have to get the economy rolling. If all the social democratic plots to protect the economy have been a flop, surely the adversaries of social democracy are at fault.

Some might find it ironic for Moore's love of the democratic state to be so all consuming that he will actually petition the president to unilaterally jail a CEO for no clearly defined crime in particular. After all, the president he wishes would bring his hammer down on the heretic is overseeing a set of war policies that Moore very sensibly condemned when they were conducted by President Bush. Obama has not only continued the rampage in Iraq and Afghanistan, spread the war to Pakistan and Yemen, and bombarded Libya; he has also covered up torturers, spied on the American people without warrants, escalated the drug war in Mexico where tens of thousands have been slaughtered on his watch, and claimed purely tyrannical powers to detain and kill people without due process. Add all this to Obama's dozens of other similarities to the Bush regime and it may seem odd indeed that a progressive would so shamelessly defer to the chief executive with the blood of thousands on his hands, much less call on him to convene an inquisition for enemies of the state.

But it is not ironic at all. Although we who believe in liberty must always defend the rights of our political opponents — such as in my article from years ago condemning the Bush administration for censoring Michael Moore — those who love the progressive state will almost to a man throw any enemy of the regime under the bus if it suits his agenda. The president might be a war criminal, even a Republican, yet if he prosecutes a corporate scapegoat like Enron's Kenneth Lay, we must cheer on the persecution. The Justice Department might be a conservative nightmare headed by a reactionary like John Ashcroft, but we are still expected to side with it against an independently wealthy entrepreneur, even a gracious and peaceful woman like Martha Stewart. The federal government might be the greatest force for destabilization in the world, yet to question its solvency should literally be made a crime ex post facto.

The state is God to the progressive mindset, although it is not infallible, and can sometimes be overtaken by people with bad intentions. But it is not the government itself that corrupts. It is not state power itself, like Frodo's ring, that is unavoidably prone to evil. No. It is those who hold the ring of state that corrupt it, not vice versa. At the core of the democratic state, the very essence of the public sector, is holiness, sacredness, the greatness that unites the collective will behind a purpose higher than that of any mortal individuals acting in their regrettable, pathetic, and fallen self interest. Even an imperial corporatist police state that does more to prop up Wall Street than bolster Main Street, that incarcerates minorities more than it educates them, that does a thousand other things abusive to progressive sensibility, is in the end the highest of all institutions, the source of our salvation on Earth. The state is, at the same time, an institution of coercion and brutalization. Those enamored of it usually conceal this truth but on occasion concede it without apology. For them the central state's violence is the very feature that allows all their collectivist dreams to be pursued by a planning elite leading us mere subjects lockstep on the road to secular redemption. The jail cell lies in wait behind all the schemes and dreams of the progressive mind, and those honest and reflective enough in this tradition will occasionally admit this with unsettling clarity. It is no wonder that even when a relatively decent and thoughtful lefty like Michael Moore sees that someone dares to say the emperor is not only nude but can't afford a new set of clothes, his only reaction is: "Off with his head!"

Anthony Gregory [send him mail] is research editor at the Independent Institute. He lives in Oakland, California. See his webpage for more articles and personal information.

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Being a U.S. war criminal means never having to say sorry. Paul Tibbets, the man who flew the Enola Gay and destroyed Hiroshima, lived to the impressive age of 92 without publicly expressing guilt for what he had done. He had even reenacted his infamous mission at a 1976 Texas air show, complete with a mushroom cloud, and later said he never meant this to be offensive. In contrast, he called it a “damn big insult” when the Smithsonian planned an exhibit in 1995 showing some of the damage the bombing caused.

We might understand a man not coming to terms with his most important contribution to human history being such a destructive act. But what about the rest of the country?

It's sickening that Americans even debate the atomic bombings, as they do every year in early August. Polls in recent years reveal overwhelming majorities of the American public accepting the acts as necessary.

Conservatives are much worse on this topic, although liberals surely don't give it the weight it deserves. Trent Lott was taken to the woodshed for his comments in late 2002 about how Strom Thurmond would have been a better president than Truman. Lott and Thurmond both represent ugly strains in American politics, but no one dared question the assumption that Thurmond was obviously a less defensible candidate than Truman. Zora Neale Hurston, heroic author of the Harlem Renaissance, might have had a different take, as she astutely called Truman "a monster" and "the butcher of Asia." Governmental segregation is terrible, but why is murdering hundreds of thousands of foreign civilians with as much thought as one would give to eradicating silverfish treated as simply a controversial policy decision in comparison?

Perhaps it is the appeal to necessity. We hear that the United States would have otherwise had to invade the Japanese mainland and so the bombings saved American lives. But saving U.S. soldiers wouldn't justify killing Japanese children any more than saving Taliban soldiers would justify dropping bombs on American children. Targeting civilians to manipulate their government is the very definition of terrorism. Everyone was properly horrified by Anders Behring Breivik's murder spree in Norway last month — killing innocents to alter diplomacy. Truman murdered a thousand times as many innocents on August 6, 1945, then again on August 9.

It doesn't matter if Japan "started it," either. Only individuals have rights, not nations. Unless you can prove that every single Japanese snuffed out at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was involved in the Pearl Harbor attack, the murderousness of the bombings is indisputable. Even the official history should doom Truman to a status of permanent condemnation. Besides being atrocious in themselves, the U.S. creation and deployment of the first nuclear weapons ushered in the seemingly endless era of global fear over nuclear war.

However, as it so happens, the official history is a lie. The U.S. provoked the Japanese to fire the first shot, as more and more historians have acknowledged. Although the attack on Pearl Harbor, a military base, was wrong, it was far less indefensible than the attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki’s civilian populations.

As for the utilitarian calculus of "saving American lives," historian Ralph Raico explains:

[T]he rationale for the atomic bombings has come to rest on a single colossal fabrication, which has gained surprising currency: that they were necessary in order to save a half-million or more American lives. These, supposedly, are the lives that would have been lost in the planned invasion of Kyushu in December, then in the all-out invasion of Honshu the next year, if that was needed. But the worst-case scenario for a full-scale invasion of the Japanese home islands was forty-six thousand American lives lost.

The propaganda that the atomic bombings saved lives was nothing but a public relations pitch contrived in retrospect. These were just gratuitous acts of mass terrorism. By August 1945, the Japanese were completely defeated, blockaded, starving. They were desperate to surrender. All they wanted was to keep their emperor, which was ultimately allowed anyway. The U.S. was insisting upon unconditional surrender, a purely despotic demand. Given what the Allies had done to the Central Powers, especially Germany, after the conditional surrender of World War I, it's understandable that the Japanese resisted the totalitarian demand for unconditional surrender.

A 1946 U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey determined the Hiroshima and Nagasaki nukings were not decisive in ending the war. Most of the political and military brass agreed. "The Japanese were ready to surrender and it wasn’t necessary to hit them with that awful thing," said Dwight Eisenhower in a 1963 interview with Newsweek.

Another excuse we hear is the specter of Hitler getting the bomb first. This is a non sequitur. By the time the U.S. dropped the bombs, Germany was defeated and its nuclear program was revealed to be nothing in comparison to America's. The U.S. had 180,000 people working for several years on the Manhattan Project. The Germans had a small group led by a few elite scientists, most of whom were flabbergasted on August 6, as they had doubted such bombs were even possible. Even if the Nazis had gotten the bomb — which they were very far from getting — it wouldn't in any way justify killing innocent Japanese.

For more evidence suggesting that the Truman administration was out to draw Japanese blood for its own sake, or as a show of force for reasons of Realpolitik, consider the United States's one-thousand-plane bombing of Tokyo on August 14, the largest bombing raid of the Pacific war, after Hirohito agreed to surrender and the Japanese state made it clear it wanted peace. The bombing of Nagasaki should be enough to know it was not all about genuinely stopping the war as painlessly as possible — why not wait more than three days for the surrender to come? But to strategically bomb Japan five days after the destruction Nagasaki, as Japan was in the process of waving the white flag? It's hard to imagine a greater atrocity, or clearer evidence that the U.S. government was not out to secure peace, but instead to slaughter as many Japanese as it could before consolidating its power for the next global conflict.

The U.S. had, by the time of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, destroyed 67 Japanese cities by firebombing, in addition to helping the British destroy over a hundred cities in Germany. In this dramatic footage from The Fog of War, Robert McNamara describes the horror he helped unleash alongside General Curtis LeMay, with images of the destroyed Japanese cities and an indication of what it would have meant for comparably sized cities in the United States:

It’s 9:45 PM and you forgot to eat. You’ll be working on a project, there’s nothing to cook quickly, and no time to go out and deal with the late-night dining selection. Who do you call?

An old friend comes over and both of you just want to sit around, catch up, and maybe have a few drinks. You’re both peckish but don’t want to bother with the time or effort needed for a full culinary production. Where do you turn?

There’s a meeting of several people, all with different tastes, and the last thing you need is to introduce the complication of food politics. Does a simple answer present itself, one that will likely be accepted for its traditional legacy as a mediating ritual as well as its convenient deliciousness?

The pizza delivery guy is an icon for everything that is beautiful about the market. I knew there were many unmentioned heroes in my article, "Some of my Favorite Public Servants," which was never meant to be comprehensive. I was reminded that truck drivers, given their dangerous work and tireless devotion to connect consumers and producers all throughout the country, are champions of civilization who are often forgotten at best. One reader pointed out the importance of electricians, carpenters, and other such laborers in the construction of the buildings that keep us safe, clean, warm, and dry. No doubt these people need more respect.

I was particularly struck by a request to write a tribute to the pizza delivery man. "Be it rain, sleet, snow or gloom of night, the pizza delivery guy will get you that pizza in 30 minutes or thereabouts. This unsung hero is far more likely to be killed on his appointed rounds then any shamelessly overweight fireman or cop," wrote Damian Smith, who suggested this piece. We are supposed to find postmen so admirable for doing their job. But what about the much less paid, less appreciated pizza man — a guy whose job requires a keener sense of timing and who, unlike mail delivery, has not yet been made nearly as anachronistic in the internet age?

The proposal to write a celebration of pizza delivery hit home for me, not because I view food deliverers as any more important than truckers and electricians, but because I interact with them fairly often, they are often denigrated despite their courageous work, and a number of my closest friends have served on the front lines in this most venerable role.

The pizza parlors themselves deserve much praise for their great flexibility and innovativeness. Almost any combination will be put in as an order, and they’ll usually do it. Pepperoni and extra cheese on one side, artichokes and anchovies on the other. These are great social institutions whose entire staffs deserve applause.

The vocation of the delivery guy, in particular, is most risky and highly unpredictable. The most pedestrian risk, and the least appreciated, is the entrepreneurial gamble that food deliverers shoulder. As a paragon of capitalism, serving the position of both entrepreneur and worker, the deliverer often invests his own capital — his personal vehicle — in the enterprise, and for each delivery dedicates the better part of an hour of his life and relies for his remuneration on an implicit contract that is almost impossible to enforce should something go wrong.

Crank calls and insatiable customers are not uncommon. The deliverer of delicious sustenance is used as a weapon in the juvenile pranks of his moral inferiors. We are supposed to laugh when we see the pizza guy in a movie relegated to the role of a pawn in someone’s sick game of ordering a ton of pizzas to be billed to someone with no intention to pay. The wasted time and difficulties incurred by this great public servant are dismissed as mere plot device. But it isn’t funny.

The risks get much more dramatic, however. Robberies are frighteningly common. Many pizza companies forbid the carrying of weapons. Surely, these deliverers, unlike police and firefighters, face an enormous threat of violent crime for every hour they work. In addition to this peril, delivery men confront the horrors of traffic, often during the worst of hours and with a strict time limit to navigate the maze and find places, often never before personally reached, without the benefit of a knowledgeable customer in the car.

"The biggest risks were traffic related. Navigating suburban streets in an old delivery car during rush hour and trying to make timely deliveries can be tricky," says Lewis Ames, my best friend who delivered pizzas in San Jose, California, during summer and winter breaks from 1999 to 2002. He reports the intimidation of driving alone, vulnerable to everyone who knows you're carrying money: "I was making a delivery downtown, and parked my car next to a group of young gentlemen who had their arms full of car stereos, and who were in the process of acquiring a few more. They all looked at me and started saying u2018Heeeeeeeey, it’s the pizza guy!' It was the end of the night and I had a few hundred bucks in my standard-issue fanny pack."

For all the risks they endure, the pizza man is insufficiently appreciated. Although not adjusted for inflation, Lewis reports an average tip of $2.50 from those days in the trenches. And while a nice neighborhood was more likely to yield a jackpot tip, on average "poorer neighborhoods tended to tip better and were more likely to tip consistently. My theory is that poorer neighborhoods more likely have people who work in the service industry, and they understand what it’s like have a job where you are paid with the assumption that you will be tipped.” Indeed, both the employers and the tax men go by this assumption — in the delivery world, tips are not gravy, they are your bread and butter.

For all the hardships in the life of distributing pizza pies, do you ever hear these people complain? No. They have tended to be very difficult to unionize and you’ll never see them agitate for more national recognition. They do their job for the modest money they make and do not puff themselves up as unappreciated public servants, although that’s what they are.

Not all pizza is created equal, and thank goodness for the competitive market. I do not much care for the largest pizza delivery chains, although their innovative work in this field must be hailed. (Thank goodness that, although some ornaments to the pizza box have been patented, the box itself remains a device anyone is free to adopt.) There are a couple places in my area that do very top-notch artisan pizza and bring it to my door. The balance between price and quality is, as usual, up to the customer.

There is something special about pizza — the favorite food of most kids of all ages — but of course I mean not to pass over the vehicular emissaries of other culinary traditions. Chinese and Thai delivery have an important place in my heart. Food delivery is not just a convenience; it is a great opportunity for cultural exchange and a reminder of the resplendent diversity in cuisine available in a market economy. Ethnic cuisine deliverers face another additional risk — difficulty in communication. One time I called for a big order of Thai food and something I mumbled must have sounded like a soup order, which was brought to me in addition to everything I wanted. I had to turn it away and the deliverer appeared a bit broken about it going to waste, but of course he accepted it as a cost to doing business. People ought to be thankful there are folks out there who will put up with all this to get you your food.

Surely all men and women involved in the delivery of commerce — groceries, packages sent by private carrier, furniture, electronics, or a million other things — are also public servants who deserve more ink devoted to their heroism.

But for me, the pizza delivery guy perhaps best symbolizes what is right about America and capitalism. Support your local pizza guy. Without sirens and legal immunity, he can’t flout the rules of the road as freely as the local fuzz. But unlike the police, he will never show up and harass or threaten you while you’re minding your own business, and when you do need him, chances are he’ll actually be there well within the hour.

Anthony Gregory [send him mail] is research editor at the Independent Institute. He lives in Oakland, California. See his webpage for more articles and personal information.

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AWOL Army private Naser Jason Abdo, a Muslim, has been arrested for plans to attack the Fort Hood Army base in Texas. Two years ago, another Muslim American soldier was arrested for killing 13 people at that base. These and other mass shootings and attempted acts of mass violence have increasingly made the news in the last few years, and the pundits typically have political lessons to teach in their wake. Now is a good time to ask a few questions they will likely neglect.

1. What is terrorism?

Rep. John Carter of the House Army Caucus celebrated the capture of Abdo thusly: “[W]e may well have averted a repeat of the tragic 2009 radical Islamic terror attack on our nation’s largest military installation. ”

Is an attack on a military installation terrorism? How about the attacks on the U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut in 1983 – were those an act of “terrorism, ” as the U.S. government said they were?

Surely this is a strange definition, because it would seemingly make all warfare, even the most traditional warfare pinpointed against military targets, “terrorism, ” and the U.S. government, and presumably Congressman Carter, wouldn ’t agree with that. It would mean every U.S. war was terrorism – even when it was targeted specifically at army bases and military personnel.

Some definitions of terrorism favored by the U.S. and other governments define terrorism as a private act, and yet in the years since 9/11, we have heard over and over again about “state-sponsored terrorism. ” If Saddam Hussein ’s government and the Taliban are capable of terrorism, and terrorism does indeed include attacks on military bases, surely the U.S. government can be guilty of terrorism.

Yet even if we include states in our analysis, terrorism is better defined as targeting civilians with the purpose of bringing about political changes. Under this sensible definition, Abdo and Nidal Hasan, the man implicated in the Fort Hood attacks two years ago, would be harder to describe as terrorists, since their primary targets appear to be military. On the other hand, such actions as the U.S. bombing of Hirsohima and Nagasaki and the U.S. sanctions on Iraqi civilians throughout the 1990s would be textbook cases of state-sanctioned terrorism.

When the Norway shootings occurred on Friday, July 22, many jumped to call it terrorism. When the alleged shooter was revealed not as an Islamist but as an anti-Islamist, some conservatives switched to calling him an extremist. Liberals, in contrast, sometimes throw the word “terrorism ” around to include rightwing “extremists ” who have never lifted a finger against anyone – such as the Michigan militia members who were detained in March 2010 for their supposed plot to overthrow the U.S. government.

The definition of terrorism is incredibly tenuous and used to score political points. The Nazi regime called its enemies terrorists but never described its own actions as terrorism. The U.S. government ’s effective definition seems to be: “Terrorism is an act of violence, against either soldiers or civilians, whether conducted by private or state groups, so long as the violence is not approved by the U.S. government.”

2. How do these people get through the military recruitment process?

The military supposedly employs the best and the brightest, and yet its screening process is rarely scrutinized when a member of the Armed Forces is implicated in an atrocity or serious crime. Neither the soldiers callously shooting at what turns out to be civilians in the Wikileaks footage from last year, nor the troops caught up in the multiple torture scandals throughout the war on terrorism, nor the numerous instances of soldiers returning from battle engaging in domestic crime, are ever noted as possible evidence that there is a problem with the military itself.

As the war on terror has slugged along, the military has lowered its standards to widen the pool of potential recruits. Americans have tired of these wars, and so we have seen stop-loss orders, the redeployment of soldiers multiple times after their terms expire, and dishonest practices adopted by recruiters on school campuses. The military has loosened standards to enlist illegal aliens and has waived rules against recruiting felons in tens of thousands of cases. CBS reported in 2009 that not only did female soldiers accuse male soldiers of rape in hundreds of cases that were never seriously investigated, but in numerous instances “moral waivers ” were used by the Army and the Marines to enlist convicts with felony rape and sexual assault on their records.

It should thus be no surprise that the U.S. government is so desperate for cannon fodder that those who are a bit mentally unstable even before heading into combat make the cut. The state lacks the means or incentives to carefully screen out dangerous people, even if such a process could be undertaken reliably. Let us remember that the first Fort Hood shooter, Nidal Hasan, was an Army psychologist.

3. Does the military itself breed violence?

The military is an institution in which the skills of killing are taught and the enemy is dehumanized. When soldiers and veterans resort to violence outside the battlefield, unapproved acts of torture, or terrorism, it is rarely regarded as possibly connected to the military culture itself. The most notable example of this was Timothy McVeigh, the convicted and executed Oklahoma City bomber, who was in the U.S. Army for several years, including a stint in the First Gulf War, where he later said he learned how to turn off his emotions. He considered himself a soldier at war with a U.S. government gone out of control, notably in its conduct in the Waco, Texas, standoff of 1993. Two years later, on the anniversary of the Waco fire, he bombed the Murrah building, seeing his crime as an act of war.

Yet although the connection should be obvious – an institution that instills into people the capacity to see other people as subhuman enemies to be killed is going to breed people with problems handling their violent impulses – it is never asked outright if the military, and especially its wars, encourage acts of violence. But as long as we are at perpetual war, living with a permanent warfare state, there will be more Abdos, Nissans, and McVeighs.

4. What can we learn from how he was caught?

A review board in the military recommended Abdo ’s release from the Army as a conscientious objector in the spring, but his discharge was delayed after he was charged with possessing child pornography. He was then scheduled for court martial. Is it possible that by failing to let him out immediately and to deal with his criminal charges outside of the military system, the military exacerbated the problem and made his attempted attack more likely?

In any event, Abdo ’s attack was reportedly preempted by “concerned citizens, ” including a gun dealer who alerted authorities about his suspicious behavior. Although we are supposed to think of gun dealers as irresponsible predatory merchants who will sell a weapon to anyone, and the military as a refined organization that find and neutralizes threats with precision, the opposite seems to be true in this case. With the entire military screening process, social infrastructure, and disciplinary system, it took old-fashioned cooperation between the community and local police to detect and cut short the threat. The actual Ford Hood shooter from two years ago, however, succeeded in murdering over a dozen people before he was stopped – reminding us that the illusion of military security exists even on the military ’s own bases. Had the rules of civil society and common sense prevailed at Fort Hood two years ago, one of the soldiers would have been armed and stopped the rampage. Instead, the shooting lasted for ten minutes before a civilian police officer shot and stopped Hasan.

The media will spin the attempted attack on Fort Hood as a reason to embrace the war on terrorism, governmental efforts to stop threats through psychological profiling, and maybe stricter gun control. Instead, we should consider the many political sacred cows that this instance should bring into question.

Reprinted from The Future of Freedom Foundation.

Anthony Gregory [send him mail] is research editor at the Independent Institute. He lives in Oakland, California. See his webpage for more articles and personal information.

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As Obama demonizes the wealthy and pitches a dozen plans to restructure the economy, opponents of this program need a reminder of what exactly we're fighting for. We are resisting bureaucracy, central planning, and encroachments on our freedom and communities. Yet this does not get to the heart of the matter. We are not only an opposition movement, countering the president and his partisans' agenda. More fundamentally, we stand in defense of the greatest engine of material prosperity in human history, the fount of civilization, peace, and modernity: Capitalism.

Many regard it a dirty word and it is tarnished most of all by its supposed guardians. Wall Street giants fancy themselves capitalists even as they live off the taxpayer and thrive on the state's gifts of privilege, inflation, and barriers to entry. In the military-industrial complex they champion it by name as they produce devices of murder for the state. In the Republican Party and every conservative institution they talk it up while making such vast exceptions to the principle as to swallow it whole. When many think of capitalism, they think of the corporatist status quo, leading even some who favor economic freedom to abandon the term.

But we should not abandon it. For one thing, most opponents of capitalism do not merely oppose Goldman Sachs or Halliburton or even McDonalds. Rather, they oppose free enterprise as a matter of principle. They object to employers' liberty to hire and fire whom they want, at whatever wage is mutually arranged. They protest the right of entrepreneurs to enter the market without restriction. They disapprove businesses designing infrastructure; providing energy, food, water and other necessary commodities; and running transportation without government meddling. They lament the rich getting richer, even through purely peaceful means. They oppose the freedom to engage in short selling, insider trading, hostile takeovers, and corporate mergers without the central state's blessing. They begrudge the worker who dissents from the labor establishment. It is exactly the anarchy of the free market they despise, not the consolidated state-big business nexus they most want to smash. For every liberal who hates monopoly capitalism for anything approaching the right reasons, there are ten who deplore the capitalism part of it more than the monopoly.

It is simply a fact that capitalism, even hampered by the state, has dragged most of the world out of the pitiful poverty that characterized all of human existence for millennia. It was industrialization that saved the common worker from the constant tedium of primitive agriculture. It was the commodification of labor that doomed slavery, serfdom, and feudalism. Capitalism is the liberator of women, the benefactor of all children who enjoy time for study and play rather than endure uninterrupted toil on the farm. Capitalism is the great mediator between tribes and nations, which first put aside their weapons and hatreds in the prospect of benefiting from mutual exchange.

A century ago the Marxists acknowledged the productivity of capitalism and its preference to the feudalism it replaced, but predicted that the market would impoverish workers and lead to greater material scarcity. The opposite has happened and now the leftists attack capitalism mostly for other reasons: it produces too much and is wasteful, hurts the environment, exacerbates social divisions, isolates people from a spiritual awareness of their community, nation, or planet, and so on.

Yet all the higher, more noble, less materialistic aspirations of humankind rest on material security. Even those who hate the market, whether they work in it or not, thrive on the wealth it generates. If Marx's buddy Engels hadn't been a factory manager, he would have lacked the leisure time needed to help concoct their destructive philosophy. Every social sciences grad student, every Hollywood limousine liberal, every Christian-left do-gooder, and everyone for whom socialism itself is the one religion; every anti-market artist, scholar, philosopher, teacher and theologian screams atop a soapbox produced by the very capitalist system he disparages. Everything we do in our lives — materialistic or of a nobler nature — we do in the comfort provided by the market. Meanwhile, the very poorest in a modern capitalist system, even one as corrupted by statism as the United States, have it much better than all but the wealthiest people a century ago. These blessings are owed to capitalism, and unleashing it further would finally erase poverty as we know it.

There is a myth that capitalism is the dominating doctrine. It seems almost everyone believes this, most finding it at least somewhat unfortunate, which itself should tell you there's a problem with assuming capitalism's unchallenged popularity. In fact, capitalism has few authentic defenders. Conservatives pretend to support it, but make exceptions for education, energy, agriculture, labor, central banking, borders, intellectual property, and drugs, to say nothing of national defense and criminal justice. Even worse, many conservatives of the anti-corporatist, localist variety are more protectionist and economically nationalistic than the establishment right. They will sacrifice property rights for their cultural preferences on guns, religion, so-called family values, and certainly patriotism. With friends like these, capitalism needs truer allies.

Progressives and socialists are downright hostile. They claim to have made their peace with the market but have a new scheme every day to restrain it, punish it, manipulate it, and beat it into submission. Liberals insist they don't want to rid of it, only refine it, only save it from itself. But if capitalism needs saving, it is not from itself, but only from liberals and conservatives.

Libertarians will speak up for capitalism, but often with some reticence. It has gotten such a bad name, and it is so despised by the liberal culture, that many do not wish to defend it outright. It is indeed crucial to be clear and precise in explaining what we mean by capitalism. But this great force for progress deserves our bold support, not our qualified testimony. It has given us everything we have. The least we can do is not pretend we're embarrassed of it.

For the last century, capitalism's most ardent defenders — the school of Mises, Hayek and Rothbard, and even the less radical followers of Rand and Friedman — have been clear that they mean the individual’s freedom in property rights and exchange, and almost everyone understands this. The enemies have mostly meant the same thing, when they weren't disingenuously conflating free enterprise with state-sanctioned privilege.

Mises said "a society that chooses between capitalism and socialism does not choose between two social systems; it chooses between social cooperation and the disintegration of society." Hayek believed "the preservation of what is known as the capitalist system, of the system of free markets and the private ownership of the means of production, as an essential condition of the very survival of mankind." While always careful to critique state capitalism for its interventionism and violence, Rothbard espoused "free-market capitalism [as] a network of free and voluntary exchanges in which producers work, produce, and exchange their products for the products of others through prices voluntarily arrived at." Capitalism and freedom go hand in hand, and it is no wonder that the enemies of the market target libertarians as the most extreme proponents of what they loathe, rather than mostly focus on the corporatists and social democrats that dominate the modern left and right.

Some libertarians worry that "capitalism" puts too much focus on capital, but this is in truth no problem. Only through deferred consumption can we build civilization, by the amassing of higher order goods and the lowering of our orientation toward the present. This is the essence of the capitalist emphasis. Maybe it takes longer to explain ourselves when we adopt the battle cry of capitalism — it also takes longer to be a capitalist than only a consumer. In the long run, however, it is worth it. Libertarianism is a long-term struggle, and so why not take the long-term view of capitalism, both as a term worth embracing and a label for the economy we envision? Anarchism, too, is a hard pill to swallow, a tradition with a mixed history where a plausible case can be made that its conventional meaning does not always encompass the values we hold dear, but rather a lack of social order. Yet libertarian anarchists embrace the term, as we should the term capitalism.

Rothbard was particularly sensitive to the fact that the term was coined by its enemies, and many today believe that defenders of free markets should not allow the opposition to define the debate. Yet this point leads me to a very different conclusion. First, even insofar as the word has negative connotations in popular culture, we might still want to adopt it. The anti-Federalists were initially opposed to the label affixed to them by the Hamiltonian statists. But now I would uphold that descriptor with pride. This is an area where we can take a cue from the gay rights activists who were smeared as "queer," only to proudly appropriate the term for their own uses.

Second and more important, if Marx and his ilk — whose ideas, to the extent they have been implemented, have yielded unparalleled human misery, starvation, and slavery — position themselves as the adversaries of capitalism, we should be so lucky to have these be the terms of the debate. The socialists of all stripes argue that real socialism has never been tried, and some say we market radicals are stuck with no better a response than to say that real capitalism has never been tried, either. However, unlike "real socialism," which Mises demonstrated was impossible on a large scale, capitalism simply exists wherever it is left unmolested. It is the part of the market that is free. But regardless of how we define it, in terms of feeding the masses and sustaining society, I will take flawed capitalism over flawed socialism any day. I will take state capitalism, crony capitalism, or corporate capitalism over state socialism, democratic socialism, or national socialism.

Yet we need not make that choice, since opposing state capitalism is part of the capitalist cause, as should opposing state religion be the calling of every religious anti-statist, opposing state schools be the goal of every libertarian who loves education, and opposing state law and order be the creed of those who endorse the natural law and peaceful social order.

The capitalist portion of state capitalism is the part that works. The fruits of capitalism can be used for evil, and they are surely used this way by the state. For instance, the military-industrial complex's evil is due to the socialist state military feeding off the production of semi-capitalist businesses. The one downside to capitalism is that the state becomes richer in absolute terms than with any other system. If the military were fully socialist it would be less effective — this is true. But this is merely a practical and moral indictment of the state, not the concept of capitalism. If this is the only real confusion that confounds capitalism's detractors we should simply ask them: Are you for a complete separation of capitalism and state, then? Of course they are almost to a person violently opposed to such a prospect. For them the problem is not the state having weapons and law enforcers and soldiers and national boundaries. Instead, the problem is unfettered entrepreneurism and the inequality of profit. Anti-capitalism is best defined, to paraphrase Mencken, by the fear that someone, somewhere, is getting rich. Looking at the warfare state, the anti-capitalists object to someone making money off the militarism, and indeed they should be embarrassed that the state institutions they favor can only successfully mount a military machine by exploiting the profit system. Yet, tellingly, their primary objection is often not with the profiteers' war; it is with the war's profiteers.

Some words are harsh and the concepts they embody seem harsher. Some notions seem too idealistic for many cynics. Peace, love, and freedom are all words that get a bad rap as head-in-the-cloud concepts that don't describe reality as it actually exists. But we do know that in a world where not all is peaceful, love is sometimes hard to find, and freedom is always in peril, all of these ideals, insofar as they are allowed to flourish, point the way to a future of harmony and plenty. The same is true of capitalism. Don't let its enemies spoil a good word for the greatest economic system in the history of the human race.

Anthony Gregory [send him mail] is research editor at the Independent Institute. He lives in Oakland, California. See his webpage for more articles and personal information.

The Best of Anthony Gregory

The emerging profile of Anders Behring Breivik is not what was first expected. On Friday, President Obama and the mainstream media immediately jumped on the murder of 92 people in Norway to affirm the war on terror's importance. Putting aside the establishment's tendency to cite both failures and presumed successes, both acts of mass violence that came to fruition and ones that were preempted, as vindication of the war on terror, we should note that the administration was politicizing an atrocity in the only way that it is ever considered appropriate: The state can respectably pat its soldiers and enforcers on the back for their waging wars and bashing heads; all other political points made in the light of mass death are considered gauche.

Yet as it turns out, the alleged murderer is not the Islamist that so many assumed. He was, instead, an anti-Islamist of the very sort that has become commonplace in the last decade. He is a self-described Christian and nationalist worried that Muslims will overtake the West. He enjoyed the same neoconservative blogs read by millions of Americans. Despite this, his act continues to be spun as a reason to worry about al Qaeda's supposed influence in inspiring acts of mass violence, rather than as a warning about the threat of anti-Islamism.

And that threat is real. Many Americans think that Muslims should be outright prohibited from building mosques in the United States. At least one Republican presidential candidate has articulated this position unambiguously. Conservatives ludicrously warn that Muslims will impose Sharia law through the U.S. court system, abolishing American liberty. Anyone who reads conservative message boards can sense the possibility that we are one dirty bomb away from seeing our Muslim neighbors rounded up and sent to camps. The hundreds seized without due process and detained for months after 9/11 are forgotten, but their story reminds us of how fragile liberty and tolerance can be.

Just because Breivik has much in common with neocons and theocons, however, does not validate the left's attempt to turn this into another excuse for cracking down on rightwing thought crime. The center left always sees such incidents as a pretext for institutional resolve against "rightwing extremism" — Timothy McVeigh and James von Brunn come to mind. Liberals are correct when they identify the double standard of labeling Breivik an "extremist" and bin Laden a "terrorist." They are being logically consistent when they say such "extremism" should be treated like any other terrorism. But the very scary thing about this tragedy is that the killer is not an "extremist" at all, at least not ideologically. He is not anti-government, either, despite what many good-government liberals imply. He loves Winston Churchill, like most neocons and liberals. He's very pro-Israel. His views on domestic and foreign policy and the supposed clash between Islam and the West are all too usual in Europe and the United States.

Anti-Muslim fear is a problem in America, but it is not that disposition alone that should most concern us, and we must be careful in addressing such fear. It is everywhere and usually no direct threat to anyone, certainly no crime in itself. When Juan Williams lost his job at NPR for saying that he felt a little uncomfortable flying on airplanes with Muslims — a fact that he disclosed candidly with humility toward those he felt ashamed of fearing — his purge was most regrettable, for it only shut down discussion and guaranteed that civilized contemplation of these complicated issues would be unwelcome in that major media venue. It also emboldened conservatives in their anti-Muslim sentiment.

The problem is not just fear of Muslims, but rather hateful, violent fear. Even such feelings, however, and even the most dehumanizing of thoughts, cannot be ameliorated by the very political system that encourages conflict and violence. Any attempt to turn the Utoya and Oslo tragedy into a rationale for an anti-rightwing witch-hunt would be misguided and counterproductive — especially coming from the very institution, the federal government, that is more responsible for antagonism toward Muslims than any other actor on the planet.

Indeed, even neoconservatives should be protected from government thought control, as should have the communists during the Cold War, despite both groups having very dangerous views when put into practice. It is not the thoughts but the deeds that are criminal. Mere discontent with Muslims is not the same as banning their mosques or restricting their liberties. As for Breivik, his beliefs are poisonous; infinitely worse was his acting on them to commit murder on a mass scale.

And this is where the real cognitive inconsistency comes in. Everyone knows that Breivik's actions were unjustifiable. Everyone knows the same about those who flew the planes into the World Trade Center. But what is not as universally understood is that mass murder is unjustifiable even when conducted by executive order and carried out by men wearing uniforms.

If not for the "terrorists" of both the Muslim and anti-Muslim variety, the war on terrorism would not be easily sustained. The relationship is mutual, as the armed conflicts incite the resentment and blowback that are in turn pointed to as the reason to continue the wars. At any rate, the war on terror itself is nothing but one act of terrorism after another, day after day. Together, Bush and Obama have probably piled up ten thousand times as many corpses as did Breivik. A week of pure terror for Oslo, London, or Manhattan resembles an average week for Pakistan, Afghanistan, or Iraq, thanks to the United States's wars of liberation. Norway, too, having dropped hundreds of bombs in Obama's NATO war on Libya, is a belligerent junior partner in what many see as a U.S.-Israeli-U.K. crusade against the Muslim world.

Sometimes the government's wars kill thousands whose lives are disregarded as "collateral damage," since the deaths were only a side effect of the main purpose of the war. This argument is weak, since the deaths are completely predictable. Moreover, many modern actions of the U.S. government involve deliberate, calculated cruelty and killing. The sanctions on Iraq throughout the 1990s directly targeted the most vulnerable segments of the Iraqi population. Misery and death were purposefully inflicted on them by the hundreds of thousands, in the hopes of prompting regime change. If this isn't terrorism, then there is no such thing.

A terrorism specialist at the Norwegian Defense Research Establishment has said that Breivik's operation "seems to be an attempt to mirror Al Qaeda, exactly in reverse." Yet this description just as well fits the foreign policy of the U.S. and its satellites: Altering geopolitical realities by treating men, women, and children as disposable pawns to be targeted and liquidated. Killing people in large numbers for diplomatic reasons is the very essence of modern war. Do it without the right paperwork, and it's terrorism.

Breivik's action separates him from the millions of bigots calling for total war but not performing it. If we look at Breivik's crimes as a problem of ideology and not only one of action then we are stuck with an uncomfortable truth: Engaging in mass violence that will inevitably kill innocent people is always wrong, and yet it is not only on the fringes of nationalist politics or on radical Islamist websites that we see endorsements of slaughtering dozens, hundreds, thousands or even more. The majority finds it defensible, even honorable and righteous, to do what Breivik did, so long as the civilian deaths are "collateral" or the result of bombings and sanctions initiated by the president — and, for those who are really old fashioned or progressive, ratified by Congress or the United Nations, respectively. The greatest trouble with neoconservatism, neoliberalism, and most other statist ideologies is that they favor mass murder. It does not matter, morally, what we call it. It makes no difference who arms the bombs and who fires the weapons, whether the hatred of the enemy is instilled at boot camp or gleaned from the blogosphere.

Many of Breivik's targets were pro-Palestinian, likely eliciting his special animus for daring to side with the cultural enemy. When a fanatic takes up arms in the delusion that he is part of the war effort, we must remember that his actions are not materially much different from those of some of the most revered warriors and leaders of history. Perhaps he is not as deluded as those who try to differentiate his freelance violence from the formal violence celebrated in parades and on national holidays.

Of course I will be accused of the great crime of "moral equivalence" — the sin of saying that deliberately killing innocent people is always immoral, no matter who does it or for what reason. So be it. In this case it will be harder for the charge to stick, for all the usual blather that typically accompanies it — "they hate us for our freedom," "they want to wipe Israel off the Earth," "their religion commands them to kill us all" — is the same kind of hysterical lunacy indulged in by Anders Behring Breivik before he put his ideology of hateful collectivism into action.

Anthony Gregory [send him mail] is research editor at the Independent Institute. He lives in Oakland, California. See his webpage for more articles and personal information.

The Best of Anthony Gregory

This is not an exhaustive list of everyone who is running for the GOP nomination, or everyone who might. It is a sample of potential candidates comprehensive enough to demonstrate the utter futility of relying on the so-called Republican frontrunners or their carbon copies to pose any sort of principled opposition to Obama. This article is also not thorough on all the problems with each of these men and women, but rather just gives a taste.

I do not include Ron Paul here, and it almost pains me to mention his name in the same article. I also am not including Gary Johnson, a candidate whose positions on some important issues are not as libertarian as Ron's but who is nevertheless far better than anyone explored below. Johnson has been marginalized out of the debates, and I feel bad for that. They would do the same to Ron if they could get away with it.

I think there is at least a strong possibility one of the forthcoming names will be at the top of the ticket in 2012, and if that is the case, there will probably be no reason a fan of liberty should care much about who wins.

Romney the Health Care Commie

Mitt Romney frightened me in 2008 when he suggested we might want to "double Guantánamo." On all the issues where Republicans are bad, he is bad. On some issues where Republicans are not always horrible, like gun control, Romney's record is spotty at best.

Most conspicuous is his failure to have a principled critique of Obama's most significant policy achievement that the GOP opposed fairly consistently. Romney is on constitutionally legitimate ground when he mounts the federalism defense of Romneycare while still criticizing Obamacare. His point that in a free republic, the states should be laboratories of democracy and the federal government should butt out, is valid. American socialism is indeed more constitutionally sound and less damaging this way.

But socialized medicine is still bad policy, morally and economically, even if done on the state level. American conservatives deride "Taxachussetts" for its state-level government interventions all the time. What's more, the constitutional argument carries no weight coming from a big-government Republican. Does Romney oppose Medicare, Social Security, national education standards, plenary federal regulation of industry, the Federal Reserve, the FDA, and the war on drugs? None of these programs are any more constitutionally sound than Obamacare.

This inconsistency will probably not hurt him in the long run, since most Republicans are equally hypocritical. Most American conservatives have become snookered by the mild socialism of both parties. The New Deal/Great Society/Compassionate Conservative agenda of entitlement guarantees, cascading deficit spending, and federal support for the old, sick, needy, and indeed most of the middle class is a fixture of every political program to be advanced in a Republican presidential bid in a general election since the 1960s. Goldwater was the last one who didn't always sound like he was talking out of both sides of his mouth and much of his party was uncomfortable with him. Unfortunately, Romney's weak critique of Democratic statism is par for the course.

This is fiscal conservatism today. This is the Republican Party: Medicare D, No Child Left Behind, new national bureaucracies, endless unfunded wars, deficit spending to finance the welfare-warfare state of FDR, LBJ and George W. Bush. Romney is not a RINO (Republican in Name Only). He is in fact a quintessential modern Republican, and that is the great tragedy. He thus has a decent shot at the White House, but no one who loves liberty should help him get there.

Rudy Giuliani's Handcuffed Entrepreneurs and Nightstick to the Knee

Rudy might throw his hat in or not, but he is worth at least passing mention. Religious conservatives warmed up to this pro-choice social liberal for one major reason: On 9/11, he was able to profit politically more than any politician not in the Bush administration. As was revealed later, it was his decision as mayor of New York to put the emergency response center inside the World Trade Center, despite its known vulnerability, having been attacked in 1993, that exacerbated the situation when the Twin Towers fell. Other problems with the response have also been pinned on him. Such critiques might be hitting below the belt if not for his long record of running on the platform of having been mayor on 9/11.

Giuliani still gets credit for "cleaning up" the Big Apple, although some have noted the mysterious nature of the reduced vagrant and street criminal populations. He has been accused of simply sweeping them into New Jersey. Surely his draconian drug war and other "tough on crime" developments — cracking down on people with dime bags and jailing homeless people for the most minor transgressions — should give us pause about the prospect of Rudy with the nuclear button.

Giuliani also has a record of anti-capitalist witch-hunting that easily compares to the socialistic biases of Obama's crew of pinkos. As the great, late Burt Blumert reminded us on why he hated the man with a passion, Rudy's oppressive takedown of the heroic capitalist Michael Milken was such a stark act of persecution that it alone should dissuade anyone with any respect at all for the market economy or the rule of law from the notion of ever, under any circumstances, voting for this megalomaniacal monster.

Rick Perry, Totalitarian from Texas

On Groundhog Day, 2007, Rick Perry climbed out of a hole and cast a shadow upon the land. It was on that February 2 that Perry issued an executive decree forcing adolescent Texas girls to get the HPV vaccine, an inoculation that is seemingly effective against a fraction of the human papillomavirus, one of the causes of cervical cancer. There was an opt-out option, but it was still an edict so sickening and invasive we could only expect how social conservatives would react if President Obama attempted such a measure. The presumption of universal sexual conduct among teen girls, the pretentious intervention into every household, the health risks disregarded, the neglected fact that many if not most cases of the very disease being targeted wouldn't be addressed — the full insidiousness of Perry's measure escaped most commentators' notice, including on the right that is today up in arms, correctly, about Obamacare and TSA.

It didn't hurt Perry's motivations, probably, that the only FDA-approved vaccine for HPV was produced by Merck, a company that had contributed to Perry's campaign and had other lobbying connections to his administration associates. The cynical corporatism and predatory statism of this one executive order tell you all you need to know about current frontrunner Rick Perry.

It was no surprise recently that Perry betrayed and derailed the efforts within Texas to hold TSA accountable. For once, there was a proposal to protect the liberty of citizens, in this case against the federal government, and of course Perry sided with the Obama administration against his own subjects. Why challenge the national groping apparatus you are seeking to inherit?

Perry stabbed fiscal conservatives in the back when he supported a rise in the state franchise tax and a controversial property tax reform bill. Like the other Texas Republican governor George W. Bush, Perry would make a terrible president.

Michelle Bachmann: Theocon Israel-Firster

Presidential candidate and Tea Party heroine Michelle Bachmann sure knows how to rile up the red-state base. Talk up the threat of socialism. Praise the Constitution. Even criticize the Federal Reserve a little bit. And this is all well and good, although her consistency even on fiscal issues is quite questionable, given her support for Cap, Cut, and Balance and other such Republican frauds.

But Bachmann holds at least one position that is at complete odds with the more admirable principles on which the United States was founded. Thomas Jefferson and George Washington warned about the danger of permanent and entangling alliances. The United States, as John Quincy Adams put it, "goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own."

In her recent video, Bachmann takes a very different position. She says that America's "alliance with Israel is critical for both nations at all times."

This is a deeply unAmerican sentiment, and you don't have to be the least bit anti-Israeli to recognize this. She is saying the alliance with Israel is permanent and unmoving, that what is in Israel's interests is the same as what is in the United States's interests. Even more troubling, she explicitly conflates the two countries in terms of their national identities:

"Israelis and Americans are two sides of the same coin. We share the same values and the same aspirations. We even share the same exceptional mission — to be a light to the nations. After all, the image of America as the Shining City on the Hill is taken from the Book of Isiah."

This is bizarre, at the very least. Could you imagine a prominent politician getting away with saying this about another country, even one as culturally similar as Great Britain? "Two sides of the same coin"? This video, an attack on Obama for being insufficiently pro-Israel, is essentially arguing that most Americans, unlike the president, recognize that the Israeli nation and the American nation are one and the same.

Indeed, the next line, about how Americans and Israelis supposedly have "the same values and the same aspirations," is also troubling for anyone who thinks the U.S. should look after its own interests. But aside from the objections on America-First grounds, consider the collectivism here, as well as the strange notion that Israelis in particular have the same values. We need not be the slightest bit disparaging of Israelis to see this is not the case — but it is especially ironic coming from someone who claims to defend limited government and free enterprise. After all, Israel is not a capitalist paradise. It is a welfare state. It is more domestically socialist, probably, than the Democrats in the United States. Its militarism and police state might inspire confidence in the Republicans who typically but inconsistently want to defend economic liberty but champion an interventionist military and law enforcement regime. But even by confused Republican standards, Israel is not some sort of paragon of Reagan conservatism, however defined.

And this doesn't touch on the religious implications of her video. Of course, Christians have long been attacked for speaking their faith in the political and public spheres, and this is a disgrace. Religious conservatives have been demonized by the secular media. Yet when it comes to foreign policy and the actual governmental agenda of the U.S. executive branch, Jefferson was right that there should be a wall of separation between church and state. Madison, the author of the Constitution, was right when he said that religion and government "will both exist in greater purity, the less they are mixed together." The whole notion of determining the proper stance of the United States in international affairs on some lines from the Old Testament should frighten even the most devoutly Christian or Jewish, for war and government are not the proper means of salvation. Those who oppose theocracy as well as those who want America to pursue a foreign policy free of permanent, entangling alliances — both groups of whom should include all sane Americans — can't help but cringe at the sight of Bachmann's video.

Will she at least stand up for all Christians? Maybe now, but it is at least potentially troubling that the church that she quit only this month held the position that the Pope was the anti-Christ.

Herman Cain, Overrated Modal Conservative

Jon Stewart, in mocking Herman Cain's proposal that all federal legislation only be a few pages, drew fire from the politically correct right for having mimicked Cain's voice as well, presumably because it was racist to do so. Stewart shot back with footage of his doing dozens of voices over the years, clearly with an equal-opportunity approach that spared no ethnic or regional group. Yet the same conservatives denouncing all leftist accusations against the Tea Party for being racist are now claiming that the only reason anyone would dislike Cain is because he's black.

What is confusing to me, however, is why so many have become enamored of Cain. Perhaps it is just his modal conservatism — his willingness to spout old Republican talking points in favor of business but without much substance behind them, and then go off on some culture warring point about the sanctity of marriage or whatever.

Tom Woods has a great video explaining many of the particular problems with Cain. As Tom notes, Cain endorsed Romney in 2008, favored TARP against the "free market purists," defends the bulk of the Patriot Act, has a despicable record on the Federal Reserve, and has no real understanding of economics.

There is one reason, however, that Cain stands up for being particularly dangerous. He has no conception at all of religious liberty in a time when it is under attack. He believes Americans have a right to prohibit mosques from being built, out of the hysterical paranoia that Sharia law will take hold and wipe away all out freedoms and Christian identity as a nation. For similar reasons Cain says appointing Muslims to government would be a big problem for him, as you never know which of them is a terrorist. This ugly anti-Islamism should all by itself should be a deal-breaker for anyone every remotely interested in liberty. Cain is targeting the group most likely to be rounded up and interned should another terrorist incident occur, a group that is already the subject of warmongering hatred, and he is legitimizing this through his candidacy. The bigotry Cain espouses helps foment the aggressive wars that have done more to undermine American freedom in recent decades than anything else.

Rick Santorum's Crusade Against Freedom

Rick Santorum says he's in the presidential race to win. In typical campaign-season Republican fashion, he has condemned Obama for having "wrecked our economy, and centralized power in Washington, DC, and robbed people of their freedom."

Of course it is true that Obama has been a disaster for American liberty. It doesn't take a genius to see this. But one might wonder, what is the alternative Santorum represents?

Santorum's War Against Contractual Liberty: Central to a free society is the concept of freedom of association. People should be free to disassociate from others as well, for any reason. One application of this principle would be the right of employers (and employees) to end their employment relationship at will — only with the caveat that premature termination in violation of an employment contract be remedied through damages. Certainly, no boss should be forced to hire anyone against his will.

This principle has been eroded severely through Civil Rights and anti-discrimination laws. This is a tragic abandonment of the cornerstone of a free society. But Santorum has proposed, with the support of such Democratic stalwarts as John Kerry, Hillary Clinton, and Ted Kennedy, to gut this principle even further, by forcing employers to accommodate the religious practices of their workers. This is an egregious attack on economic liberty. It means that a boss would have to make "reasonable" provisions for his employees' prayers and religious rituals, even if these are at odds with his own values. In a society of religious and contractual liberty, employers wouldn't have to hire people of any religious persuasion that they didn't want to, much less subsidize religious practices they did not support. Of course, customers could boycott companies if they found the discrimination or lack of accommodation unfair. But this should be up to free individuals working in the market, never the state.

Santorum's Attack on the Constitution: Santorum has argued that the federal government should build a wall and use national guards to enforce border security — a usurpation of the proper authority of the states under the Tenth Amendment. He has been an enthusiastic defender of torture, despite the Eighth Amendment, due process rights, and every single standard of human decency. He also voted in support of making warrantless wiretapping easier, in clear violation of the Fourth Amendment; the flag-burning amendment — not actually in violation of the Constitution, but with the opinion, apparently, that the First Amendment needs changing; harsher penalties for drugs, when there is absolutely no authority in the Constitution for the feds to be involved in this at all; draconian penalties for gun violations so long as drugs are involved; federal abstinence education programs, when in fact education is the proper province of the states; a presidential line-item veto, when this is clearly an unconstitutional deprivation of Congress's legislative authority; the Patriot Act and the evisceration of habeas corpus for detainees in the war on terror. And if you think he only supports cruel measures against those deemed by the government to be "terrorists," keep in mind that this is the man who callously said that victims who didn't successfully flee New Orleans in the midst of Hurricane Katrina should have been burdened by "tougher penalties."

Santorum's Battle Against Rationality in Foreign Affairs: Santorum has voted to expand NATO, an outdated Cold War relic; supported stronger sanctions against Syria, Cuba, Iran and even Japan in direct tension with the human right to free trade and the interests of the United States; and backed Clinton's unconstitutional and unnecessary war with Kosovo, despite the better judgment of many other Republicans. But what else is to be expected from a man so deluded he thought as late as 2006 that Weapons of Mass Destruction were found in Iraq — even as the Bush administration insisted this was not so — and has seriously argued, even in a time when political correctness threatens freedom of inquiry and academic liberty at our universities, that criticism of Israel on college campuses should be federally punished?

Is He Good on Anything? Some will insist that at least Santorum is a fiscal conservative, but he voted for Bush's deficit-enlarging budgets and does not support abolition of the huge unconstitutional, wasteful and counterproductive federal programs that are drowning this nation in debt — the empire, Social Security, Medicare, and all the rest. He might be marginally less spendthrift than Obama, but wait until you see him in power. He has no compunctions about using the force of the federal government and tax dollars to impose his vision on America — a vision in which employers have to accommodate workers' religions against their will, a vision in which Washington teaches kids what kind of sexual values to embrace, a vision in which campus criticism of America's closest Middle East ally is socially engineered out of existence, a vision of social conservatism not nurtured in a humane and virtuous manner by families, churches, and communities, but by the largest political body in the history of the world — the U.S. government. He has no respect for free speech, the Fourth Amendment, or Constitutional limits on the federal police power. Like so many other politicians, he thinks Americans have all too much liberty in many areas, and yet has the temerity to criticize his ideological mirror image, Barack Obama.

Obama has been a nightmare for liberty across the board. So was Bush. If Americans want to finally awake to a future of liberty, they will reject the authoritarian right-wing socialism of Rick Santorum.

Oh No. Another Reagan Republican: Jon Huntsman

Jon Huntsman announced his presidential bid in front of the Statue of Liberty, evoking images of Reagan's announcement of his own run over three decades ago standing at the same spot. Huntsman, a former Reagan official, reminded his audience that Reagan had "assured us we could u2018make America great again,' and under his leadership we did."

In 2007, Jon Huntsman openly favored an individual health care mandate — the most directly anti-liberty element to Obamacare. Also as governor of Utah, he signed a global warming initiative agreeing to cut greenhouse gases. Under his stewardship, state spending increased by about 10% a year.

Some will say this means Huntsman is clearly not a real Reagan conservative. Yet Reagan is the president who:

• About doubled the size of the federal government
• Increased Social Security taxes and the overall tax bite from the American economy
• Promised to abolish the Selective Service, the Department of Education, the Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms Bureau, and did nothing of the sort

As governor, Reagan:

• Signed the Mulford Act, banning the carrying of firearms in general terms, setting the stage for California's modern anti-gun atmosphere
• Increased taxes more than any previous governor, including his $1 billion hike in his first year — the largest tax increase in CA history
• Immensely expanded the welfare bureaucracy and added over 30,000 employees to the state government payroll
• Created 73 new state government councils and commissions, including the horrible California Energy Commission
• Oversaw a 122% increase in the state budget

This is the reality of the Reagan legacy. Even as a governor, with no military enemy as an excuse, he acted even worse than the Democratic governors before and after him. And why not? Reagan was a unionist, a Hollywood New Deal Democrat who took on the role of touting free enterprise because he was hired by General Electric to do so. He was a performer who acted his way into the White House, and to this day the Republicans all jump over themselves to claim his mantle, all competing to be described as the most Reaganesque.

Huntsman is indeed a Reagan Republican: a defender of big government who stands in front of the Statue of Liberty without any credibility on what that statue represents.

Tim Pawlenty, Second-Rate Bore for More Government and War

Poor guy. Even given his close relationship to the 2008 John McCain presidential run, Pawlenty has been unable to turn that experience into the credentials needed to run another losing presidential campaign in 2012. He is not the most frightening of the bunch, however, although his dedication to smaller government is par for the course among Republicans. That is to say, he doesn't have any.

Pawlenty as governor of Minnesota was an enthusiast for public works projects, rail lines, and Target Field, two-thirds of the funding for which was billed to the taxpayers. He is well known for his bill raising the ethanol requirement for gasoline up to 20%. In environmentalist California, the figure is closer to 6%.

Back in March, before Obama committed the United States to yet another anti-Muslim war of aggression, Pawlenty scathingly attacked the administration for being soft on Libya. Condemning the president for caring what other nations thought about American wars, Pawlenty intoned: "What’s most important is our nation is secure and respected." Ah. "Respected." So that is the point of these foreign adventures — being treated like the international mob boss. While the other Republicans in the field are now toying with America-First rhetoric concerning this war, Pawlenty has not taken off his campaign website the numerous examples of his being a visionary ahead of the curve, goading the emperor to flex his muscles before Obama himself felt inclined finally to let the bombs drop.

Newt Gingrich the Career Political Outsider

If there is a great silver lining in this election it is that Gingrich is doing so poorly. What a joy to watch him get nowhere, to watch his ego take a beating every day.

Gingrich has boasted that he is not a "Washington figure" and claims that he "will clearly be the most change-oriented, the most fundamental reform candidate in the race." Yes, this from the guy who was recently taken to the woodshed for his comments that Paul Ryan's ridiculously moderate budget cut proposal was an example of dangerous "right-wing social engineering."

This only demonstrates what is meant these days when someone is called a "Washington outsider." Obama was supposed to be such a candidate, despite his record-busting campaign donations from Goldman Sachs and other Wall Street powerhouses, his unequivocal support for the agenda of AIPAC and other establishment lobbying groups. But even Obama was a better example of an outsider than lifetime government employee John McCain, who laughably ran as a maverick in 2008, defending virtually every element of the Bush regime — the wars, the bailouts, the compassionate conservative welfare statism.

There was a time long before his stint as Speaker of the House when Gingrich was a little bit interesting. In 1982, Newt Gingrich wrote to the Journal of the American Medical Association in defense of medical marijuana. He noted that "Federal law. . . continues to define marijuana as a drug u2018with no accepted medical use,' and federal agencies continue to prohibit physician-patient access to marijuana. This outdated federal prohibition is corrupting the intent of the state laws and depriving thousands of glaucoma and cancer patients of the medical care promised them by their state legislatures."

Almost 30 years later, is he still asking for a liberalization of federal marijuana law? Quite the reverse. He strongly suggests we need to look at such countries as Singapore for our inspiration on drug policy and does not flinch when it is pointed out that that nation executes drug dealers and issues mandatory drug tests to the general population. These are totalitarian proposals, and Gingrich seems to endorse them emphatically.

Newt's Contract with America — the Republicans' literature offering hope and change to the American people — was filled with reforms supposedly aimed at limiting the power of Washington, but much of it had to do with expanding government to crack down on crime or uphold family values. One thing is for certain: the Republican Congress in the 1990s did not cut back government overall. To the contrary, in the 1990s the last federal budget passed by the Republicans was hundreds of billions higher than the last one passed by the Democratic Congress. In some areas, like farm subsidies, spending went up substantially.

The ringleader of the 1990s Republican non-revolution has no hopes, and for this at least we can be grateful.

Sarah Palin: Will the Bulldog with Lipstick Run?

Many have long argued that she would have no chance at the presidency. Only half the Republican voters like her, and none of the Democrats do. Obama is polled to easily defeat her in her own state of Alaska.

Perhaps I am playing into the media zeitgeist by not being a lot more substantive in this discussion. What about Palin's political positions? Well, she has flip-flopped and equivocated on quite a few questions. But it would be fair to say that she is slightly more fiscally conservative than Obama, in the same ballpark in terms of foreign policy (although with the distinct possibility of surprising us in either direction), and otherwise comfortable with the status quo of bailouts, corporatism, entitlements, huge government, and central management of the economy, with some perfunctory areas where she mildly dissents from the Washington consensus. In other words, she is a typical Republican politician, who might sound a little better than the Democrats when she is out of power, but who always has the potential to prove a neocon in the White House.

Yet it is a mistake to assume the above is the most substantive thing to be said of her. Palin was primarily always a culture-war figure: a rallying point for the heartland to unify and cry out that it had enough of the coastal elitism of the central state and media giants. Yet what were they rebelling against in 2008? Was it the Bush legacy they had voted for? He was, after all, a counterfeit middle American, a Connecticut transplant in the heart of Texas who always advocated big government. The biggest issue to unify the proto-Tea Party uprising of 2008 was, of course, the gigantic Wall Street bailouts, which were advocated and supported by Palin, as well as McCain and Obama. Palin had the problem of running on a ticket calling for hope and change when the Democratic opposition had already trademarked those slogans and was running against the sorry record of her own party's mismanagement of the economy and two wars. Now the setting is ripe for a run against Obama-style elitist liberalism. The problem is, Palin is a TV star and her own very red state backs the incumbent over her.

There's lots of talk about whether she can beat Michelle Bachmann. Maybe not. Nevertheless, I still don't think it's impossible for her to be president one day, if not in 2013 then down the line. Palin is still very young. She could run every election cycle until 2028 — five elections, inclusive — before she's any older than Hillary Clinton was in 2008. Think of that. Even if she's decisively defeated this time, she has plenty of opportunities to make a comeback like Richard Nixon, or Peewee Herman, or Freddy Kreuger, depending on how you regard her.

I for one welcome Palin into the race, as I find her entertaining and somewhat refreshing. My appreciation is nuanced, as I do not think she is any sort of champion of freedom but rather an establishment politician, but it can be fun watching the liberal media stumble over themselves to attack her for cultural reasons, perennially and invincibly clueless that much of the country is on board with her social values. Part of me even wants her to win the White House, not because she will be any better than Obama, necessarily, but because it would serve to educate at least some people. Either the liberals will learn that she is not the devilish threat to their social democracy as they've been fearing, or some conservatives will learn that the problem wasn't Obama but leviathan, or some feminists will learn that a woman in the White House doesn't mean a more peaceful or less corrupt executive branch any more than a black president means a less predatory criminal justice system. The problem is political power itself, and no modification to the cultural lipstick worn by the empress will mean a damn thing. Perhaps Palin will help bring us closer to the day when Americans recognize that.

The Grand Old Party: A Circus of Fascists, Clowns, and Creeps

As I've noted repeatedly here and elsewhere, the Republican Party has always been a party of big government. The exceptions only prove the rule. If any of the above people get the presidential nomination we will again face a contest between two candidates with no reliable respect for the liberal tradition, free trade, peace, freedom of association, civil liberties or free-market capitalism. The bright side is we'll only be closer to the day when Americans give up on electoral politics as a means to achieve freedom.

Much of this material is adapted from material first published on JohnDennisReport.com. Note this, as well as LewRockwell.com, in any reprints.

Anthony Gregory [send him mail] is research editor at the Independent Institute. He lives in Oakland, California. See his webpage for more articles and personal information.

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Ludwig von Mises noted that by calling their program "welfare" the economic interventionists slanted the debate in their favor, for who could oppose such a thing? Everyone wants welfare in the broad sense. Indeed, the "general welfare" is a principle, however confused, affixed in the Preamble of the U.S. Constitution.

Today, welfare has lost its rhetorical advantage. Ever since the bipartisan welfare reform of the 1990s, the word "welfare" has not had the positive connotations of the past. Liberals rarely talk openly about how we need more of it. Conservatives talk freely about how it should be discarded. Even in substance, the debate has changed somewhat.

So too has the center left abandoned its talk about redistribution for the very poorest among us. Liberals used to complain about homelessness, calling it an epidemic. Their programs have not improved upon the situation. Now it is mostly ignored.

It makes strategic sense to neglect it when the welfare state is much more palatable when directed not toward the very bottom of the ladder, but to voters of the middle class. This helps explain why those opposed to welfare by name have won the linguistic struggle that Mises long ago identified, and yet have lost the entitlement war. Also important is that when conservatives denounce welfare, they are mostly condemning payments to the poor — programs like the long-maligned Aid to Families with Dependent Children and food stamps.

These programs are socially destructive and should be abolished. That will do only so much good, however, because the preponderance of the Bismarckian welfare state is not just tolerated but defended by all the respectable people, the conservatives and middle class.

When the financial crisis hit in late 2008, across the spectrum were pleas to do something to save middle class homeowners from losing houses they probably shouldn’t have bought but did because of credit expansion, Fannie and Freddie, Bush’s Ownership Society and the entire insane bipartisan project to stuff all of bourgeois America into increasingly expensive houses at increasingly declining costs. Few people saw the desire to shore up universal home ownership as a welfare scheme.

In attempting to oppose expansions of government in late 2008, such as Bush’s TARP bailout, the conservatives were in a bind, for they had been cheering on the biggest welfare statist president since Lyndon Johnson. Bush's Medicare plan was the most obvious example. Today we see that Medicare and Social Security — Great Society and New Deal plots that conservatives once called socialistic — are now favored by nearly everyone. The left is shrewd to frame its argument for nationalized medicine in terms of "Medicare for all," since it demonstrates that the premise of health care subsidies has already been accepted by the conservative movement. Most opponents of Obamacare said they would support guaranteed coverage for those with preexisting conditions, and many attacked Obama's plan for threatening the existing welfare apparatus. We've all seen the Tea Party activist holding up the sign warning Obama: "Hands off my Medicare!"

The idea that the elderly are entitled to this money has enticed the entire right. The intellectual purpose of the entitlement state — conditioning people over generations toward dependency with vows to loot future taxpayers to maintain the system — has worked perfectly. But no one has a right to Social Security or Medicare, any more than they have a right to food stamps or other welfare. Yes, they were robbed for years, but that money has been spent already. Their victimization at the hands of the state gives them no moral claim to victimize current workers, any more than an abusive father having been brutally beaten as a child can use this as an excuse for his own abusive behavior.

Another key feature of the welfare state universally accepted is the disaster called public education. This is fundamental to the modern state, much more than direct handouts to the poor, as it inculcates the principles of collectivism in the young. Conservatives used to at least call for decentralization, removing Washington's influence from state indoctrination. Whether this would immediately mean more liberty for students and parents is not a priori obvious, but it would likely allow for pockets of freedom to emerge and perhaps the eventual separation of school and state in some places. In the post-No Child Left Behind era, the nationalist conservatives have a position essentially identical to that of the social democrats. They may call for charter schools, as does the Democratic president, or even advance the program of school vouchers — an expansion of the welfare state even further into private education. The omnipresence of federal aid in higher education is also a mark of the respectable classes’ comfort with welfare. Needless to say there is not the stigma attached to sending children to public school that exists with other welfare. Whether there should be, it is indisputable that this component of contemporary welfarism is accepted by all but the radicals. However, until public education is abolished or seriously compromised, statism will dominate the culture.

Vast cultural approval also exists for more conventionally identified forms of welfare. Receiving unemployment insurance is regarded as less contemptible than accepting traditional handouts. Apparently, having had a good job and losing it privileges one to feed at the public trough, whereas never having such an opportunity means one is simply a bum. One can counter that a fraction of one’s income goes into this “insurance” program, but in the end if it is justifiable to receive money financed through taxation, then the principle must be observed more consistently. As Walter Block argues, it is not unlibertarian to take money from the government. The point here is not to condemn those who do it but to recognize their daunting number — many in the bourgeois sector should therefore not find themselves to be holier than a typical welfare case.

The whole society clamors in defense of subsidies not seen as welfare at all. Agricultural aid is particularly popular on the corporatist right, as are obscenely expansive patent protections, certain "uncontroversial" avenues of scientific research, space exploration, new resources for law enforcement, and protectionist trade policy. As for the various public servants, especially those doing some of the most harm — fighting the state’s wars, enforcing its laws, teachings its values to students — they are regarded as respectable members of society. They are said to work for their share, although in most cases what they do is socially deleterious and they’d be on better moral footing if they just accepted handouts. Not only is their income considered by virtually everyone to be in a different class from welfare, so too are their cushy benefits and pensions. Veterans’ benefits in particular have obtained a nearly sacred status in this society. A conservative who cheers on these programs and argues for their aggrandizement and then condemns welfare mothers in the next breath may wonder why the left finds his views so hard to swallow. It is at least in part because they make no sense.

Foreign policy presents an interesting case. Most Americans think the U.S. has some sort of duty in some instances to elevate the beleaguered peoples of the world. The conservatives argued for invading Iraq to save the Iraqi people. The liberals argued the U.S. couldn’t leave until this job was done. Americans fancy themselves generous in their warmongering. Few Americans recognize the immorality of seizing tax dollars to pay for wars of occupation, putting aside the fact that they are utterly immoral in themselves and fail to bring about freedom and prosperity worldwide, but rather spread despotism and mass death.

Welfarism has moreover corrupted the immigration debate. The right complains that immigrants, illegal as well as an excess of legal ones, drain the public treasury. This is an empirical question much more complicated than often assumed, as both citizens and foreign nationals pay taxes. Yet the obvious solution — ending the welfare state wherever it exists — is much harder to sell than it should be, precisely because the welfare state's permanence is unchallenged. If the notion is framed as though they are taking our public benefits, the whole collectivist premise has already been stipulated. Signing up for government aid has become part of the very identification of being American, and so is it seen as inappropriate for non-Americans, however defined, to get in on the nationalist socialism. There are enough conservatives in America to push for welfare reform that would undercut any actual problem with illegal immigration, insofar as welfare is the problem as they claim. But they do not mobilize to do it. They are as invested in maintaining and solidifying the idea of the modern American welfare state as is the left, and so in response to immigration they mostly propose violations of commercial freedom and police state measures to strengthen the national collective rather than undermine it through a frontal assault on the entitlement state.

The welfare state has won over all of society. It has succeeded in making the entire culture dependent on it. Middle class conservatives condemn welfarism even as they clamor for better public schools, apply for student loans for their kids, hold jealously onto their Medicare and Social Security benefits, accept unemployment checks when they’re expedient, and resist any talk about cutting back the government’s support for its police and soldiers. Liberals today say they are realists on welfare but never cease to agitate for more ways to put us all on the dole. As we find ourselves in the wake of fiscal catastrophe, we must recognize that only a tiny portion of government expenditures go to the easy targets — the earmarks, the welfare mothers, the roads to nowhere, the Woodstock museums, the funding to study bird migrations, even the salaries of bailed out CEOs. America is, despite the conservative and liberal propaganda to the contrary, essentially as much a welfare state as most other nations of the West, and the hugest chunk of the entitlement expenditures are going not to the easily scapegoated classes, but rather to the respectable masses.

Thanks to Alexander Ovsov for this translation of this article into Romanian.

Anthony Gregory [send him mail] is research editor at the Independent Institute. He lives in Oakland, California. See his webpage for more articles and personal information.

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If the debt limit is once again raised, guaranteeing more crazed deficit spending regardless of any promises accompanying the deal, blame should fall squarely on the Republicans.

The GOP controls the House of Representatives. They command the federal purse strings. Nothing can force them to raise the debt ceiling. There is no justification for raising it under any circumstances. Default is a perfectly valid option, discouraging lenders from continuing to enable Washington’s gluttonous and destructive spending. Or the government can simply cut $1.6 trillion for the next fiscal year and operate according to its revenues.

The House Republicans can easily tell Obama: “We refuse to raise the debt ceiling. Period. Now let’s sit down and talk about what to cut.” And no matter what the president does, the House leadership can refuse to pay for his expensive programs. It is that simple.

Of course, the Republicans would need to propose real spending cuts — not tens of billions or even hundreds of billions but over a trillion. The U.S. could go back to its penny-pinching budget of 2002. You know, back in the horse-and-buggy days of nine years ago, when the federal government remarkably managed to survive on a mere two trillion annually.

This could be done. Or the Republicans could say: “Let’s slash all military-related spending by half, means-test Social Security and Medicare, cut the bureaucracy of every single department by 50%. It’s either that or nothing. We refuse to vote to raise the debt limit.”

But this will not happen, because the Republicans have absolutely no interest in cutting government. These are the clowns who nearly doubled it when they had the presidency in the 1980s and increased it by over half during the Bush years. They love big government about as much as the Democrats.

How else can we explain their failure simply to refuse to increase the debt limit? They won the 2010 midterm elections on an anti-government mandate. At least, that’s what they claim. Indeed, a new Gallup poll indicates significant public support against raising the debt limit: “Despite agreement among leaders of both sides of the political aisle in Washington that raising the U.S. debt ceiling is necessary, more Americans want their member of Congress to vote against such a bill than for it, 42% vs. 22%, while one-third are unsure.”

The Republicans could marshal this public opposition to business as usual for a major political payoff, but instead they agree with the Democrats that the limit must be raised or else hell will break loose. In the end their major interest is in advancing the power and size of the state. As with the TARP bailout, they will ultimately demonstrate neither the will nor desire to stand with the public against fiscal insanity. Instead, we get the same old nonsense: Promises to balance the budget years from now, which has no relevance because Congress can only determine one year’s spending at a time.

In particular, the Republican trick this time around is “Cut, Cap, and Balance.” As Lew Rockwell notes, when Ron Paul, libertarians, or regular people talk about “cuts,” they mean actual reductions in the budget compared to last year. Is this what most Republicans mean when they sign onto this? It’s impossible to trust them.

Consider the substance of this scheme. We are to believe that some petty cuts and “enforceable” caps on future spending, combined with a Balanced Budget Amendment, are going to stop a catastrophe that has been in the making for decades, one that doesn’t even touch on the many trillions in unfunded liabilities that will come to the forefront in future generations. Meanwhile, the bloated and growing military budget won’t be touched at all.

A Balanced Budget Amendment is actually a bad idea. It is a potential excuse to raise taxes, despite any requirement of supermajorities needed to do it, and something that can’t be passed without support from three-fourths of the state legislatures anyway. How can something contingent upon such a major process be a bargaining demand for a debt ceiling that has to be raised in the next couple weeks? This is all a smokescreen.

Twenty years ago, Congress thoroughly debated this stuff. It was clear the trainwreck would come. The Democrats did nothing. The Republicans did nothing. The GOP had Congress in the 1990s and did nothing. They had the presidency and Congress for a few years and again did nothing.

Actually, that’s not accurate. When the Republicans ran the whole show they did plenty — way too much. After years of pleading for a chance to run the White House and Congress, they proved themselves spendthrifts across the board. Even before the excuse of 9/11, the Bush administration was readying its multi-trillion-dollar expansion of Medicare and vast expansion of the Department of Education. Under Bush, the Republicans voted to raise the debt limit over a dozen times. To say Republicans spend money like drunken sailors insults sailors and greatly exaggerates the effect of alcohol on financial judgment.

At least we are seeing the myth of gridlock, one of the last fallacies of democratic politics that libertarians tend to believe, come unglued. Eventually the two sides will come to a deal that will be bad for every normal American, concocted with one purpose alone: to give politicians on both sides of the aisle a way to win votes from their constituents. This economic crisis that should turn everyone away from electoral politics altogether and encourage a mass exodus from both parties will instead be spun to excite the base of both parties. From the deep state’s point of view, higher voter turnout and strengthened partisan loyalties, along with more celebration for the prospect of partisan cooperation to move the country forward, are the best possible outcomes of a financial calamity that should instead turn all of society against the state.

Even if the Republicans were to draw a line in the sand and refuse to raise the limit while demanding a trillion and a half in cuts, it would be too little, too late, and they would not deserve the support of anyone seriously interested in limited government. But they won’t even do that.

Don’t be distracted by Republican schemes and sleights of hand. They are not victims of an unstoppable Democratic establishment or a public opposed to cutting spending. Their talk about a debt ceiling compromise attached to some meaningless vows to cut spending in the future should be dismissed outright. They need only to refuse to raise the debt limit and go from there. No matter what happens, they run the House of Representatives and could stop the spending any time they want. Any continuation of the unspeakable profligacy that has defined the Obama era must be blamed on the Republicans.

Anthony Gregory [send him mail] is research editor at the Independent Institute. He lives in Oakland, California. See his webpage for more articles and personal information.

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There are no federal holidays for them. They have no national lobbying power. When they fall in the line of duty, no public hosannas are sung to their sacrifices. Yet without these brave men and women, modern civilization as we know it would collapse.

I'm talking about America's neglected public servants. None of them are paid out of government coffers. No taxpayers must be looted on their behalf. They make their money through peaceful exchange alone. And it is an obscenity, but their status as voluntary sector workers renders them forgotten in all their public service.

Taxi Drivers

When you are in an unfamiliar city, cabbies are lifesavers. They often work more than 12-hour days just to get by. Encumbered by the licensing and cartelization that infect almost all taxi industry, these heroes put in the extra effort just to move people safely from point A to point B. Business travel, vacationing, and carefree nights on the town are made possible by these heroes.

With the DUI police state more draconian than ever, it is all the more important that people who wish to paint the town red can get home safely. Taxi drivers make it possible. When you do not want to rely on public transportation to catch a crucial flight, the cabbie will serve you well.

Surely limousine drivers, private shuttle operators, and all private sector workers in transporting the public must be hailed as well. But there is something particularly sad about the taxi driver's hard work so rarely being acknowledged. These folks give up most of their lives, driving around constantly — a very risky business — and many barely scrape by. They rely largely on the generosity of tips, throwing themselves to the mercy of their customers as do few others in the service industry. Strike up a political conversation with one, and you will find a more libertarian fellow than on average. Most of them know the government is a racket and the market is what makes the world go around. Tip them well.

Convenience Store Workers and Gas Station Attendants

Children find it fun to ridicule the guy behind the counter with the Slurpee machine, cigarettes, and beef jerky. Ethnic jokes targeted at this group are among the last kinds tolerated. But even as people grow up, they rarely seem to fully grasp how wrong they were to say a bad word about these keepers of the peace.

Convenience store clerk risks it all, often late at night and in sketchy neighborhoods, to provide the essentials of life for those who need them in a pinch. They provide sustenance. Gas attendants also offer fuel. These are the heirs of the great tradition of the general store, although in ways their line of work is even more gallant. They bring light and a beacon of civilization to the darkness of the urban night. Far more than police, these defenders of security risk their lives to connect us to the matrix of human interaction at all hours. They are frequently robbed even as they make it less likely the rest of us will be attacked. Some ungrateful folks find the prices at these establishments to be steep. But they are a bargain.

Private Security

Private security personnel are libertarian heroes, especially when compared to their public sector counterparts. Generally, the worst that private guards do is work with government police, mostly because the state's laws force their hand.

Yet there is a fundamental distinction. Almost everything private security does is to protect property rights and social peace. They work in a civil manner to combat shoplifting, a crime that eats at the profits of businesses so severely that just a little more could always destroy the victimized business, which in retail so often relies on the smallest of margins to operate. Private security benefits all the customers who seek nothing but friendly exchange. A positive spillover effect is felt on the whole vicinity surrounding the places that hire them. By preserving law and order in their establishment, they are authentic guardians of the general welfare.

Yet they are derided and ostracized and lampooned everywhere. They are scorned as "rent-a-cops," as though they are somehow inferior to the tax leeches that taze suspects to death and drag innocent folks into cages. It is a wonderful fact that private security outnumbers government cops in America and throughout the world. True freedom and safety will come when the only armed guards are hired by businesses with an interest in treating customers with respect, and by other private individuals and voluntarily constituted institutions.

The Unsung Heroes

All throughout the economy, people serve the public through hard work. Yes, they are usually paid, as are government employees, but for some reason this is not held against altruistic state workers the way it is against the selfish individuals of the private workforce. Yes, public servants of the kind I admire do not always serve all segments of society equally — but neither does anyone in the government. The main differences are, as a general rule: private servants to the public benefit all of humankind on balance, they do not take from some so that they can do good by others, and their work is often riskier, and much more helpful, than what we can expect from those getting a government paycheck.

There are plenty of heroes I have left out, from everyone on a hotel staff that makes visitors, guests, and even many who are just walking through feel as welcome as possible to those who build, sell and repair the modern appliances that make modern life so luxurious for the masses; from the auto mechanics, plumbers and locksmiths to the waiters, waitresses, bartenders, busboys, and other restaurant staff who have brought cosmopolitan dining to all classes of society. I especially support the troops who work in the various food industries — catching fish, hunting game, farming, picking fruit, shipping food, fixing refrigerators, serving, mongering — without whom our connection to the rest of the world would be deprived an important dimension.

I have only mentioned a fraction of the most overlooked public servants. Many of them work hidden from the view of the commons. They fix computers, behind the scenes. They develop movies and art and music. They design buildings and concoct business plans and deliver babies and sew dresses and wake up at 3AM every day to bake bread or stock shelves. Perhaps I will get to them in another article. Here I have mostly focused on some of my favorite ones lost in plain sight, the ones we see every day and yet are all too often invisible for all they give and how little they take.

Next time someone in the market does you right, in particular if they are of the neglected classes of workers, thank him for his public service. You will be surprised how much it can mean to someone to hear it, after the sheer confusion is overcome. Most of these people are rarely thanked, don't expect it, and are taken aback when a patron shows he really understands the situation. Public teachers, firemen, cops, soldiers, bureaucrats, civil engineers and so many others are praised everyday. Children are taught at a young age to revere these government officials, many of whom still demand even more appreciation, more tax dollars, more benefits, more national recognition for their subsidized labor. You don't usually hear such a demand for respect from cabbies, restaurant expediters, private guards, convenience store clerks or the other true public servants, but they would be justified in asking for more appreciation than they get. Yet they never do. They are almost always just happy to serve the public, often at a great personal cost, for a reasonable fee. Honor their sacrifice. Thank a private sector public servant next chance you get.

Anthony Gregory [send him mail] is research editor at the Independent Institute. He lives in Oakland, California. See his webpage for more articles and personal information.

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In Casey Anthony's case we see an example of a grave injustice in the modern system. I'm not talking about her acquittal. When the prosecutor fails to prove someone's guilt beyond a reasonable doubt, the only responsible thing for the jury to do is refuse to damn the suspect to time in a cage. An innocent person imprisoned is so much worse than a guilty person let go, as in the former instance the state seduces all of society to cheer on and legitimize an injustice. Also, whereas justice for the guilty is at least a metaphysical possibility outside of prison, it is downright precluded institutionally for the innocent on the inside.

The actual travesty here is the offense of which Casey Anthony has been convicted: four counts of providing false information to a law enforcement officer. This should not be an offense in a free society, and I am struck by how little this horror has gained attention in the last week.

Lying in most circumstances is immoral. And lying to cover up one's crimes might be especially egregious, and arguably criminal in itself. But Casey Anthony was acquitted of the actual crime of murder. As far as the state is concerned, she has not been proven guilty. So why is her dishonesty with the police an offense against the law?

Many can't even relate to this point as they like the idea of this person suffering at least somewhat for a crime they assume she committed but got away with. Taking it to different contexts, we can see the full injustice involved in criminalizing lying to the police. What if people are lying to protect themselves from persecution? Indeed, when we engage in the thought experiment of what would be a morally acceptable lie, we can't help but think of such examples as lying to Nazis about Jews hiding somewhere, or lying to cover for a runaway slave. If lying is ever defensible, it doubtless is when the only deceived and harmed persons are agents of oppression, and it is done purely in service of preserving someone's rightful freedom.

Defending the rights of a runaway slave might seem different from defending someone from the tax man or drug warriors, but this is only a matter of degree. In a free society, there are only laws that prohibit acts of violence against person or property. Anything else is illegitimate. As St. Augustine said, an unjust law is no law at all. In a civilized world, when the state is wrong — arresting and prosecuting people for crimes that are no crimes at all — we should defend the proportional means potential victims of the state employ to save themselves from state oppression. Lying to defend oneself against state injustice should never be punished.

In practice, "obstruction of justice" and "giving false information" are almost always themselves victimless crimes. Bill Anderson and Candice Jackson call these types of offenses "derivative crimes" — offenses contrived out of thin air, used by the state to railroad people whose actual offenses cannot be proven. This trick was used to oppress the ethically innocent Martha Stewart, but even when it is used against a real creep, like Scooter Libby, it is far too dangerous a tool to trust in the hands of the state. No government should be able to jail someone merely for the act of being dishonest with it.

When the right to lie to the state is trampled, the ripples of injustice shake the whole system. Often, police don't even have a strong case against someone, not even enough to search or arrest him. And so they start probing. They start asking questions, hoping the subject trips up, contradicts himself, and can be caught in a deception. Then this is used as the probable cause on which an arrest and threat of conviction ultimately rely. This is a good reason to avoid talking to police altogether. But it is also a reason to oppose the very doctrine that telling a fib to a cop should in any way, all by itself, be considered any worse than fibbing to anyone else. If someone tells a white lie to a neighbor because he thinks he's being asked something that is none of the guy's business, we can criticize this as a minor sin, but it should not be any worse when the police are involved. Deceiving one's acquaintances can lead to a tangled web of awkwardness and more prevarications. But deceiving an officer should not, in itself, lead to warrantless searches, arrests, and prison time.

There is another principle in play here. No one owes the police anything. Perhaps in very unusual cases it makes ethical sense to cooperate. Surely there are prudential reasons from time to time. But the police are out to round people up, most of them overall non-violent people, and throw them in cages. To do their business, police, like prosecutors, lie through their teeth. It is standard practice. They are trained to do it. Whereas you could make a strong case that as tax recipients and supposed public servants, police should be held to a standard that forbids dishonesty, there should be no legal obligation on the part of the common person to come clean with the state.

The fact that the state gets away lying to the people — about its successes and failures, its intentions in domestic policy, the rationale behind its foreign policy, the strength and content of its evidence in criminal cases — while it makes it a crime for common people to misrepresent themselves to the government is another example of the ultimate double standard that defines the state as what it is. Albert J. Nock called the state a monopoly on crime, and we see it here. Much of what the state does would be illegal if anyone else did it. A fair deal of that would be properly illegal for anyone to do in a free society. But then the state also criminalizes a multitude of behaviors that should be legally protected, as well as generally tips the scales of justice in its own favor every chance it gets.

Without a doubt, if someone cannot be proven to have committed an actual crime, or if someone's only true offense is against the state's positive law rather than another individual's person or property, any lies he tells while the police are doing their investigation should not be illegal. Maybe lying to a cop is in some cases immoral, but if there is no legitimate crime proven other than that, it should not be punished.

See also: Bearing False Witness and Lying to the Cops

Anthony Gregory [send him mail] is research editor at the Independent Institute. He lives in Oakland, California. See his webpage for more articles and personal information.

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