Few political ideologies are as misunderstood as anarchism. Confusion is so widespread, in fact, that those ignorant of this intellectual tradition often use the word “anarchism” as a synonym for “chaos.” Some of the confusion may arise from the fact that anarchism is today often solely associated with the anti-private-property anarchists of the nineteenth century, such as the followers of Mikhail Bakunin.

Indeed, this variety of anarchism was so dominant through the first half of the twentieth century that Ludwig von Mises, writing in Liberalism, mockingly asked “[c]an it, then, be assumed, without falling completely into absurdity, that, in spite of all this, every individual in an anarchist society will have greater foresight and will power than a gluttonous dyspeptic?”

Writing in 1927, Mises’s experience with anarchists was with those who sought to tear down every form of human institution, from the market to the family to religious groups. Not surprisingly, Mises was somewhat skeptical that a society scraped bare of all tried and true human institutions would enter a phase of utopia.

In the libertarian tradition, however, the anarchist society is merely the society in which individuals are not governed by a state built on monopolized violence and coercion, but instead govern themselves through organizations into which they have entered voluntarily. Among such institutions can certainly be found churches, schools, families, professional associations, markets, and tribes.

Anarchists and others may debate the value of such institutions, but the libertarian anarchist does not by force oppose a person’s membership in any such institution or organization. What is opposed by the anarchist libertarian is the type of civil government known as “the state” which exercises a monopoly on the means of coercion. It is this monopoly, perhaps more than anything else, which characterizes the state, its lack of voluntary association, and its claim of a right to employ unchallenged force over all individuals who just happen to live within a certain geographical area.

Indeed, anarchists do not even necessarily oppose the use of coercion, for certainly a criminal who has stolen from someone else could rightly be forced to pay restitution.

At this point, the student of anarchism will begin to ask himself: “Fair enough, the state is bad, but what would a legal system look like under an anarchic system? How would property owners and employees interact? What would be the role of parents and families?”

Fortunately for us, these are not questions we have suddenly come up with ourselves, but have long been asked by libertarian theorists. And as we begin to look more deeply into the anarchist tradition, we find that it is not new, nor is it undeveloped in its thought.

While we can look back to Étienne de La Boétie to find some early writings on the subject, the nineteenth century produced numerous serious anarchist thinkers from Molinari to Proudhon in Europe and Spooner and Tucker in the United States. These nineteenth-century theorists would eventually be popularized and employed by Murray Rothbard in what has come to be known as anarcho-capitalism, the anarchist tradition of private property and free association.

To offer a truly detailed exploration of the answers offered to these questions, David Gordon will next week offer a new course through Mises Academy on the history of anarchist thought, and will examine for six weeks the intellectual tradition of anarchism, and the tradition’s importance to the political debate today.

Indeed, anarchism’s importance in the political realm is perhaps greater than ever, and its continued relevance again came to the fore in May when Kelefa Sanneh, writing in The New Yorker, discussed the influence of anti-capitalist anarchist David Graeber who has become prominent in the Occupy Wall Street Movement. In his article, however, Sanneh, could not ignore Murray Rothbard, whom Sanneh describes as “one anarchist who could be considered influential in Washington” and as “Ron Paul’s intellectual mentor, which makes him the godfather of the godfather of the Tea Party.”

One can certainly debate Rothbard’s anarchist influence among Tea Partiers themselves, but the importance of Rothbard’s anarcho-capitalist thought within the larger libertarian movement is noteworthy.

And yet this divide between the pro-private-property anarchists like Rothbard, and the anti-property-anarchists of David Graeber’s school continues to cause confusion about what anarchism is.

Writing in the upcoming September issue of The Free Market, David Gordon notes:

Graeber does not agree that if we got rid of the state, people would live under free enterprise capitalism. He follows Karl Polanyi’s contention in his book The Great Transformation (1944) that the free market depends on a rigid framework of laws and institutions to force people into the behavior that the capitalist system requires. In particular, Graeber thinks that capitalism is based on debt peonage and slavery and views debt cancellation favorably.

If some anarchists believe that the free market cannot exist without the state, and others believe that the state is the great enemy of free markets, then what is anarchism?

If all anarchists truly are united by opposition to a coercive state, then perhaps the question is irrelevant. For as libertarian anarchists know, a stateless society is likely to naturally produce widespread, complex, and successful markets. The anti-capitalist anarchists will simply be proven wrong, although they might perhaps be thanked for their service in opposing the state.

David Gordon will cover these issues and much more in detail for six weeks beginning on September 17 through Mises Academy.

There is presently a debate in Congress and in the media about how expensive the War in Syria will be. In the American policy debate The expenses are only calculated in estimated monetary terms, and so we know that the debate will of course ignore  all damage done to the Syrians themselves and to global markets, which are always damaged and stunted by wars.

Nevertheless, even the very tame and limited argument over the costs to the U.S. treasury will be based mostly on conjecture and dishonest assessments of the true cost.

We might get some glimpses of some of the honest estimates as the debate rages between the bureaucrats and the politicians, although even those are still nothing more than estimates.  The bureaucrats (i.e. the Pentagon) will use the drive to war in Syria as an opportunity to demand that more taxpayer money flow into their coffers. We have seen this already with former Defense Secretary Leon Panetta’s claim that the tiny cuts imposed by sequestration “are weakening the United States’ ability to respond effectively to a major crisis in the world.”  It will be in the Defense Department’s interest to high-ball the costs of the war.

Nevertheless, even the Defense’ Department’s claims of costs for the Syria war will likely be well below the true cost by the time the public hears them, for the Department will be restrained by the Obama Administration’s competing interest to make the war appear as cheap as possible. The Administration will naturally wish to have the war appear cheap, easy, and no big deal, as regards to cost.

Indeed, John Kerry was claiming yesterday that unnamed “Arab countries” have offered to pay for the war. This claim by the Obama Administration should of viewed as being on more or less the same levels as the Bush Administration’s claim in 2003 that the Iraq war and the reconstruction of the country would be paid out of Iraqi oil revenues.

Those who remember the debate of Iraq War costs a decade ago will also recall the Bush Administration’s outrage over General Eric Shinseki’s (correct) estimate that hundreds of thousands of troops would be necessary to restore peace to Iraq in a reasonable amount of time. The Administration claimed only a fraction of that number, and thus, only a fraction of the funds, would be necessary.

So, politicians want a war to appear cheap, at least up front, while the bureaucrats want bigger budgets. Once the war starts, though, all bets are off, and any political or legal authorization given to the administration to wage war will be a de facto blank check for future unlimited outlays for occupation and conflict on an unlimited timeline. We’ve already seen this in both Afghanistan and Iraq, and while the two countries descended into chaos, the claim was made that since the U.S. regime had “broken” Iraq and Afghanistan, the taxpayers were now on the hook to finance the “fixing” of the broken countries.

The regime knows that all it needs to do is start a war, and the money will begin to flow indefinitely. Thanks to Robert Higgs’s Crisis and Leviathan, we know that War is generally a winning proposition for states, for it leads to greater revenues and more control of the domestic population, continually ratcheted up by new wars. Rothbard noted in  his essay “War, Peace, and the State” that while wars can lead to the downfall of states, they upside is often enormous for them, as wars secure vast new powers for the regime both domestically and internationally. And since Syria poses no threat to the U.S. military or to U.S. territory, the prospects are all excellent for the politicians, bureaucrats, government contractors and intellectuals who all stand to get rich off the latest conflict.

The taxpayers will of course fare less well, whether in the form of a far greater tax burden or by their misfortune in holding a currency ever more de-valued by the need to deficit-finance endless war.

For the government class though, times are good, as long as enough of the population can be neutralized or even convinced to support the latest conflict. Thanks to what Hans-Hermann Hoppe calls “the myth of national defense,” wars are among the easiest big government programs to sell to the citizenry, for so few are willing to entertain possibilities outside the status quo of state monopolies for the provision of defense.

And in those cases where convincing the voters might prove more challenging, the state can always goad foreign nations into making an aggressive move than can lead to war, or the state may rely on a small army of intellectuals to provide the propaganda necessary to sweep all opposition aside.

The cost to Americans in the form of higher energy prices, lost trade opportunities, and other hidden costs will be immense, but even the cost in dollars to the taxpayers when calculated in terms of the true costs of empire, cannot be predicted.

World War Z (2013), Directed by Marc Forster

In his book on popular culture, The End of Victory Culture, Tom Englehardt identifies a narrative employed in film he dubs the annihilation narrative. In films where this narrative is employed, hordes of hostile savages lay siege to a fortress inhabited by a virtuous population of defenders, generally portrayed by white people. The set-up might also take the form of a traveling band of innocents who are constantly in danger of an ambush from hostile mobs of brown-skinned savages. As Englehardt notes, this narrative of besieged freedom fighters versus the dusky hordes has been

…[f]eatured in thousands of movies, [and] its prototype was certainly the band of Indians, whooping and circling the wagon train, but “they” could be Arabs charging the North African fort (Beau Geste), Chinese rushing the foreign legations (55 Days at Peking), Mexicans rushing the Alamo (The Alamo), Japanese banzai-ing American foxholes (Bataan), or Chinese human-waving American lines (Retreat, Hell!).

Zombies are convenient, of course, because they are not necessarily specific to any particular race or culture, and modern viewing audiences don’t regard the human bodies being mowed down as truly human.

And yet extremely similar political messages can be transmitted by employing a zombie apocalypse plot as with an old fashioned tale of white victory over savage natives. The heroes today, however, are no longer necessarily white people, but are nevertheless agents of what white people traditionally represented in 20^th century film, namely, order, civilization, safety, and enlightened rule; and these things were in turn provided by the nation-state and its army of military and scientific experts.

World War Z excels in spades at employing these old models of the annihilation genre, and its overall message can be summed up thusly: we are threatened on all sized by hideous hordes of invaders, and if it weren’t for the government, we’d all be dead.

The movie opens with a series of images of disasters, famines, mob violence, disease epidemics and similar imagery. The overall effect of this is to convince the viewer that things are spinning out of control, and we are left wondering what can impose order.

Shortly thereafter, through the eyes of Gerry Lane (Brad Pitt) we learn that Philadelphia (where Lane and his family reside) is being overrun by apparently zombified humans.

With the help of the U.S. Navy and Gerry’s friends at the U.N., he is able to escape to an American aircraft carrier where we learn that Gerry is a former U.N. investigator and that he must now take up his old responsibilities to learn the origins of the zombie disease in hopes of stopping it.

Gerry is flown to South Korea, a suspected place of origin of the disease, where he is protected by Navy SEALS and where he learns from a rogue CIA agent that he may learn more if he takes his search to Israel, where the Israeli state is effectively fighting off the zombie invasion thanks to its garrison state.

Gerry also learns that North Korea is perhaps the one society that has effectively contained the zombie disease by knocking out the teeth of all 23 million of its inhabitants in a matter of days. Apparently, zombies that cannot bite you cannot infect you.

Gerry travels to Israel where he finds Jerusalem surviving the apocalypse thanks to all the walls it has built to contain the Palestinians. The images of safe and free non-zombies protected on all sides by fortress-like walls from a crushing mob of savage zombies, reminds the viewer that the garrison state has many advantages. Indeed, the more segregated and controlled a society is, the better.

However, lacking the hard-core totalitarianism of the North Koreans, even Israel eventually succumbs to the hordes, although not without a valiant and courageous fight put up by the highly-competent Israeli regime.

With the help of the U.N., the U.S., Navy, The W.H.O., and a tough-as-nails female Israeli soldier, Gerry is eventually able to devise a solution that will finally allow the survivors to fight the zombies on relatively equal terms.

In the final scenes, thanks to government airlifts and interventions, ordinary people are able to avail themselves of this government-provided cure and perhaps overcome the invaders.

It is somewhat difficult to overstate how profoundly authoritarian and statist is World War Z, and the film employs many of the Cold War-era narrative elements that instructed viewers to trust and rely on government experts and military might while regarding the general population as nothing but a faceless, helpless mob.

Thus, we see in World War Z some similarities with 1950s UFO films in which government scientists and military personnel are our last great hope, all wound up together with war movies or the same era portraying Japanese, communist, and Arab invaders crushing in upon outposts of (usually American) civilization.

At the same time, the film, while employing zombies as a plot device, is essentially a movie about a disease pandemic like Outbreak (1995) and The Andromeda Strain (1971) and as such, the heroes inWorld War Z are the official state forces who seek to contain the disease in the face of a clueless or panicking populace.

It should be noted, by the way, that zombie films need not employ these narratives. Numerous zombie films and television shows, such as Night of the Living Dead (1968) and The Walking Dead (2010- ) imply instead that survival is assured by localized resistance or small bands of survivors who rebuild society in the new world. In such cases, the central government is often nothing more than a far-off and irrelevant memory.

In World War Z, however, the sheer aggression and numerical advantage of the zombies makes it pretty clear that total destruction of the human race will be athand without the efforts of Gerry and his friends in high places.

The Best of Ryan McMaken

Pat Buchanan is again sounding the alarm about how immigration to the United States is leading to “balkanization” and will result in the United States being split into “two countries.”

In an interview with talk radio host Andrea Tantaros, Buchanan complained that new immigrants are not being sufficiently assimilated, and Buchanan and Tantaros agreed that people aren’t being taught the right kind of American history:

“If you indoctrinate or teach kids different views about their country and how it began,” Buchanan said, “what you get is a growing disintegration of the country, a fragmentation into different parts.”

Apparently, Buchanan’s position is that we need to “indoctrinate or teach” kids all the same views about the country and how it began. This should be done in the name of unity.

Buchanan received some support in this thesis of his from Barack Obama last week when Obamacomplained that different groups in Irish society send their children to different schools:

“If towns remain divided – if Catholics have their schools and buildings, and Protestants have theirs – if we can’t see ourselves in one another, if fear and resentment are allowed to harden, that encourages division.”

In other words, if we’re not all culturally united and believing the same thing. That’s a bad thing.

It’s hard to see a significant difference between Buchanan’s lament about too much variety in instruction producing disunity, and Obama’s condemnation of diverse schooling for encouraging “division.”

This should not surprise us. Pat Buchanan, while he often has many insightful observations about the state of political affairs in the country, is nonetheless a lifelong beltway political operative, politician, and a Nixon acolyte.

This is a man who believes that the modern nation-state should micromanage demographics and cultural affairs, invade foreign countries that don’t do what The U.S. government says, and that the nation-state itself serves a hugely beneficial role in human society. In his 2001 book The Death of the West (which I reviewed here), Buchanan approvingly quotes Jacque Barzun’s claim that the nation-state is “the greatest political creation of the west,” and that most of cultural crises in the Western world today stem from insufficient loyalty to states. Buchanan then goes on to criticize secession and various kinds of political decentralization.

Buchanan points to the 1960s as his benchmark for the high point of American “unity.” Buchanan notes that the 1960s came as a high point for the legitimacy of the American state. Following the New Deal, years of WWII propaganda, and the Cold War, Americans were primed by 1960 to provide the American state with virtually unquestioning allegiance and loyalty. The White Anglo-Saxon Protestant version of history was the onlyversion of history being taught in public schools, and even in most private schools. For middle-class white people, like Pat Buchanan growing up in northern Virginia in the 1950s, it probably did seem like the United States was culturally united.

But even in the 1960s, Americans were not quite as unified as Buchanan imagines. It was during 1960 after all, that Americans were openly debating if a Catholic should be elected president, lest he enthrone the Pope on Capitol Hill. Where was that “one religion in common” Buchanan likes to refer to?

This cultural unity, to the extent that that it did exist in the 1960s, and which Buchanan so fondly remembers, was an aberration in America history, and depended on relentless pro-government propaganda through media, schools, and even religious institutions during the mid-twentieth century. The central government, through the FCC, essentially controlled broadcasting, and through its funding and regulation of educational institutions, created a uniform political ideology among formally-educated people which outlined the acceptable parameters of political debate and ideology.

In the 19th century, before mass media and widespread public schooling and public universities, one’s ideology was shaped by one’s wealth, race, ethnicity, religion and private formal instruction. Regional experiences and local institutions could produce wide variations in what ideologies dominated locally from place to place.

Political institutions by necessity were varied and local in the face of deep ethnic, economic and ideological divisions.

The Golden Age came at last (for people like Buchanan and Obama), when the federal government became skilled at using nation-wide media and public schooling as a means to “teach” the citizenry to be loyal to the local nation-state and to accept its laws, edicts, abuses, and lies. What the people learned in school was then reinforced in the evening news.

Thus Americans began to think that loyalty to the American state was better than loyalty to one’s local government, or community, or family, or religious group. The old divisions were downplayed, eliminated, and ridiculed.

There was no way to fight it, as there was no other easy means of obtaining information outside of the approved channels. Knowledge was controlled by the regulated media and by the approved educational institutions. Everything else was firmly within crackpot territory, according to those with respectable opinions.

Today, however, with the proliferation of homeschooling in all its forms, the web, and the rise of alternative media, the days of “unity” are thankfully coming to an end.

While I’m not one who believes that the internet will by itself cause libertarianism to sweep the globe, it does appear that the variety of information offered by the web and by the home education movement will lead to division and dissent and variety where it has not existed in decades.

Buchanan looks upon this with horror. For the nationalists, widespread unity, uniformity and obedience are to be desired for that is what allows a vast nation-state like the United States to function. The suppression of cultural minorities by the cultural majority, along lines desired by the cultural elites, made the American leviathan state of the 20th and 21st century possible.

The conservative culture warriors who now complain about secularist left-wing control of schools and other cultural institutions are only suffering at the hands of a beast they created. The forces of conservatism created the public schools to teach watered-down American Protestantism, to beat the foreign languages out of students, and to above all, “assimilate.” They got their assimilation machine, but now the shoe is on the other foot, and when we look at the speech codes, and the P.C. wars and propaganda coming out of the public schools, we should all thank the right-wing guardians of American culture who made it all possible.

That age of assimilation, however, whether to right-wing or left wing ideals, is coming to an end. The future is likely to look much different. The future will bring cultural division, and with it, political division, just as Buchanan predicts.

It had always been unnatural for the American central government to hammer into one polity the people of New Mexico and the people of Massachusetts, for example. To tell 300 million people of such diverse origin that they’re all part of one giant nation-state, was always nonsensical except in only the loosest confederation. Centralization made assimilation to a centrally-determined ideal necessary, and by 1960, we got it. And it made Pat Buchanan happy.

The future divisions that come, on the other hand, will simply be a matter of recognizing the cultural, economic, and ideological divisions which had always been there, but had been covered over by state “education.” Immigration will contribute to this, but that factor is by no means the only one.

Unfortunately, there is a great downside to this as well. In the wake of political disintegration, the American nation-state will leave behind a huge government apparatus: the remnants of a federally-funded and militarized police forces, its subsidized agricultural systems, its military bases, and a political culture devoted to seizing power and control whenever possible. The destruction of the family as a central economic institution, and the hobbling of the market itself will all lead to impoverishment and a desire by different and disgruntled groups to control the machinery of power that the centralized nation-state will leave as it recedes.

With this will come conflict, unrest, and violence along economic, ethnic and racial lines. It will just be part of the legacy of the American nation-state which the nationalists still trumpet as our savior.

Buchanan thinks the best thing to do is to keep up the façade; to paper over the deep divisions with flag-waving American history classes for the indoctrination of the young into embracing “unity.”

That’s an idea for an age long past, and the time has come to abandon that failed experiment that is the centralized American state. But, as usual, we’ll be left with cleaning up the messes the state will leave behind.

The Best of Ryan McMaken

Some critics of Edward Snowden criticize his chosen escape route from the United States. This criticism initially showed up as moralistic shock and outrage over the fact that Snowden had chosen to flee to China. “Why, China is an oppressive regime!” the critics cried.

Like most states, including the United States, China is in fact authoritarian, and not exactly a libertarian utopia. For Snowden, however (and it’s hard to blame him for this), it was better to be in China, than to be tortured in a military prison somewhere like Bradley Manning. Snowden has now apparently left China and is in Russia.

In neither Russia or China, has the local regime shown much interest in delivering Snowden to Snowden’s pursuers. Snowden, so far, it appears, has been rather savvy in his strategy to elude the American police state.

For the average regime apologist, for whom the U.S. government is the embodiment of all things just and moral, it is for some reason outrageous that Snowden has been playing one regime against another to protect his own interests. He knows that the Russian and Chinese governments have little interest in helping the American regime, and he also knows that in those two countries at least, the local regime was less likely to be bullied by the Americans into turning him over. We live in a multipolar world now, and not the world of the “American Superpower” that nostalgic neocons still pine for.

In response, the claims of the nationalists in the media and government has been to claim that Snowden is somehow a traitor or in league with the U.S’s “enemies.” We’re told he’s a Chinese spy. Now that he’s in Russia, I guess we’re supposed to assume he is a Russian spy. The fact that these foreign regimes which Snowden is using to his advantage do not adhere to libertarian notions of civil liberties, is supposed to therefore prove to us that Snowden must not actually care about liberty, and that’s he’s some sort of hypocrite. This claim doesn’t follow logically, of course, and it merely shows that Snowden likes to move to whatever place he feels is most likely to meet his particular needs.

People do this all the time, including libertarian-minded ones, who might move to a less free, more oppressive American State (i.e. New York) or unfree foreign country (i.e., The United Kingdom) in order to earn more money or be close to relatives. Few reasonable people would call someone a hypocrite because he accepted a job transfer to California, even if said person advocates for lower taxes or more gun ownership.

It is also true that Snowden is simply doing what states do all the time, which is to engage in realpolitik in pursuit of their own interests. Why is it immoral for Snowden to play the Russian regime against the American one, when it is moral for the American regime to pit the Syrian “rebels” (who eat the internal organs of their victims) against the Syrian regime? Over the years, the United States has allied itself with an endless list of mass murderers ranging from Stalin to Pol Pot to Pinochet and Saddam Hussein. But Snowden lived in China for a little while! What an horrible guy!

Unlike states, which use realpolitik to increase their own power and ability to kill, maim, and steal, Snowden has employed similar methods in the pursuit of being left alone and to simply tell Americans what the US Government does with our money.

The Best of Ryan McMaken

When discussing various atrocities committed against the Native Americans throughout history, apologists for this particular type of state-sponsored killing will often resort to pointing out that Indians murdered many settlers and their families. This claim, which is true enough, really only begs the question, however, of why white Americans were on Indian lands to begin with.

The easy answer is that the settlers were poor and wanted free land. That’s true too, but to appreciate the economic and political realities behind the mass western migration of whites, we have to look at how it was encouraged and subsidized by U.S. Government policy during the nineteenth and early twentieth century.

From the very beginning, governments have had an interest in encouraging their subjects to move to new lands and colonize them. A sizable population of settlers from the mother country makes conquest easier, while providing greater ease in making claims to lands against the incursion of foreign governments.

The downside of having subjects in new lands is that it’s expensive to defend them from the indigenous population. This means having to spend money on forts and military detachments designed to protect one’s subjects from the natives.

Students of the American Revolution know that this was an important factor in the war. As the Crown saw things, the British state had incurred an enormous expense protecting American colonists from the French and various Indian tribes, and the Crown wanted the Americans to pay for it. Thus, they taxed the Americans. In addition, the Crown limited westward expansion for the colonists in an effort to keep down the expense of dealing with the Indians in the interior. The Americans resented both the taxes and limitations on new settlements.

The American victory in that war that resulted ended the British restrictions on westward expansion. By the mid-nineteenth century, a new pattern had been well established. White people moved west, and then they demanded military protection for their settlements. Members of Congress, eager to retain their seats, were happy to oblige. The move to universal manhood suffrage in the following decades then opened the door for massive voter pressure to be applied in Congress as settlers demanded more cheap land. The solution? Get rid of the Indians. The result was the Removal of Indian tribes in 1830 and similar subsequent policies. It was interest-group politics at its most pure.

By the time the Civil War ended, the U.S. government found itself with a massive standing army, and a huge frontier to open up to the voters.

With the adoption of the Homestead Act of 1862, the frontier then became America’s biggest voter-subsidy program in which the Federal government subsidized the wealth of hundreds of thousands of Americans.

Modified for various times and places, the Homestead Acts provided a legislatively designated amount of land for little or no money in exchange for living on and “improving” the land.

Prior to this, westward settlement had been more haphazard, more decentralized, and it came with fewer assurances from the Federal government that it would remove all native populations to make room for the new settlers.

Following the war, however, westward expansion entered a new phase marked by massive Federal subsidies in the form of free land, military protection, and the railroads.

There were restrictions on where settlers could move, with Indian reservations being off limits. Yet most Americans assumed, correctly, that if they moved in or near Indian territories, the U.S. government would eventually be pressured into moving the Indians into even more remote locations.

At its core, westward expansion had always been a wealth transfer scheme. It was a transfer of wealth from Indians, who did not have a vote, to whites, who did have a vote. In the post Civil War period, the Federal spending on railroads and the frontier army also transferred wealth from the taxpayers as a whole to the frontier populations. The whites in the East paid for it via tariffs and other Federal taxes while the Indians paid what might be glibly described as a 100 percent land forfeiture tax.

Following the typical sequence of events behind interest group politics, politicians who sought to respect treaties with Indians were punished at the ballot box, while politicians who were eager to oblige the voters by handing over Indian lands, were rewarded. Indeed, one might say the destruction of the Plains Indians was one of the greatest textbook examples of American democracy in action.

This was basically “stimulus” and “job creation” frontier-style, complete with shovel-ready infrastructure projects (the railroads) and plenty of military spending.

This massive stimulus project even produced its own booms, busts, and bubbles. When the Lakota were finally starved and murdered into submission, the opening of the Dakota Territory produced the Great Dakota Boom that lead to a 734% increase in population from 1870 to 1880 in what is now South Dakota. Not surprisingly, the boom ended with capital flight and a return to reality for the standard of living in the territory.

But that didn’t stop the flood west well beyond 1890, with miners, farmers, and other settlers looking for cheap land gained by military conquest and paid for with the blood of Apaches, Utes, Cheyennes and others.

Moreover, as is often the case with government wealth transfers and subsidies, the frontier stimulus and welfare programs produced a sense of entitlement in the minds of many Americans.

This attitude was even dramatized in Laura Ingalls Wilder’s autobiographical Little House series of books.

In Little House on the Prairie (1935), Charles Ingalls moves the family to “Indian Territory” in what is now Kansas. It’s not entirely clear if the land they’re settling on is open to settlement or not, but it is just assumed that it eventually will be open to settlement, so the Ingallses built a house and a farm. After several uneventful encounters with Indians, it’s the U.S. Army that forces the Ingallses off the land, informing them that the territory is not open.

This message isn’t received well by Charles, and in By the Shores of Silver Lake (1939), Charles remarks that the U.S. Government still owed him a homestead after forcing him off the Kansas land. Later, while planning his homestead in South Dakota, Charles sings a song, which was no doubt popular among homesteaders of the age:

Oh, come to this country,
And have no fear of harm,
Our Uncle Sam is rich enough,
To give us all a farm!

While not quite something for nothing, free frontier lands were nonetheless something more for something less than what would have been the case on a frontier characterized by unsubsidized markets. The settlers wanted land without having to buy it from Indians or anyone else, and they wanted to be able to move to unsettled lands without having to make provision for their own self defense. Many of us would no doubt desire the same were we in a similar situation, but the fact remains that frontier policy of the post-war period was just as much about the politics of hand-outs as anything else.

In nineteenth-century America, had freedom been the rule instead of state-managed and centrally-planned settlement, settlers would have been free to attempt a move to Indian lands of course, but without any guarantees of safety or cheap land handed over by the state. In order to be allowed to stay on Indians lands, new settlers would have had to provide services and goods the Indians could not produce themselves. Gunsmiths, blacksmiths, merchants and doctors would have all of course been highly valuable. Settlers who wanted land, on the other hand, such as miners and farmers, would have been driven off.

As always, trade would have been a great unifying and pacifying factor, and those who contend that Indians and whites were too culturally incompatible to trade are indulging in the leftist myths about Indians being unable to comprehend private ownership, trade, and markets.

Had the Feds not moved in to arrange free lands for settlers, the evolution of the frontier would have been slower, more socially complex, and would likely have been characterized by a network of whites in towns and villages along waterways and private railroads, surrounded by Indian-controlled hinterlands. There are examples of just this sort of settlement pattern in various times and places, but such processes of free settlement are of little use to states.

Much better for states is the nineteenth-century frontier model in which the central government moves in, seizes vast tracts of land, and then doles out some of it to voters. Even better for the central government is the fact that if often gets to keep huge amounts of stolen land for itself, and to this day over 50 percent of land in most Western states is owned by the Federal government.

The claim that settlers somehow had to be there and were but meek child-like innocents seeking to make their way in the world has little basis in reality. As Kit Carson noted, the reservation system became a necessity (in his mind) due to the fact that settlers relentlessly moved onto Indian lands and then agitated for more government protection, railroads, and free lands. The U.S. government was happy to oblige, and the symbiotic relationship between voter and government in the pursuit of stolen goods continues to this day.

The Invisible Hand in Popular Culture: Liberty vs. Authority in Film and TV
By Paul Cantor
University Press of Kentucky, 2012

Reading an essay by Paul Cantor is a bit like having dinner with someone who has read thousands of books, and can speak enlighteningly for hours on everything from Greek myth to Marxism to Star Trek VI. By the time it’s all over, you greatly wish you’d actually read all those assigned books you were too drunk to finish reading in college.

Cantor, an expert on Shakespeare and a professor of English at the University of Virginia, has again returned to the topic of television and film with his new book The Invisible Hand in Popular Culture: Liberty vs. Authority in American Film and TV, and further expands on the topics of globalization, markets, and state power first presented in his 2001 book Gilligan Unbound.

This new volume is even more substantial than the previous one, featuring ten essays on film and television ranging from UFO movies to Westerns to South Park. In addition, the introduction provides an extensive discussion on the very nature of pop culture, how it is produced, and how it should be interpreted.

Written in clear language for the curious layman, but carefully footnoted for the scholar, Invisible Hand helps us look in a new way at the images on the screen that undeniably have an enormous effect on the viewer’s notions of history, government, freedom, and the human experience.

Cantor begins with The Searchers (1956) and looks at its themes of revenge in light of another revenge cycle, Aeschylus’sOresteia. In the frontier of the Western genre, the lawlessness of the new lands is reflected in the words of Aeschylus, written millennia before:

Go where heads are severed, eyes gouged out, where Justice and bloody slaughter are the same… castrations, wasted seed, young men’s glories butchered…

In the Western genre, this is so often the nature of the American frontier neatly summarized, and we can only ask ourselves: who shall impose order?

Cantor goes on to note that this question is answered in a variety of ways in Westerns, with two distinct and opposing options offered by the television shows Have Gun – Will Travel (1957-1963) andDeadwood (2004-2006).

Have Gun provides the (conventional and authoritarian) view offered by Westerns, and as Cantor notes, the show’s hero Paladin imposes order on a frontier composed largely of racist rubes, petty tyrants and superstitious fools. Every town, it seems, has a lynch mob, and the “unending sequence of tyrannical rich men” in Have Gun sets the stage for many showdowns between the enlightened and refined hero Paladin and his backward enemies.

Paladin, Cantor notes, looks remarkably like the members of the ruling class in Washington D.C. and New York at the timeHave Gun was made. Sophisticated, highly educated technocrats were the heroes of the day (at least among people making television shows) and Paladin fit the bill. Everywhere on the frontier, Paladin’s intervention is necessary for “Paladin never seems to come upon a functioning community, with a set of decent political institutions that make it capable of self-government.”

At the other end of the spectrum is the HBO series Deadwood, in which the people of the town of Deadwood are perfectly capable of self-government. If the “enlightened” people show up in Deadwood, it’s usually to steal something.

Cantor examines Deadwood in light of the debate between Hobbes and Locke. Cantor concludes that Deadwood is in many ways explicitly libertarian, condemning government and praising private property as a civilizing force in numerous ways. Is the state necessary for order or do property, peace and prosperity pre-date the state? Deadwood, it seems, comes down firmly in the latter camp.

The people of Deadwood – uneducated, foul-mouthed, and unsophisticated – explicitly reject rule by far away and refined elites. They’ll take freedom instead.

A similar theme comes through in Cantor’s chapter on Mars Attacks! (1996) in which the wealthy elites of the American establishment are naïve, stupid, incompetent, and corrupt. As Cantor observes, the elites, in spite of all their massive machines of war, and blinded my their devotion to “diversity,” are unable or unwilling to defend Earth from the vicious and murderous Martians. In the end, the earth is saved by a ragtag gang of has-been athletes, scumbag capitalists, and gun-loving trailer trash who defeat the aliens after learning that their heads explode when exposed to the sounds of a Slim Whitman song.

Cantor details how the Mars Attacks! narrative, in which common men and women save humanity, is a complete inversion of the Cold War-era flying saucer movies in which government soldiers, experts, and intellectuals save humanity from invading aliens. Indeed, “the people” in the traditional Cold War films are rarely pictured as anything other than a panicking and hapless mob, while the sophisticated and virtuous people of the U.S. Government do their jobs with admirable precision.

Although today taking many forms and exploring many themes, the alien invasion motif, Cantor notes, is alive and well in American popular culture. At this point, Cantor returns to a topic he knows well – The X-Files (1993-2002) – and notes how numerous modern television shows have carried on the legacy of government conspiracies and alien invasions.

And here again, we find the conflict between “the experts” and the ordinary individual straining against an authoritarian order so stacked against her. The victimization of Scully in The X-Files reflects one of the central fears dramatized in the series. Cantor explains:

Although conventional despots like Saddam Hussein are occasionally mentioned in The X-Files, the “tyrant” in the show is more likely to take the form of a man in a white coat, calmly asking you to submit to an examination or an inoculation. The underlying fear in The X-Files is that the world is now being run by experts, who lay claim to rule based on their scientific and technological know-how, not their political and military victories…Among the most ominous words a character in The X-Files can hear is “this is for your own good.”

All of these shows explored similar themes to the X-Files and examined the role the state has in failing to protect citizens from alien invasions. The underlying fear these shows, capitalize on, Cantor contends, is not just the fear of foreign immigrants, but also a fear of powerlessness in the face of forces beyond our control. Immigration, terrorism, disease epidemics, and culture wars are all addressed through the lens of these shows. Often, the victims include the traditional family, freedom, and most of the institutions we hold dear. In these shows, the triumphalism and deference to experts of the Cold War years is long gone.

In 2008, Fox introduced Fringe (2008-2013) which closely resembled The X-Files in a number of details, although instead of offering aliens, the show featured interactions between our own world and a mysterious dystopian parallel universe.

Furthermore, as Cantor noted in a recent interview with the Mises Institute, “Fringe became overtly libertarian in its fifth and final season, even changing its ‘flash cards’ in its opening credits to emphasize libertarian themes. Can you believe that the show spotlighted ‘ownership’ in its opening catalog of the fundamental principles of human existence?”

The endurance of shows like Fringe, Cantor theorizes, illustrates that in spite of events like 9/11, institutional corruption, conspiracies, and the betrayal of the American people by its own government, remain a popular theme in television.

I’ve only managed to touch on some of the many topics Cantor covers in this wide-ranging book. In the chapter on film noir, for example, Cantor looks at capitalism, the open road, and the Marxian Frankfurt School’s effects on American pop culture, while his chapter on South Park illustrates how the show’s creators, Trey Parker and Matt Stone, speak libertarian truth to power “Out of the Potty Mouths of Babes.”

In a world of government-subsidized “fine” art that virtually no one looks at or cares about, capitalist pop culture is the real art today that reflects the prejudices, hopes, fears, and ideologies of our time. Paul Cantor offers us a helpful guide in navigating the pop culture of our own age, while illuminating it with history, philosophy, high academic theory, and even the epic poetry of ages long past.

According to the Associated Press, new billboards in northern Colorado are controversial for using the fate of the Native Americans as an illustration of the dangers of gun control. The billboards are in the style of a reddit meme and feature a photograph of three men in traditional Plains Indian attire, with the caption “Turn in your arms. The Government will take care of you.”

According to the AP, one person condemned the billboard for “making light of atrocities the federal government committed against Native Americans.”

Had the journalist or anyone interviewed for this story done any actual research on this matter, he or she would have quickly learned that the billboard is obviously based on a series of memes that have been around for years in various forms, and far from “making light” of atrocities against the Indians, are intended to be deadly serious (for the most part) in their references to the genocidal wars waged against the Indians.

Some interviewed for the piece went on to declare the message of the billboards as “extreme,” and it says a lot that pointing out the indisputable fact that the treatment of Native Americans throughout most of American history has been based on deception and murder is considered by some people to be “extreme.”

The issue of Indians and gun control is of course an important one, because it illustrates so well that disarming a population is a key factor in subjugating it. The case of the Indians is a little different from modern variants of gun control, however, because Indians were so rarely considered to be full-blown American citizens.

Unlike the policies toward Indians adopted in the Spanish colonies, which were based on conquest and assimilation, including citizenship for all baptized Indians, Indian policy in the United States and Canada was based on apartheid and extermination. So, the Indians in the U.S. never really had any reasonable chance of having any of their universal rights respected by the U.S. government.

For this reason, the treatment of the Indians, perhaps more than that any other group, serves as the most “pure” example of the consequences of being disarmed. Obviously, any claim that Indians were legally protected by treaties with the U.S. government would be darkly laughable, and because of their status as legal unpersons, we can indeed make the claim that the Indians’ arms were often the only thing standing between them and total genocide.

When Indians were able to gain some small concessions, it was often thanks to the uncompromising resistance of men like Geronimo who repeatedly embarrassed and exhausted military forces to the point where they were willing to negotiate. (Geronimo today, of course, would be labeled a “terrorist” and assassinated by drone without trial.)

Most Indian tribes were always negotiating from a position of weakness, because they were so massively outnumbered by endless waves of whites who immigrated to North America. But often, it was their guns that won tribes some modicum of negotiating power when dealing with the U.S. government.

In top of this, we might note that Indians often received treatment from private citizens that was at least as bad as what they got at the hands of the U.S. Cavalry. The history of mob justice waged against Indians in California, the Southwest, and a host of other locales is appalling and grotesque to say the least. Indeed, personal arms carried by Indians were perhaps the only thing that might have helped against a gang of drunk and rampaging white miners on the frontier. The disarming of Indians also put them at the mercy of these Indian-hating rubes.

This situation became even worse for the Indians after the Civil War when battle-hardened war veterans were only too happy to participate in massacres of Indian civilians. Such was the case as the Sand Creek Massacre when Colonel John Chivington, Civil War Union “hero” and racist scumbag, lead a group of Colorado and New Mexico soldiers to murder Cheyenne and Arapahoe women, children, old men, and babies on the Colorado plains in 1864, thus wiping out entire extended families in some cases. Does anyone seriously contend that it would not have been a good thing for the victims to have been better armed?

We might also note that the Wounded Knee Massacre of 1890 started out as an effort to disarm the Lakota. Having learned by experience that one should not trust the U.S. government, however, some of the civilians resisted, and the men in the 7th U.S. Cavalry went berserk, murdering over 200 women and children.

Some might contend that the Lakota (and the Apaches and all other resisters) should have just given up their arms and negotiated. That’s an easy thing to say in hindsight, especially when by 1890, the Lakota had already endured a campaign by the U.S. government to exterminate the buffalo as an effort to starve the Plains Indians to death.

The Wounded Knee massacre was just one of many massacres and skirmishes that began as operations designed to disarm the Indians. The U.S. government knew then, as it does today, that disarming a population is a necessary part of the “peace” process in which peace consists of the absolute surrender of any and all groups who might offer resistance.

The indisputable justice of disarming the Indians was once met with widespread approval, of course. A common theme in popular culture, specifically in the Western genre, is the righteousness of disarming “savages” and other non-whites.

In my book Commie Cowboys, I examine the frequently-employed subplot in Western films in which villains attempt to sell guns to Indians, thus endangering the lives of the good and decent white people of the frontier. It is explicitly noted in numerous cavalry films of the 1940s and 1950s (such as those of John Ford), that an important function of the U.S. Cavalry was to enforce embargoes against arms sales to the Indians. To emphasize the savagery of the Indians themselves, these arms dealers are often killed by the Indians after the sales “go bad” for some reason.

One film in which this theme is key to the central plot is The Man From Laramie (1955) in which a U.S. Cavalry veteran, played by James Stewart, hunts an evil capitalist who attempts to sell repeating rifles to the Indians. The result of these sales, we are told, will lead to a general uprising among the Indians and the extermination of the whites for miles around. One can imagine 1950s movie audiences bobbing their heads in agreement as the film strains to explain to us the calamitous evil that will befall us if the U.S. government does not enforce gun control.

In such pop culture propaganda of the good old days, government soldiers are always honorable, always rational, and always doing the right thing. To show American soldiers doing what they really did at Sand Creek would be considered “politically correct” and unpatriotic by the purveyors of nostalgia as history. Indeed, as Mark Crovelli has shown, the sort of deference shown toward the U.S. government by tradition-minded Americans has paved the way for modern gun control.

Now the shoe is on the other foot, and the “enemy” is us. If you see something, say something, citizen, for your neighbor is probably a nutcase and murderer, although you may not know it yet. Fortunately, we have the government to disarm the modern savages, which is a category that includes you.

Although the supreme irony of this situation may escape some adherents of Geezer Conservatism, the irony certainly isn’t lost on younger Americans who are increasingly familiar with the endless train of atrocities committed by the U.S. government in the name of civilization and peace.

It’s silly to think that those Colorado billboards are somehow insulting Native Americans. If anything, the real fear of the government now felt by many modern Americans has made them sympathize with one of the chief victims of the American regime. The only insult here is that the sympathy has come about 200 years too late.

Jonah Goldberg, long-time hanger-on at National Review, has a long history of hating libertarians. And yet, his knee-jerk disdain for them has been backed a bit into a corner by the fact that libertarianism is far more popular than conservatism, and that conservatism is basically dead weight in a movement being kept afloat by the Ron Pauls of the world.

Perhaps reflecting his realization of the new reality, in a February 2012 blog post, Goldberg went to bat for Austrian economics, in the context of an article about Ron Paul, and criticized the New York Times’s ”glib” portrayal of Austrian Economics as idiosyncratic and not mainstream.

At the time, The Daily Bell declared this comment by Goldberg as a sort of apology to the Austrian Economics-inspired libertarians (specifically the Rothbardian variety) for saying they could all fit in a phone booth:

Many years ago, leading conservative pundit Jonah Goldberg lost his temper and wrote that Lew Rockwell (of LewRockwell.com and Mises.org) and his libertarian colleagues could fit into a “phone booth.”

Not so fast. Today, those who have a lively interest in Austrian free-market economics or who are outright supporters of the magnificent ideas inherent in “human action” and free-market money are a forceful factor throughout the blogosphere.

Goldberg couldn’t even get his defense of Austrian Economics right, though, as Goldberg is apparently under the impression that Milton Friedman was part of the Austrian School.

However, by March 2013, Goldberg was back to his old self, and was careful to steer clear of anything that might be construed as anything other than good ol’ reliable beltway libertarianism. You know, the kind that talks a good game about low taxes, but does nothing to actually attack the state itself.

In Goldberg’s March 2013 column, titled “Fusion Power on the Right” Goldberg makes an attempt to make nice with libertarians, although, he is careful to not mention Ron Paul at any point, and of course, completely ignores the problem of foreign policy. In other words, Goldberg’s position is more or less: “Hey, we like libertarians. We agree on almost everything, So let’s do that fusionism thing again.”

In the column, Goldberg is forced to admit, that yes, libertarianism is more popular than conservatism, especially among the young. although he is careful to declare that the only acceptable sort of libertarianism is the soft-core, “libertarian conservatism” of Rand Paul and Jim DeMint, which of course is a type of libertarianism that doesn’t demand much more than to perform a few strategic amputations while leaving the giant bloated warmongering creature that is the U.S. government largely in tact.

For most people who don’t suffer from beltway-induced mental blocks, however, it is clear that the bulk of the libertarian movement, especially that among the young, is of the Ron Paulian/Rothbardian variety. This is also known in D.C./New York as “The Libertarianism That Must Not Be Named.”

Basically, Goldberg at this point is just back to normal, and his Old Self hates libertarians of the radical variety influenced by Paul and Rothbard.

However, these days we see that Goldberg has been forced to make nice with libertarians, in spite of his spittle-flecked hatred of any libertarian who registers a libertarianism any stronger than that of the good, safe, and non-threatening (to the state) F.A. Hayek. Goldberg invokes – like every good conservative who wants libertarians to just go away – Frank Meyer’s fusionism. This time around, the appeal to fusionism smells of desperation, though, as conservatism’s stinking corpse is going to need a lot more than a few libertarians grafted onto it to save it from total oblivion.

Goldberg nevertheless has come a long way from declaring that all libertarians could fit in a phone booth. In fact, there’s an interesting little story behind Goldberg’s Phone Booth Period in conservative strategy. Let’s explore some of it now.

The phone booth comment appeared in an article titled “Libertarians Under my Skin,” from 2001. But before we get to that article, we have to look back a little further. The phone booth article was one of several articles issued by Goldberg denouncing libertarians, and specifically denouncing the sort of libertarianism associated with LewRockwell.com. (Namely, Ron Paulian/Rothbardian libertarianism.)

The whole anti-libertarian phalanx of articles by Goldberg was touched off by a February 9, 2001 article (“Goldberg’s Conservative Canon”) in which Goldberg asserted that libertarians are useful for fighting some leftists, but that you wouldn’t want libertarians to ever actually be in charge of anything. Goldberg denounces “semi-anarchist” libertarians and “purists” and then proudly advertises that he doesn’t know anything written by Ludwig von Mises and states: “if you want the purist libertarian stuff, go read something by Ludwig Von Mises. Honestly, though, I don’t know what that would be.”

This column, is no longer online, although you can read it on Google cache.

Myles Kantor and David Dieteman took exception to Goldberg’s blanket dismissal of libertarians here and here.

In response to those two columns, Goldberg wrote an article denouncing libertarians in even stronger terms. In a March 2, 2001 column titled “Libertarians Under my Skin” Goldberg responds to Kantor and Dieteman by announcing that no one cares what anyone at LewRockwell.com thinks.

But they can be exhausting. In the last couple weeks three different Lewrockwell.com-ers have banged their spoons on their high chairs about me. I’ve been called a “schmuck” by one guy, a closet socialist by two, and an ignoramus by all three. That’s all okay, I’m certainly not one to throw stones about name-calling. But I do wish the attacks were done better…

Anyway, I really don’t think it’s worth anyone’s time to do a point-by-point rebuttal because, well, nobody cares…

Goldberg of course does not address any actual points about the intellectual history of libertariansism because he knows nothing about it. He has at this point, already established his credentials as someone who can’t name anything written by Mises.

It is in this column, dripping with condescension, that Goldberg decides that libertarians all fit in a phone booth. The LewRockwell.com libertarians fit in a small phone booth, and the “larger universe of organized-movement libertarians” fit in a “bigger phone booth.”

This article has also been removed from NRO, although you can read it here.

So much for the libertarians.

At this point, Kantor and Dieteman respond to the March 2 article in the pages of NRO itself, here and here.

For libertarians, both of these columns are simply elementary explanations of libertarianism, although the actual realities of libertarian thought and scholarship apparently are news to Goldberg.

Further enraged by the insolence of these nobodies known as libertarians, Goldberg pens a column titled “Farewell, Lew Rockwell” declaring that debating libertarians of the LRC variety is best described by that proverb which states “never argue with an idiot.”

Goldberg first excommunicates Kantor and Dieteman for their inability to be “reasonable” like the “classical liberals” at Reason and Cato.

He then moves on to cast aside Daniel McCarthy (current editor of The American Conservative) who had jumped into the fray calling for conservative tolerance of libertarians.

Goldberg then goes berserk on Bob Murphy, (that Bob Murphy) declaring him a “no-talent ass-clown” who “clearly thinks a great deal of himself” and who should, Goldberg asserts, be barred from writing for LRC ever again.

Goldberg ends this column by announcing that he will soon post an article titled “Why Harry Browne is Wrong.”

“Farewell, Lew Rockwell” is still up on NRO for now.

On June 22 of that year, Goldberg was back for more with an article titled “The Libertarian Lobe.” This time, Goldberg asserts that libertarianism “tells kids everything they want to be told” Indeed, the word “kids” appears five times in the first five paragraphs. He notes:

But, as is usually the case in Washington, the libertoids were the most ideologically aggressive, both during the Q&A and in private conversations. It was these kids – interns from Cato, fresh Borg drones from the Libertarian party, and kids who as teenagers had read Ayn Rand or Murray Rothbard the way others had listened to Bruce Springsteen – who seemed the most cross with me.

In other words, libertarianism is a simplistic ideology that appeals primarily to children who are incapbable of the more nuanced thought of the conservatives. At this point, Stephan Kinsella chimed in:

Goldberg’s implication here is that libertarianism is somehow fallacious, if it can only attract the attentions of the naive and inexperienced, if clever and passionate, young. (He conveniently forgets that Murray Rothbard, whom he recognizes as being a key libertarian figure, was a radical libertarian well into his sixties.) I say “implication,” because Goldberg never quite specifies what is wrong with libertarianism, much less does he try to provide an argument. Instead of an argument, he offers merely his own self-contradictory opinions, which are laced with condescension, attitude, smug snideness, and ad hominem, and full of confusion and misstatements about the nature of libertarianism.

Thus ends, for the most part, the 2001 Jonah Goldberg-National Review five-minute hate against libertarianism.Two years later, Goldberg attempted to smear libertarians yet again with a blog comment in which he refers to “the defenders of Jim Crow over at Lew Rockwell’s shop.” This smear was then obliterated by Kantor shortly thereafter.

That very same day, Lew Rockwell, Justin Raimondo, and Joe Sobran, among others, were cast into the outer darkness, by David Frum of all people, for being Unpatriotic Conservatives and not supporting the gloriously successful Iraq War. National Review couldn’t even get that right. None of those guys were conservatives in 2003.

Jonah Goldberg, long-time hanger-on at National Review, has a long history of hating libertarians. And yet, his knee-jerk disdain for them has been backed a bit into a corner by the fact that libertarianism is far more popular than conservatism, and that conservatism is basically dead weight in a movement being kept afloat by the Ron Pauls of the world.

Perhaps reflecting his realization of the new reality, in a February 2012 blog post, Goldberg went to bat for Austrian economics, in the context of an article about Ron Paul, and criticized the New York Times’s “glib” portrayal of Austrian Economics as idiosyncratic and not mainstream.

At the time, The Daily Bell declared this comment by Goldberg as a sort of apology to the Austrian Economics-inspired libertarians (specifically the Rothbardian variety) for saying they could all fit in a phone booth:

Many years ago, leading conservative pundit Jonah Goldberg lost his temper and wrote that Lew Rockwell (of LewRockwell.com and Mises.org) and his libertarian colleagues could fit into a “phone booth.”

Not so fast. Today, those who have a lively interest in Austrian free-market economics or who are outright supporters of the magnificent ideas inherent in “human action” and free-market money are a forceful factor throughout the blogosphere.

Goldberg couldn’t even get his defense of Austrian Economics right, though, as Goldberg is apparently under the impression that Milton Friedman was part of the Austrian School.

However, by March 2013, Goldberg was back to his old self, and was careful to steer clear of anything that might be construed as anything other than good ol’ reliable beltway libertarianism. You know, the kind that talks a good game about low taxes, but does nothing to actually attack the state itself.

In Goldberg’s March 2013 column, titled “Fusion Power on the Right” Goldberg makes an attempt to make nice with libertarians, although, he is careful to not mention Ron Paul at any point, and of course, completely ignores the problem of foreign policy. In other words, Goldberg’s position is more or less: “Hey, we like libertarians. We agree on almost everything, So let’s do that fusionism thing again.”

In the column, Goldberg is forced to admit, that yes, libertarianism is more popular than conservatism, especially among the young. although he is careful to declare that the only acceptable sort of libertarianism is the soft-core, “libertarian conservatism” of Rand Paul and Jim DeMint, which of course is a type of libertarianism that doesn’t demand much more than to perform a few strategic amputations while leaving the giant bloated warmongering creature that is the U.S. government largely in tact.

For most people who don’t suffer from beltway-induced mental blocks, however, it is clear that the bulk of the libertarian movement, especially that among the young, is of the Ron Paulian/Rothbardian variety. This is also known in D.C./New York as “The Libertarianism That Must Not Be Named.”

Basically, Goldberg at this point is just back to normal, and his Old Self hates libertarians of the radical variety influenced by Paul and Rothbard.

However, these days we see that Goldberg has been forced to make nice with libertarians, in spite of his spittle-flecked hatred of any libertarian who registers a libertarianism any stronger than that of the good, safe, and non-threatening (to the state) F.A. Hayek. Goldberg invokes – like every good conservative who wants libertarians to just go away – Frank Meyer’s fusionism. This time around, the appeal to fusionism smells of desperation, though, as conservatism’s stinking corpse is going to need a lot more than a few libertarians grafted onto it to save it from total oblivion.

Goldberg nevertheless has come a long way from declaring that all libertarians could fit in a phone booth. In fact, there’s an interesting little story behind Goldberg’s Phone Booth Period in conservative strategy. Let’s explore some of it now.

The phone booth comment appeared in an article titled “Libertarians Under my Skin,” from 2001. But before we get to that article, we have to look back a little further. The phone booth article was one of several articles issued by Goldberg denouncing libertarians, and specifically denouncing the sort of libertarianism associated with LewRockwell.com. (Namely, Ron Paulian/Rothbardian libertarianism.)

The whole anti-libertarian phalanx of articles by Goldberg was touched off by a February 9, 2001 article (“Goldberg’s Conservative Canon”) in which Goldberg asserted that libertarians are useful for fighting some leftists, but that you wouldn’t want libertarians to ever actually be in charge of anything. Goldberg denounces “semi-anarchist” libertarians and “purists” and then proudly advertises that he doesn’t know anything written by Ludwig von Mises and states: “if you want the purist libertarian stuff, go read something by Ludwig Von Mises. Honestly, though, I don't know what that would be.”

This column, is no longer online, although you can read it on Google cache.

Myles Kantor and David Dieteman took exception to Goldberg’s blanket dismissal of libertarians here and here.

In response to those two columns, Goldberg wrote an article denouncing libertarians in even stronger terms. In a March 2, 2001 column titled “Libertarians Under my Skin” Goldberg responds to Kantor and Dieteman by announcing that no one cares what anyone at LewRockwell.com thinks.

But they can be exhausting. In the last couple weeks three different Lewrockwell.com-ers have banged their spoons on their high chairs about me. I've been called a "schmuck" by one guy, a closet socialist by two, and an ignoramus by all three. That's all okay, I'm certainly not one to throw stones about name-calling. But I do wish the attacks were done better…

Anyway, I really don't think it's worth anyone's time to do a point-by-point rebuttal because, well, nobody cares…

Goldberg of course does not address any actual points about the intellectual history of libertariansism because he knows nothing about it. He has at this point, already established his credentials as someone who can’t name anything written by Mises.

It is in this column, dripping with condescension, that Goldberg decides that libertarians all fit in a phone booth. The LewRockwell.com libertarians fit in a small phone booth, and the "larger universe of organized-movement libertarians” fit in a "bigger phone booth.”

This article has also been removed from NRO, although you can read it here.

So much for the libertarians.

At this point, Kantor and Dieteman respond to the March 2 article in the pages of NRO itself, here and here.

For libertarians, both of these columns are simply elementary explanations of libertarianism, although the actual realities of libertarian thought and scholarship apparently are news to Goldberg.

Further enraged by the insolence of these nobodies known as libertarians, Goldberg pens a column titled “Farewell, Lew Rockwell” declaring that debating libertarians of the LRC variety is best described by that proverb which states “never argue with an idiot.”

Goldberg first excommunicates Kantor and Dieteman for their inability to be “reasonable” like the “classical liberals” at Reason and Cato.

He then moves on to cast aside Daniel McCarthy (current editor of The American Conservative) who had jumped into the fray calling for conservative tolerance of libertarians.

Goldberg then goes berserk on Bob Murphy, (that Bob Murphy) declaring him a “no-talent ass-clown” who “clearly thinks a great deal of himself” and who should, Goldberg asserts, be barred from writing for LRC ever again.

Goldberg ends this column by announcing that he will soon post an article titled “Why Harry Browne is Wrong.”

“Farewell, Lew Rockwell” is still up on NRO for now.

On June 22 of that year, Goldberg was back for more with an article titled “The Libertarian Lobe.” This time, Goldberg asserts that libertarianism “tells kids everything they want to be told” Indeed, the word “kids” appears five times in the first five paragraphs. He notes:

But, as is usually the case in Washington, the libertoids were the most ideologically aggressive, both during the Q&A and in private conversations. It was these kids — interns from Cato, fresh Borg drones from the Libertarian party, and kids who as teenagers had read Ayn Rand or Murray Rothbard the way others had listened to Bruce Springsteen — who seemed the most cross with me.

In other words, libertarianism is a simplistic ideology that appeals primarily to children who are incapbable of the more nuanced thought of the conservatives. At this point, Stephan Kinsella chimed in:

Goldberg's implication here is that libertarianism is somehow fallacious, if it can only attract the attentions of the naive and inexperienced, if clever and passionate, young. (He conveniently forgets that Murray Rothbard, whom he recognizes as being a key libertarian figure, was a radical libertarian well into his sixties.) I say “implication,” because Goldberg never quite specifies what is wrong with libertarianism, much less does he try to provide an argument. Instead of an argument, he offers merely his own self-contradictory opinions, which are laced with condescension, attitude, smug snideness, and ad hominem, and full of confusion and misstatements about the nature of libertarianism.

Thus ends, for the most part, the 2001 Jonah Goldberg-National Review five-minute hate against libertarianism.Two years later, Goldberg attempted to smear libertarians yet again with a blog comment in which he refers to “the defenders of Jim Crow over at Lew Rockwell's shop.” This smear was then obliterated by Kantor shortly thereafter.

That very same day, Lew Rockwell, Justin Raimondo, and Joe Sobran, among others, were cast into the outer darkness, by David Frum of all people, for being Unpatriotic Conservatives and not supporting the gloriously successful Iraq War. National Review couldn’t even get that right. None of those guys were conservatives in 2003.

Ryan McMaken [send him mail] is the author of Commie Cowboys: The Bourgeoisie and the Nation-State in the Western Genre.

The Best of Ryan McMaken

Remember that time Ron Paul used the Golden Rule to explain his foreign policy? Conservatives booed him for that. So who can be surprised that conservatives have been falling all over themselves to condemn Ron Paul for quoting Jesus – in correct context, by the way – to note that the violence wrought by over a decade of nonstop war in America leads to tragedy on the home front?

Every neocon pundit and middle-American red-blooded conservative took a few minutes out from running around shrieking “boo-yah” and polishing his dually F-250 to be outraged that someone dared suggest that a government employee wasn’t a holy relic.

The Daily Caller was the first to the show, posting Paul’s twitter post without comment and allowing the comment box to quickly fill with outraged Republicans who were dismayed that anyone would not endorse every action of every single taxpayer-funded soldier who ever drew a bead on some dirt-poor 12-year-old child-soldier 10,000 miles away. Others soon piled on.

The most transparent were the conservatives who claimed to be former supporters of Paul who must now go support some more “patriotic” politician: One who doesn’t actually question anything the military does.

One member at RonPaulForums.com said “‘Live by the sword, die by the sword’ is what the dumbest, stupidest, most delusional people around here would say. There’s no way that Ron actually said this. Ugh. How said [sic] and pathetic.”

That seems to be the general reaction one gets from conservatives about the Golden Rule also.

This is what it comes down to for most conservatives, of course. All that stuff about laissez faire and freedom and free markets has never been more than an act and an affectation which goes right out the window if someone ever criticizes the US Government in a truly trenchant or penetrating manner.

Most of these sunshine patriots who now whine that Ron Paul has lost their support, wouldn’t ever have supported Ron Paul in the first place if Obama weren’t in office. Had Ron Paul run against a GOP incumbent, most of these timid and prevaricating “opponents” of big government would have condemned Paul for questioning the glorious deeds of “our” Commander-in-Chief. Among conservatives, Ron Paul has only ever had minority support, for in the end, conservatives love government, as exhibited by their latest outrage. They just love it in a slightly different way from the left liberals.

As I’ve noted before, the Tea Party movement, and most conservatives who pretend to be for small government, only act when there’s a Democrat in office. During eight years of Bush shredding the constitution, spending money like there was no tomorrow, and inflating the money supply with his pals at the central bank, no conservative would walk ten feet to protest the federal government. But about five minutes after Obama was sworn in, the Tea Party protests swelled into a huge disingenuous show that will evaporate five minutes after any Republican is sworn into office, assuming the GOP can actually win a national election with one of the out-of-touch never-had-a-real-job rich boys they insist on nominating.

In the end of course, Ron Paul has never been about rallying people to himself. He has been about the message, and the message is about freedom. It is a logical impossibility to be simultaneously pro-freedom and pro-military. Patrick Henry, who called government soldiers “engines of despotism” knew this. Thomas Jefferson knew this. Every true friend of liberty from William Graham Sumner to Murray Rothbard knew this. And Ron Paul knows it. Some of his supporters, still stuck in the mindset of a form of Geezer Conservatism in which “freedom-lovers” bow and scrape before the US Government, denied that Ron Paul could have even agreed with the Twitter post. No such luck for them. The tradition of laissez faire is a tradition against standing armies, and wars, and deference to military “heroics.” Conservatives who are troubled by this should probably be honest with themselves and find a candidate more suitable to their views. I hear Newt Gingrich is still taking donations.

Ryan McMaken [send him mail] is the author of Commie Cowboys: The Bourgeoisie and the Nation-State in the Western Genre.

The Best of Ryan McMaken

Listen to the podcast

ROCKWELL: Good morning. This is the Lew Rockwell Show. And how great to have as our guest today, Ryan McMaken. Ryan is an LRC columnist, a faithful blogger. Always very, very interesting things that he writes. But I want to start off today by talking to him about the course he’s going to teach this summer. He teaches political science at University of Colorado in Denver, and he’s going to be giving a course on American Conservatism and Libertarianism with some very interesting readings.

Ryan, tell us about this course. Tell us what you hope to achieve with it, and why you think people will and should be interested.

MCMAKEN: Well, for whatever reason, the department came to me several months back and asked me if I’d be interested in teaching a class on Conservatism, and I said yes. And I know there’s been national programs to get classes like that, and so they may have been responding to some requests from students. Who knows? But, of course, I wanted the class to be interesting to me as well as to the students, so I thought perhaps the most interesting way to set it up would be to set it up as a conflict between the Libertarians and the Conservatives. That way we could look at the critiques of each movement and learn something that way. I didn’t want the class basically to be a literature review of Conservative writings.

And so it’s been set up essentially as if you had to personify each side. It’s a debate between Buckley and Rothbard essentially. And I set up the class poster and all the class propaganda that way, with pictures of Buckley and Rothbard kind of going at each other and all of that.

(Laughter)

And I think that’s really the interesting way to look at the movement now. And I’ll then be looking at different episodes historically, really since the ’30s, of flashpoints in this conflict between the Libertarians and the Conservatives.

And what’s interesting is that the exact same problems continue, up right to today. And we’re seeing it, I mean, just in the last few days, in the conflict between the party leadership and the Ron Paul movement. It’s all a lot of the same stuff that’s really been going on for decades. And so I’m just going to go back and look through the decades since the ’30s and see, what has this conflict been, and what has it taught us about the nature of the right wing and the Libertarians, and what can we learn from that.

ROCKWELL: The story that Bill Buckley told so successfully came to dominate, came to erase what I would argue is the truth of the situation. But don’t you think it’s being un-erased? Don’t you think that more and more people are becoming aware — maybe because of Rothbard on the web and Ron Paul and many other things — are becoming aware that the story that Buckley and National Review started telling and — well, Buckley in the late ’40s, National Review in the ’50s — is a false story?

MCMAKEN: Well, yes. And it has really no leadership anymore, that whole movement, either. And, yes, 30, 40, 50 years ago, we had the National Review around. It existed in many ways to really purge the movement of undesirable groups that we didn't like. And I think we saw several different episodes of that. There was the original purging back in the ’50s, the early ’50s. We got rid of Frank Chodorov, from The Freeman and from Human Events. It kind of sent him off into the outer darkness to a certain extent there; turned Fees (ph) magazine into just kind of this economics thing, so it didn’t engage anti-Communism as a political issue anymore, and so really kind of cut the Libertarians out originally in that case, because, according to Buckley and that group, they weren’t enough in favor of militant anti-Communism.

And then you had a second set of purges in the ’60s. We got rid of the Birchers. We got rid of the Randians. We got rid of Rothbard and his people.

And then interestingly, again — and there may be episodes I’m missing. But then in 2003, there was another purge where specifically they mentioned Lew Rockwell, Justin Raimondo, Pat Buchanan and others, who were unpatriotic Conservatives. This was a David Frum column that they put out. We’re going to get rid of those people; they’re shouldn’t be around; they hate America, all that sort of thing. And so there was an attempted purge then.

What became, I think, significant in that period was that the purges kind of ceased to have any effect in that, supposedly, we’re going to have this big cover story and we’re not going to hear from these people every again now that we’ve gotten rid of them. But nobody seemed to care by 2003.

And then now, of course, I think it’s to the point where they would love to purge the movement of Ron Paul, but they can’t. They don’t even dare try because it would just delegitimize the whole thing. And who reads National Review really any more any way? I don’t know. But certainly, it doesn’t have the cache it once did decades ago.

And so there’s been, I think, a big change in the overall movement from that side of it, really commanding everything and telling the story they want and everyone believing it, to a totally different situation now where really the biggest microphone it seems between the Conservatives and the Libertarians is actually Ron Paul, because there doesn’t seem to be any other intellectual force in the movement at all, do you think?

ROCKWELL: No. And I think the Paul movement is, of course, fundamentally Rothbardian in its populist orientation and its focusing on the Fed, on issues of war and peace and other issues.

I was just going to mention, you make such a good point about the effect on them of also having no Buckley any more. I knew Bill Buckley a little bit. Tremendously smart, tremendous charismatic, just a man of huge abilities. I happen to think a bad man. But he certainly was just extraordinarily cultured and mannered and just a very, very impressive guy. And he did have an effect in purging people. He was very, very proud of that role, by the way. He also — not only did he do what you said to Frank Chodorov, he got rid of Frank Chodorov from the organization that he founded. It was originally Intercollegiate Society of Individualists. He purged Frank from that and it became the — and installed a Neo-Con in charge of it, Victor Milione, an early Neo-Con. They changed the name to the Intercollegiate Studies Institute.

And Buckley was very, very proud of what he’d done. He loved being the grand inquisitor. Although, or I don’t quite know how he saw himself in that sense.

(Laughter)

But he was very proud of his role. But Lowry or Bill Kristol, or whatever, none of — (laughing) — none of these guys come up to Buckley’s ankle as a public figure. So they really lost all their cache. They’ve lost, as you say, their ability to purge. I think they’ve largely lost their ability to influence. All they do now is just champion the state. I mean, it’s a little bit like this recent “Wall Street Journal” editorial where they say, don’t question anything the government does in national security because, if the government says you’re a terrorist, you’re a terrorist, and anything can be done to you. And you’re an unpatriotic guy. Really, you might even be suspicious yourself if you’re questioning —

(Laughter)

— what’s being done to these terrorists. So that’s what they’ve come down to.

But it certainly is not influencing young people. Young people are eschewing it. They’re having nothing to do with it. And I think this panics them. I think they’re worried about the future because of what Ron Paul has done.

MCMAKEN: And in earlier ages — and you may remember this. I mean, from the —

ROCKWELL: Unfortunately, I probably do, yes. But go ahead.

(Laughter)

MCMAKEN: From the perspective of a young person working within the movement, what was the effect of, say, a purge being handed down by Buckley? Because I can imagine now how an average Paulian would regard a column in National Review or really in any of these organs saying, oh, yes, well, we’re done with those people; they’re out. But was there a demoralizing effect among the youth, say, back in the late ’60s when they told us all that Rothbard was terrible and no good?

ROCKWELL: Only among a small minority. Most people went along with Buckley. I mean, most — (laughing) — this is hard to imagine. Most, a lot of young guys even tried to even imitate Bill Buckley in terms of their own mannerisms —

(Laughter)

— in the way he tapped his teeth with a pencil or whatever, and how he would — his use of vocabulary and so forth. He was a colossus. So some of us, of course, when, say, he purged the Birchers, you know, just made us dislike him more, especially because, of course, he was purging the Birchers for war-and-peace reasons. This is never discussed but, because Robert Welch, then the head of the Birch Society, had come out against the Vietnam War, so that’s why the Birches were purged, not for any of the other reasons they talk about.

And, indeed, I think National Review was started perhaps by CIA money; certainly with the aid of many CIA-connected people, to get rid of the peace movement which had existed in the Old Right and to make everyone a Cold Warrior. So originally, they sort of kept all the other ideological attributes of what was then the right wing movement. Those, of course, have been gradually purged themselves in the years since.

But the key thing they worried about was war and peace. And, of course, they always wanted war.

And I remember when Ron was running in 1988 on the Libertarian Party ticket and he was interviewed by Buckley on Firing Line. It’s on YouTube. Very interesting to see. And the thing that kept bugging Buckley, openly bugging Buckley, and he was bugging Ron over the course of this hour interview, was that the Libertarian Party wanted to abolish the CIA, and Ron Paul did, too. And he thought this was the most outrageous, most horrendous, most, you know, ridiculous, evil thing he had ever heard of.

So, you know, they say there’s no such thing as an ex CIA agent any more than there’s an ex KGB agent or any of — ex Mossad agent or MI6 agent, any of these organizations. You’re in it for life. And I think certainly Buckley continued to be oriented to the national security establishment, the CIA, which, of course, is a group that specializes in overthrowing foreign governments and killing people, lying, professional lying, stealing, all allegedly for the country, right? But, of course not — for the government and for themselves. But everything is so changed.

So when he did these purges, of course, the Libertarians were outraged when he tried to get rid of the Rothbardians. All of us, Objectivists and others, were outraged when he wanted to purge the Randians. It doesn’t mean we agreed with everything, right, or with the Birchers, but just this whole process seemed like a Communist outrage. It seemed like the way the Communist Party operated.

And, of course, many of these Conservatives, not including Buckley, were ex Communists. The ex Communists dominated the Conservative movement rather than going into a monastery and doing penance for the rest of their lives —

(Laughter)

— for what they had done. They were telling everybody else what to do, after having flipped 180 degrees, or maybe not, maybe just flipped a little bit. Then they’re speaking from the moral mountain and telling us what to do.

So they had a huge, bad effect. But that’s all gone. It’s all over. Buckley’s gone. Buckleyism is gone. National Review is just another magazine. The various pygmies who control National Review have no effect on anybody.

So, yes, they’ve gone after Ron Paul relatively gently, by their normal standards, a number of times. And, of course, it’s always rebounded against them. As you point out, they don’t actually dare go after him. He’s such a much bigger figure than anybody they’re associated with — Krauthammer or Kristol or, you know, go down the list of creeps. Ron Paul is today’s colossus. He’s today’s Buckley, only he’s a very good man instead of what Buckley was.

(Laughter)

So this is a thrilling time to be alive, is all I can say.

MCMAKEN: And that’s what I notice as well. And, of course, Paul is something of an anomaly in the sense that he’s not really a politician. In fact, he’s more of a — he’s an intellectual-movement type of person in that he stays in Congress because this enables him to spread this message. And so it’s as you say, doing exactly now what Buckley had done decades before. I’m going to go in, I’m going to start Young Americans for Freedom, in Buckley’s case; in Paul’s case, you’ve got Young Americans for Liberty. YAF, by the way, seems to have completely disappeared. I don’t know —

ROCKWELL: Yes.

(Laughter)

MCMAKEN: — if they do anything anymore.

ROCKWELL: They have been vicious against Ron Paul. And then they went virtually out of existence. Their last act was to attack Ron at a CPAC meeting in a press release, a vicious press release. I think that was the end of them.

(Laughter)

MCMAKEN: Well —

(Crosstalk)

ROCKWELL: So, very funny, very funny.

MCMAKEN: Well, I was recently invited to speak very briefly about this class at an event here in Denver that they had. It had been around for years. I got the impression it was a free-market event. And I thought, oh, well, it’s just going to be yet another one of these Conservative events and I know what sort of people are going to be there but I’ll go anyway; maybe there will be some good Libertarians there. Well, I walk into the room, the whole room is filled with Young Americans for Liberty people. I mean, that was 90 percent of the audience.

(Laughter)

And so it wasn’t, anymore, you go to these groups put on by Conservative groups, you know, some of the more peripheral Conservative groups, like, say, the Leadership Institute and things like that, and half the people I encounter there now are Ron Paul people.

ROCKWELL: Yes.

MCMAKEN: If not more so, because that’s all the young people.

ROCKWELL: That’s true of ISI, too, by the way. I’ve attended a lot of ISI programs and they were what you might expect from a Conservative organization. Now, today, in a sense, Frank Chodorov is back. The ISI meetings, they’re full of Paulians.

MCMAKEN: Mm-hmm.

ROCKWELL: So the Libertarians are back, even there.

MCMAKEN: And you remember how it was, say, in 2003. I mean, you just wouldn’t have dared show your face as a Libertarian at any of these sorts of things.

Which kind of brings me then to the other issue. Yes, OK, we know that if that one big factor then over the last decade has really been the decline of the intellectual power of the regular Conservatives, the mainstream right, as we would call it, but what else has gone over that time? And I think to really illustrate how much things have changed really over the last 10 years, I would just describe how things were 10 years ago when I was writing my master’s thesis. Part of the reason that they brought me in to teach this class is because it was with a lot of the faculty at UCD where I worked on my master’s thesis, which was on the topic of the anti-war movement on the American right wing. And so they just remembered me, that I had done that topic and done an intellectual history on the right wing.

But that was back in 2001 when I was doing most of that research. And I can tell you, back then — (laughing) — if you wanted to get information on the Old Right, on the anti-war movement in the right wing and all that stuff, you had basically maybe three options. You could go to antiwar.com, LewRockwell.com or Chronicles magazine. And, of course, Chronicles didn’t have anything online, so you actually had to go to the stacks in an old library and photocopy old articles and that sort of thing. And, of course, that wasn’t Libertarian, although it had a lot of comment on the foreign policy issue.

And at that point, LRC was three years old and antiwar.com was maybe five years old, something like that. And so it didn’t have anywhere near the volume of information that it has now. And the Internet just didn’t have all of the stuff that it has now. And, yes, Ron Paul was obscure. I mean, your choices of what sort of people you would read, the articles you would have — there was no Tom Woods back then. You didn’t have Judge Napolitano on TV. You never saw Lew Rockwell on TV back then. And then, all of a sudden, in 2012 — I mean, just to compare the two years, it’s just amazing how completely different it is now, compared to 10 years ago.

So while, yes, Buckley is gone and National Review has kind of faded into the background, I mean, what happened on the other side of that? How was this movement able to build from 2002 to 2012?

ROCKWELL: Well, of course, I lot of it is the Internet and the growth of the Internet. It didn’t hurt that the Mises Institute put all of Rothbard’s works up online for free. There’s a famous think tank in Washington that has a big summer intern program. And for years, two of their key people would give a joint lecture to the kids that pretty much consisted of, don’t read Rothbard.

(Laughter)

He’s an evil son of a gun. He’s a “this”; he’s a “that.” Don’t read him. You know, well, and they’ve been doing this, you know, in the ’70s and all through the years. Needless to say, any kid with a brain, when they hear that, the first thing they want to do is go read Rothbard.

(Laughter)

What is this all about? Well, who is this guy?

(Laughter)

In the old days, they had to go to the stacks. Today, of course, they can find it in three minutes, two minutes, 30 seconds, three seconds.

Recently, there was a controversy when I said online that I thought that Murray was a much bigger figure among today’s young people than Milton Friedman, even though, at the time and in the economics profession and so forth and in the culture, Friedman, who was always an advisor to Republican presidents and an excuser of Republican policies and so forth, was, by far, the bigger figure. So one of the people who wrote in to denounce me and had a comment, he said, look, you can’t really say this because it’s unfair. All of Rothbard is available for free on the web and Friedman books are all very expensive and you have to buy them or you have to go to the library.

(Laughter)

MCMAKEN: Yes.

ROCKWELL: So I though, oh, unfair, yes, right. So —

(Laughter)

So we have everything of Mises. We have Chodorov. We have Albert Jay Nock. We have, you know, all the great guys, to the extent we can, for free on the web. We have the physical books, too, but we — all over the world, people are — I mean, Rothbard, Rothbard is today a much huger figure than he was in his lifetime. And Buckley barely exists. Does anybody read Buckley any more? Does anybody read — I mean, he was a best-selling author, best-selling novelist. He had a very well-read column and so forth. He’s disappeared like, you know, a cup of spilled water on an August day. I mean, he’s just gone.

MCMAKEN: Well, and part of the reason I think, there, is the Conservatives don’t even care about their own heritage, intellectually. It’s just about cheering on whoever the current Republican president is and just rooting for your side. And so they don’t even bother with quoting that.

ROCKWELL: But I think it’s also a deliberate policy by the leaders of the Conservative movement. I always think of Rush Limbaugh announcing, “Just listen to me. Don’t read anybody else. Don’t listen to anybody else. I’ll tell you all you need to know.” It’s semi-joking or sarcastic, but not actually a kind of a statement.

(Laughter)

Because they don’t want people reading the old literature because they might read dangerous stuff. They might come upon ideas that they’re not supposed to hear about. So, yes, they’re just supposed to concentrate on the immense importance of installing Romney as versus Obama. You know, that’s Conservatism. And while that appeals to careerists and it appeals to some people, it certainly doesn’t appeal to idealistic young people who are always the carriers of any new revolution.

I think we have so much reason to be optimistic, despite all the, you know, drones in your backyard or whatever else is coming out of Washington recently. Because really, forget the election. Ron Paul has won the future by the millions of young people, not only in this country, but all around the world. He’s got a following all around the world. And these kids are reading. The people who are following Rich Lowry are not reading books, or if they’re reading books, they’re reading the latest book by Michelle Malkin or whatever. They’re not reading the classics. The Ron Paul people are reading the classics. It’s shaping them. It’s forming them. It’s forming our entire movement. It’s why we’re going to win.

MCMAKEN: Well, then I think that really highlights the importance of consistency and strength on the intellectual side of the movement, which I think, unfortunately, even some good Libertarian activists don’t really appreciate. I’m afraid that some people will be discouraged if Ron Paul, as is probably going to happen, is not going to win the general election. And then a lot of people are going to think, well, we lost an election, so what does that mean? That means the movement is dead. Which, of course, it doesn’t mean that at all because, of course, we were doing it all for the last couple of decades in pushing these ideas, getting people to believe in that. It’s not like Ron Paul just runs for office and, suddenly, everybody decides that they’re Libertarian. There was a whole intellectual movement behind that. And it continues, and has been greatly magnified by what Paul has done. And I’m sure he’ll continue to be a personality and someone who will lead this movement, much in the way that Buckley did.

But I was looking and contrasting that on who was on the other side. And you brought up Limbaugh. And a friend of mine who is sympathetic to the mainstream Conservative side said — and he didn’t mean this in a good way. He said, I think really the intellectual Conservative movement and their ideas are really just dictated by talk radio now. He didn’t really think there was any kind of real intellectual backing. There aren’t any scholarly books being read. It’s just, what did the TV guys say; what did the radio guy say? And it pretty much doesn’t get beyond that.

So if that’s what you’re building that side of the movement on, I don’t see how that can have much appeal to young people or people who actually want to be knowledgeable on the subject.

ROCKWELL: Not only Limbaugh but despicable Mark Levine or the boob, Sean Hannity. I mean, look at these people — (laughing). They obviously have talent as entertainers for some people, but they’re actually anti-intellectual. The entire leadership of the Conservative movement is, in fact, anti-intellectual. So this is also something — even though, as you say, there are plenty of Libertarians who don’t put the right emphasis on things, who think that electoral politics is the be-all and the end-all, which, by the way, Ron Paul does not think. He thinks that the intellectual side is, by far, the more significant.

And I think your friend is right. These talk show hosts, so shallow, so hectoring, sometimes resembling propaganda artists for, you know, Radio Moscow or something, from another side of things. Just very unpleasant. I think also declining in listenership. I think they don’t have the power they used to have. Even with Obama in the White House, they’ve not ever come back to their status under Clinton.

So as to politics, my own view is we can’t seek our salvation in Washington or in government of any sort. I don’t think it’s actually possible to take over the Republican Party. I mean, it’s part of the government. Why don’t you try taking over the Department of Justice? I mean, you can’t —

(Laughter)

It’s one thing to use politics, as Ron has done so successfully to promote his ideas, but it’s quite another thing to think, I’m going to take power and force my will. You can’t wear the ring and triumph against Mordor. It can’t be done. So the people who go into politics for the typical reasons already have a problem. So my guess is there’s going to be a lessening of an interest in politics with Ron’s — after Ron’s campaign. And I think that’s good. I think we can’t actually achieve anything through politics, which, after all, is the government’s weapon, all based on force and violence, coercion and the threats of coercion, ordering people around, putting a gun to peoples’ head and telling them what to do. That’s never the path to anything decent.

MCMAKEN: Well, and there’s probably a certain value in a lot of these activists taking part in the whole party convention process just because they’ll get a taste of just how truly awful the process is.

(Laughter)

ROCKWELL: And they are, by the way.

MCMAKEN: Mm-hmm.

ROCKWELL: A lot of them, they can’t believe it. They can’t believe how they’re treated. They can’t believe they’re being kicked in the teeth. Their guts are hated by the people in control. They were naïve, I guess, enough to think that somebody could take power from the old guard and they wouldn’t try to kill you in return.

(Laughter)

MCMAKEN: Yes. There’s not going to be a friendly transfer of power, no matter how polite you are, of course. There’s a lot of money at stake, jobs, prestige, all that sort of thing. People don’t want to give that up.

And just like a lot of former military people are the best Libertarians in many cases, because they’ve seen how that all works up close and personal.

But how does this victory look then, if it doesn’t consist of taking control of a party? Now, there, of course, can be no final victory, or there’s no such thing as the final triumph of the liberty movement or anything like that. But say you do become very successful at really undercutting the power of the state. What does that look like then? What institutions are taken over, if any? What happens there?

ROCKWELL: Well, if you read Murray’s introduction to The Politics of Obedience, by Etiene de la Boetie, the 16th century writer, early Libertarian who talks about consent, he writes a wonderful essay. He didn’t publish it under his own name at the time because he would have been executed by the king, but he says political philosophers are always wondering, how do we, you might say, engineer consent. How do we get more people to support the regime? How do we enlist the population in what we’re doing? And de la Boetie said, well, to me, the interesting question is, why the heck does anybody obey? Why do you obey when it’s so clearly against your own interest? And he says, in fact, all that is necessary to win is the withdrawal of consent.

This is why, for example, the government spends so much time trying to get everybody to vote. It’s why the public schools spend so much time getting you to agree to the legitimacy of the regime. Because they require the consent of the people! The parasites must necessarily be much smaller than the host or they can’t live it up like they like to, and they can’t run their wars and do all the rest. So they’re always a tiny minority. Democracy, disguised as this. One of the reasons they love democracy. But still, the facts of the situation are most of us are not beneficiaries from the regime; we’re the victims of the regime.

And to the extent that more and more people withdraw their consent and mentally don’t go along, if enough of us do that, it dramatically weakens the government. And I think, as you say, there’s never going to be a final victory this side of the next life, but we can certainly turn the tide. We can certainly put things in the opposing direction.

So I think to the extent that people don’t pay attention to every word that drips from the lips of Obama — terrible that I ever look at this show, but there’s a political show —

(Laughter)

— by Todd — I’m not thinking of his first name — the MSNBC political director.

MCMAKEN: Sure, I know who you’re talking about.

ROCKWELL: And one of the things he starts off his show every morning with is, “What’s the soup of the day at the White House.” Well, today it’s crab bisque, or whatever. I mean, it’s like announcing, what is the king eating at Versailles today.

(Laughter)

So the —

MCMAKEN: Or what’s the first lady wearing, right? Like we care about that.

ROCKWELL: Yes. All of that kind of stuff. So the more that we don’t pay attention to that and when we laugh at it — it’s always important to laugh at the government and all its works. The more that we don’t pay attention, the more we concentrate on educating ourselves, which, as Nock always pointed out, when people talked about saving the world, he said, really, all you can do is present the world with one improved unit. Learn yourself. Educate yourself. Then others will come to you, and that’s the way a movement spreads.

But it is an intellectual struggle, but the government is weakened to the extent that people don’t want anything to do with it. They can’t actually jail us all, shoot us all or whatever. And when this sort of thing takes place — and it has happened in history. I think of the — mention the politically incorrect example of Iran. Even people within the regime begin to reject the regime and then the whole thing comes down. When the Shah of Iran had a vast secret police, the SAVAK, a vicious, vicious secret police — towards the end, he was doing vast money printing and put on price and wage controls. Of course, the big businessmen never got into any trouble if they raised prices, but the small businessman did. And he would send the police into the market areas, and if a businessman had raised his prices, they would take him out and beat the soles of his feet off with bamboo staves.

(Laughter)

MCMAKEN: Nice.

ROCKWELL: Right. So that kind of stuff. Of course, vast numbers of prisons, huge government structure, all the big businesses on his side. The Ayatollah Khomeini sent tapes into Iran and, within a relatively short period, the entire government dried up and blew away. I mean, it was just gone. Nobody ever talks about the fact that while Khomeini had a very important religious appeal, he also was attacking the government for high taxes, for money printing and similar things. And he was far more free market than the Shah. That, of course, has reversed itself, unfortunately. The current guy, Ahmadinejad, is a big Keynesian.

But anyway, Khomeini actually had a free-market streak in him, which I’ve always thought was part of the reason for his appeal, aside, of course, from the basic religious appeal.

But just by sending sermons on cassette tapes into Iran, he brought the government down. It’s the same sort of thing that Murray Rothbard talks about in Conceived in Liberty with the Pennsylvania government, where long after anybody was paying attention to them, they’re still passing laws in the state legislature and the governor is issuing edicts, or whatever, and nobody paid any attention to them. And finally, they just got on a ship and went back to England.

(Laughter)

So there are examples. And you don’t have to have — well, and we can talk about Gandhi, too. It’s a slightly different thing with the mass civil disobedience. But if people reject the government — and, first of all, it’s important that they intellectually reject the government, then they don’t believe all of the — they don’t maybe talk about the government as “we.” They don’t say, should we go to Mars? Should we bomb the people in Yemen? You know, this sort of thing. Of course, it’s not “we.” It’s the government.

So to the extent that they stop thinking of the government as “we,” they start to resist the public schools and home school their children or send them to good private schools or unschool them, to the extent that they secede from the regime in every way possible, but first of all, intellectually and spiritually. This is tremendously weakening.

Now, it might not sound persuasive. I would urge everybody to read Rothbard’s — we’ll link to it in this podcast, as well as, of course, to the books you’re going to be using as textbooks and readings for your course. But read Rothbard’s — de la Boetie is magnificent. Rothbard’s introduction is tremendous. And he explains really how it’s possible to overthrow a tyrannical government without violence. How it’s actually possible by withdrawing your consent, laughing at them, and becoming yourself a beacon of liberty by what you know, by the way you’ve educated yourself in economics and political science and history, theology and so forth, that you are able to become a beacon of resistance yourself. And not the kind, by the way, that they arrest you for! You’re not forming a resistance organization with cells in various cities to do whatever. That’s not the way to go, I would say, morally. It’s certainly not the way to go practically. Those kinds of things are the government’s weapons. They shoot people. They torture people. They put people in cages for life without trial and so forth. That’s their style. That’s not our style. So our style — and Ron Paul always points this out — is nonviolent. And it’s intellectual. And it can actually work.

Now, when is it going to work? We can’t know. It might be well beyond even your lifetime, let alone my lifetime. On the other hand, when social events start to happen, when social change starts to take place, it can really be amazingly fast. So we don’t know. I mean, it could be, especially with the economic crisis that’s continuing and getting worse that, unfortunately, can lead to worse things, man on the white horse and et cetera, or it can lead to radical good change. It’s up to us to try to make that happen.

Again, the first thing to do, as Nock and Rothbard and Chodorov and all these men would tell us, educate yourself. Understand Austrian economics. Understand real history. Understand political science. Understand the nature of the state. Understand some political philosophy. You’re a layperson, of course. You’re not another Ryan McMaken. But in your job, in your private time —

(Laughter)

— you can learn what’s necessary. You become a beacon. And this is happening more and more. It’s happening with the young. I’ve run into kids who are, like, 12 years old, who are interested in this sort of thing, not to speak of teenagers, college students, young working people, all of whom realize they’ve been stepped on; they’re going to be stepped on. They want to change things. And we can change things. And I think this is the path to it, withdrawing your consent.

MCMAKEN: Well, and I think it’s worth pointing out that we thought the Soviet Union was going to collapse in 1985, or maybe even 1987, and we thought the British were going to be forced out in 1774. I mean, it’s really hard to predict.

But I do encounter that with some of the younger activists, is just a certain impatience with, well, if it doesn’t work this time, when is it going to work. And it’s as you say, I guess, you just have to keep in mind that people like Rothbard and Chodorov, they died before they saw the fruit of their work. But where would we be now without them?

And I think another important component is that the United States is actually one of the few Western, industrialized counties at least that has an existing free-market movement with a nice intellectual underpinning and a real following. And so kind of just one of the things I hope — (laughing) — that if the situation becomes very bad, if you do have a situation of state collapse, do you actually have something here that’s Libertarian to replace it? And a lot of places don’t have that. And so I think that’s a hopeful sign here. What do you think?

ROCKWELL: Well, I think so.

I just want to mention one other thing about the struggle. And Rothbard exemplified this for me much more than anybody else I’ve ever known. It’s fun to fight. It’s fun to resist these people. It’s fun to learn the truth. It’s fun to expose them. It’s fun to laugh at them. This whole movement is fun. It’s, of course, extremely serious, extremely important also, but it’s just a lot of fun. So even if things don’t happen as quickly as we’d like them to happen — and when do they ever — we’re having fun. Ron Paul has fun. You know, he loves doing what he does. That sort of man is the model for us.

But you’re exactly right. We have a huge — on your other point, a huge movement of people who understand economics, who understand black markets, if it comes to that, who understand the intellectual underpinnings of a free society, much more so than — I don’t know if any other country, but certainly many of the countries I’m familiar with don’t have this — Canada, Mexico, England, France and so forth. It’s growing in other countries. It’s not absent in other countries. But we do have this here. There is an infrastructure. And, of course, we — sort of the basic insight of Libertarianism is we don’t need to be managed. Society does not need an outside manager. We, as individuals, don’t need managers. We don’t need central planners. We don’t need this gang in Washington telling us what to do and ripping us off and stepping on us and putting the boot on the throat and all the rest of the things they do, and love doing, by the way. Just as we have fun fighting them, they have fun — maybe like the devil’s fun — but they have fun crushing people.

I mean, the people who rise in politics, as Hayek pointed out, are the worst possible people. They actually like starting wars. They like sending out young men to kill and be killed. They actually enjoy that. They love feeling up people at the airport. They love the fear that they can engender in somebody’s eyes when they tell them they’re from the FBI or whatever. They love — they like to put their thumb on you and go, aagh. I mean, that’s their fun in life. So that’s the other side.

But there are a whole lot of regular people who don’t want to run other peoples’ lives. They have enough trouble taking care of their own family. They’re not interested in running the next household or the next village or the next — let alone, the next country or the world. And they’re far more preponderant.

Also, we have the truth on our side. I mean, that’s certainly — (laughing) — an important point, too.

(Laughter)

But, yes, we have the infrastructure. So, yes, if there is a currency collapse — I’m afraid we’ve got serious troubles ahead. How serious, I don’t know. But we are equipped much more so, than would have been — than was true in the Great Depression, for example, to explain to people what’s happening, why it’s happening, why it didn’t need to happen, and what we can do about it.

MCMAKEN: And I think you see that now in just daily life. You know, I’m not a movement guy. I’ve always had just regular jobs, so I don’t spend my day surrounded by Rothbardians or anything like that. But I can tell you, what you can say now in mixed groups about — say, you trash the Federal Reserve or just make really what would have been considered 10 years ago outlandishly kooky, crazy Libertarian-type statements, are now regarded as, well, maybe not correct, but just the sorts of things people say now. And — (laughing) — so the fact that you can get away with saying the things without being regarded as just the weirdest guy anybody has ever met, I think that’s a big change there, as well.

ROCKWELL: Well, it’s true even on the most radical subjects. I mean, something like taking an Anarcho-Capitalist position of free market, private property, in favor of free market, private property anarchism, you were practically a Communist when I was a kid if you discussed such things. Now, virtually nobody agrees with you, but they’ll discuss it.

And you mentioned the Fed. This is, of course — that was Rothbard. Now, this is entirely Ron Paul. I can remember talking to people about the Fed during the Goldwater — (laughing) — the Goldwater campaign. Of course, I had no luck whatsoever in interesting anybody. And I once tried to start an organization called the Committee to End the Fed. Nobody was interested. Nobody cared.

(Laughter)

And their eyes glazed over. Ron Paul has made it an issue. I mean, people realize now, which Murray always said is the key, not only that it’s promulgating economic error and making things worse economically, but that it’s ripping us off. Murray always said those are the two key things to get people involved, that there’s a rip-off going on and that they’re in error as well. So now, I find people don’t even want to defend the Fed.

(Laughter)

(Crosstalk)

ROCKWELL: Now maybe they have a tough time thinking of getting rid of it, because it’s there, it’s been there since 1913 and so forth. But it’s huge progress. Unbelievable progress on that issue, so that the Fed hires, for the first time ever, P.R. people to defend it. So the Fed officials are going out, giving speeches all over the place to try to get better P.R. They feel under attack. We know this from any number of stories with unnamed Fed officials speaking. For the first time ever, they feel under attack. And we have one guy in Forbes magazine saying, look, this is horrendous; Ron Paul must shut up. Because you can’t actually make anybody focus on the Fed because then it makes it difficult for these selfless, brilliant and wonderful technocrats, who are running the economy, to do their work. If anybody is — he said it’s not enough that people are not against the Fed; they shouldn’t even be for the Fed. They should pay no attention to the Fed. Which, I must say, always was my view that that was what they wanted. Now we all pay attention to the Fed, and not just guys on Wall Street. Their power is circumscribed. You wouldn’t think it’s possible. Their power has been circumscribed by what Ron Paul has done to make them an issue. There, again, is the model.

Or think about what Tom DiLorenzo has done with the case of Abraham Lincoln. Before Tom wrote his books on Lincoln, telling the truth about this dictator, he was Saint Abraham. Now, any teacher or professor giving the normal line on Lincoln has to be concerned that there’s some kid in his class who has read one of these books and actually knows —

(Laughter)

— what the truth is about this guy. He’s actually changed the minds of so many young people.

So it can be done. How did it happen in Tom’s case? A lot of research, years of work and of scholarship, and wonderful writing skills, producing two great books. Ron Paul, 40 years of work, 40 years of studying the Fed and Austrian economics and Libertarianism. But what fruit that’s borne! It is possible to change. It is possible to make progress. We are making progress.

MCMAKEN: Yes, I guess if I were being approached — as I’ve gotten e-mails recently from some of the new activists who — they’re discouraged, right? They’re being fought tooth and nail. But I guess all I can say to them — (laughing) — is trust me, you’re winning.

(Laughter)

I mean, things are going well. You may not see it because you were 16 during the last presidential election or whatever, but hang in there because, yes, things are going in your way.

ROCKWELL: Well, when they slap you on the back and smile at you and shake your hand, there’s trouble.

MCMAKEN: Yes.

(Laughter)

Exactly.

ROCKWELL: It’s only when they hate your guts, you know you’re doing good.

MCMAKEN: You definitely do, yes.

Well, that’s all I had for you today, Lew. And that was a wonderful discussion. It went a little long. But, yes, it was great.

ROCKWELL: Well, Ryan, you make the time go by fast. And congratulations on your course. Keep writing and blogging for LRC. And, again, we’ll link to all the books that you’re going to use and we’ll link to some of the other books that we’ve discussed today and other writings.

And great to have you on the show, and thanks for interviewing me.

Thank you, Ryan.

MCMAKEN: Thank you very much, Lew. See you.

ROCKWELL: Bye-bye.

MCMAKEN: Bye.

ROCKWELL: Well, thanks so much for listening to the Lew Rockwell Show today. Take a look at all the podcasts. There have been hundreds of them. There’s a link on the upper right-hand corner of the LRC front page. Thank you.

Podcast date, June 5, 2012

Ryan McMaken [send him mail] is the author of Commie Cowboys: The Bourgeoisie and the Nation-State in the Western Genre.

The Best of Ryan McMaken

I refer of course to the Catholic theologians known as Saint Thomas Aquinas and Saint Augustine, both of whom concluded that the immorality of prostitution was not sufficient to justify a prohibition of the practice by civil governments.

I was reminded of this recently when I encountered the reaction to a recent column written by Bobby Jindal, the governor of Louisiana. Jindal, of whom I am generally not a fan, nevertheless made some astute observations in noting that

Let's ask the question: Why do women have to go see a doctor before they buy birth control? There are two answers. First, because big government says they should, even though requiring a doctor visit to get a drug that research shows is safe helps drive up health-care costs. Second, because big pharmaceutical companies benefit from it. They know that prices would be driven down if the companies had to compete in the marketplace once their contraceptives were sold over the counter.

These statements are accurate. The laws requiring prescriptions for certain drugs do little more than push up health care prices by forcing people to see doctors more than is actually needed. This benefits the health care industry interests, and such laws are an artifact of lobbying by medical special interests. The assumption made by proponents of prescription drug laws is that people are too stupid to make their own health care decisions.

Jindal’s conclusion is that the sale of contraceptives should be rendered non-political by simply allowing people who want them to purchase them.

Alas, Jindal can’t bring himself to advocate for real pharmaceutical freedom, and he conditions his position here on the alleged safety of hormonal contraceptives. In this, Jindal is wrong, since there is much conflicting evidence on the safety of hormonal contraceptives, and it’s ironic that people who insist on buying organic milk and who shop at Vitamin Cottage will simultaneously pump their bodies full of artificial hormones. The drug companies of course maintain that their products are wonderful, although there is much evidence to the contrary. Nevertheless, grown ups can come to their own decisions about using such drugs, and the state certainly is not equipped practically or morally to make people’s health care decisions for them.

So, Jindal here is at least striking a tiny blow for liberty by calling for the de-politicization of at least one aspect of health care.

Predictably, however, the prohibitionists have struck back. Following Jindal’s comments, The Archdiocese of New Orleans issued a statement noting that: "The Archdiocese…disagrees with Governor Jindal's stance on this issue, as the use of birth control and contraceptives are against Catholic Church teaching,"

Okay, so it’s immoral. Any actually-practicing Catholic can agree with that. The question is: Does the fact that it is immoral mean it should be illegal?

The National Catholic Register and other Catholic news outlets simply assume that if something is immoral, then it should be illegal.

This attitude, however, is not in line with historical Catholic thinking about the role of civil government and the state. A case can certainly be made that hormonal contraception is both physically harmful and immoral. But this is a completely separate issue from debating whether or not something is illegal. If one’s assumption that all harmful and immoral things should be illegal, then one should be honest and make that known, rather than dancing around the issue, as so many of Jindal's adversaries are doing.

I’m forced to wonder then, if the people who advocate for state control and regulation of contraception are also in favor of making adultery and fornication illegal. Certainly, in the age of STDs, those things are both immoral and potentially damaging physically. Should they be illegal too?

It has never been the position of the Church, or of any reasonable person, I daresay, that just because something is immoral, it should therefore be illegal. Even from a non-religious perspective, of course, this is an important distinction, as was repeatedly noted in Rothbard's The Ethics of Liberty. Many things that are immoral may not justify proscription by law.

To see evidence of this, we only need consult two of the Church’s most respected theologians: Thomas Aquinas and Augustine of Hippo, both of whom concluded that prostitution and fornication should remain legal.

Historian Vincent Dever provides a nice summary on this issue:

Having concluded that fornication and prostitution were gravel immoral,

it would seem obvious that Aquinas would want to engage every force against them, especially civil law. Oddly enough he does not. Instead he notes that the state should allow fornication and prostitution to exist for the sake of the common good. Relying on the well-known passage from Augustine’s De ordine, Aquinas advocates tolerance of prostitution by noting: “Accordingly in human government also, those who are in authority rightly tolerate certain evils, lest certain goods be lost, or certain evils be incurred: thus Augustine says [De ordine 2.4]: ‘If you do away with harlots, the world will be convulsed with lust.’” If these social practices were to be suppressed, the public reaction might be such as to threaten the peace of society.

Far from being theocrats, as so many vulgar critics of the medievals claim, the medievals like Aquinas were actually in favor of greatly limited civil government, which had little use or purpose beyond the maintenance of peace. Civilized society of course, could not function while wars raged everywhere, so civil governments were tolerated for the maintenance and safety of society. The idea, however, that civil governments should pass regulations governing people’s food and medicine, and then have such regulations enforced with an army of bureaucrats, would have seemed ridiculous to the medieval mind.

Dever continues in summarizing Aquinas:

While civil law does forbid certain vicious acts such as murder and theft, and requires certain acts of virtue such as caring for one’s children and paying one’s debts, it cannot “forbid all vicious acts” nor can it prescribe “all acts of virtue.” Aside from the fact that it would supplant the need for eternal law, why cannot civil law be enacted to prohibit all vicious activities? The goal of human law is the temporal tranquility of the state and not eternal salvation. Given this goal of temporal peace and order, Aquinas notes that the mandate of human law is to prohibit “whatever destroys social intercourse” and not to “prohibit everything contrary to virtue.” The main reason for civil law’s inability to prohibit all vice is that it cannot effect a full internal reform of an individual. An individual in their personal moral life is wounded by original sin and can only be restored by God’s grace. Therefore the coercive and educating power of human law is inefficacious in this realm. Aquinas asserts, then, that human law cannot “exact perfect virtue from man, for such virtue belongs to few and cannot be found in so great a number of people as human law has to direct.

Any reading of Aquinas’ works on politics makes it quite clear that “civil government,” for there was no “state” as we know it in the 13th century, does not exist to reform people’s minds or to increase their virtue, or to protect them from themselves.

Dever goes on:

Given these limitations of civil statute in regard to virtue and vice, Aquinas goes on to assert that human law leaves many sinful things unpunished and the example he uses is simple fornication, under which he has included prostitution. He clearly wants to include fornication and prostitution under that category of vices that human law cannot control and which must be left to eternal or divine law. Yet could not a case be made that prostitution is one of those activities that destroys social intercourse and so should be prohibited by civil statute? [Aquinas'] general principle, by which the state would tolerate prostitution without approving it, is that human laws “leave certain things unpunished on account of the condition of those who are imperfect, and who would be deprived of many advantages, if all sins were strictly forbidden and punishments appointed for them.”

So, if our finest theologian thinks that even gravely immoral acts such as prostitution and fornication should be legal, why should contraception not fall into this category?

To maintain that civil government in fact exists to regulate what pills we take illustrates that 21st-century Catholics have drunk the modernist Kool-aid and accepted the modern idea that civil government exists to regulate every aspect of our lives.

The moral status of contraception, like that of prostitution and fornication, is a settled matter in Catholic teaching. Those Catholics who disagree might be more comfortable in another church. The role of civil government in this matter, on the other hand, is another matter completely.

Those who think that states should be in the business of providing corporate welfare to health care providers and pharmaceutical companies in the form of prescription drug regulation, have the burden of proving that adults are incapable of determining what substances should be put in their bodies, and that state regulation would not lead to just the sort of society-damaging effects detailed by Aquinas and Augustine in their discussions on prostitution.

This entire discussion, however, will be null and void with in a hundred years, when we will look back on this age of government prohibitions of drugs and guns and labor and laugh to think that there was ever such a time when we thought that government could actually enforce such laws. The realities of commerce and technology are already outpacing the state, and in the not-too-distant future, we Catholics will once again be left on our own, as we were for most of the past 2,000 years, and this short age of lazily invoking the state to fight our battles for us will be over.

Ryan McMaken [send him mail] is the author of Commie Cowboys: The Bourgeoisie and the Nation-State in the Western Genre.

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True Confession: I used to watch Celebrity Apprentice. Thus, my first introduction to Piers Morgan was in his role as a despicable self-promoter on that show several years ago. Being the domain of D-list celebrities who are usually on the fast train to oblivion, like Drug-War enthusiast Stephen Baldwin, I was surprised to hear that Morgan had been upgraded from Celebrity Apprentice fame to C-list celebrity when he was given a talk show on CNN.

Now, he’s lecturing us about the evils of private property in the form of gun ownership. The British have long despised liberty, of course. One only need look at their dirty, crime-ridden, totalitarian little island, where they fear kitchen knives and murder sick babies, to see that. With the murderous British Empire with its concentration camps and death squads no longer available to Morgan, he apparently wants to spread British Enlightenment by other means to the few corners of the Anglosphere where a small amount of liberty remains. The natural right to bear arms, one of those “English liberties” we preserved by throwing the British out of our country for good, is under attack by Morgan, a man who is

Update, 4:06pm:

Technically speaking, the current legislation being pushed by the GOP does not raise taxes by itself. No, the tax increase is happening because the GOP put an expiration date on the Bush tax cuts, even though they had total control of the Congress and the White House at various times during the past decade. So, we can thank the GOP for putting us in the current position where tax cuts are automatically set to expire.

The current deal is being rationalized by Republicans as the most that can be done in the light of the GOP-mandated tax increase that is now happening thanks to the expiration of the tax cuts. In reality, of course, this is NOT the best that can be hoped for. The GOP has a veto on all federal legislation in the form of its House Majority. So the GOP could simply refuse to approve any budget until the tax cuts are extended permanently. The GOP does not have the guts or the desire to do this of course, so get ready for a tax increase.

Also, this Plan B will be vetoed anyway, so the current deal is just about sending a message. If they’re in the business of sending a message right now, why not send the message that tax increases are not to be tolerated? Even when they know that their bill is DOA, they choose to accept a tax increase rather than take a principled position against taxes.

Original Post:

There’s a lot of talk about cutting tax deals in Congress these days. I recently criticized Justin Amash for saying he would be open to tax increases if it led to concessions from the other side on some kind of taxing and spending deal. I was criticized by more than one reader for not looking carefully at the context of the situation.

Now, we have Grover Norquist signing off on a tax increase [Plan B] because it "permanently prevents" tax increases on people making less than $1 million.

Amash was justifying his own deal-making on the grounds that accepting a tax increase would somehow permanently cut spending.

Any time a politico talks about "permanently" preventing tax increases or permanently cutting spending, or claims some other unrealized benefit in the future as a result of some deal, you can stop listening.

The fact of the matter is that no Congress can bind a future Congress to any agreement. So, Norquist’s (and the GOP leadership’s) "permanent" prohibition on future taxes is pure nonsense. It’s about as substantial as cotton candy. It means nothing. It can be overturned with a majority vote in Congress at any time. The only way any of these deals could be enforceable in the future would be if they were adopted as constitutional amendments. Similarly, things like 10-year or 30-year plans to balance the budget, like the Paul Ryan plan, are testaments to the imperishable gullibility of Republican voters.

So, when these deals are struck, the people who are signing off on tax increases for some imaginary benefit in the future should really say "Well, we signed off on a higher tax rate, but in our fanciful version of the future, our buckling under on this issue will prevent taxes from ever going up."

Translation: "Taxes will go up, and we can’t guarantee you anything in return for this except the higher tax rates we just agreed to."

This is nothing more than politics and attempts by lobbyists and politicians to claim that they struck a blow for liberty when they really did nothing of the sort.

Congressional deals of this sort mean nothing. They are unenforceable. The promised benefits will never be delivered. What does matter is principled opposition to more taxes and more spending.

I might also point out that the Income Tax was adopted when voters were promised that the income tax would be applied to millionaires only. That was in 1913. I’m sure the Grover Norquists of 100 years ago told us that the "deal" would ensure that the income tax would never be applied to non-millionaires, and we had to sign off on this to balance the budget. Fiscal responsibility demanded it. Those who opposed the new tax were just old fashioned, politically naive, and not savvy enough to see how in the future it would prevent tax increases on ordinary people. A great deal, indeed.

Ryan McMaken [send him mail] teaches political science in Colorado.

The Best of Ryan McMaken

The first thing you’ll notice about this piece by David Brooks about the future of the Conservative movement is how boring it is. The second thing you’ll notice is that it is just re-hashing to same old story about the conservative movement. "Here are the new young guns of the movement!" At least this time the usual obligatory references to the latest batch of young neocons was preceded by a few lines about the conservatives at The American Conservative, who aren’t so bad.

But most of the article is just the usual list of younger neocons in the Romney mould who promise to never ever upset anyone’s apple cart, and ensure that the status quo endures forever and ever until the sun burns out. Ramesh Ponnoru? He wants "family-friendly tax credits." Yep, that’ll fix things. Tyler Cowen? He’s not even a conservative, but is definitely in favor of the status quo. One of the publications Brooks mentions is in favor of "a big agenda of institutional modernization" which of course means a mild tweaking of the status quo.

"Innovation." "Reducing inequality." "Burkeans." If you just arrived here out of a time warp from 1986, you’ll definitely find all this to be very cutting edge stuff. The Conservative movement is really barreling toward grappling with the tough realities of the coming bankruptcy and default.

Brooks of course, doesn’t mention Ron Paul even once, in spite of mentioning libertarians at least twice. And when he goes through what he thinks are the important issues of our day, he doesn’t mention the words "debt," "dollar," or "inflation" once.

Looking at Brooks and the New York Times columnists, I feel like I’m reading memos going back and forth between Louis XVI and his most sycophantic courtiers. "No need to bother about those middle classes and peasants out there. We’ve got the bright new thinkers here in Versailles. Everything will be fine!"

Ryan McMaken [send him mail] teaches political science in Colorado.

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I have no illusions about this latest secession petition phenomenon. Nothing will directly come of this, and the people who are behind it are mostly people who would be singing "God Bless America" at the tops of their lungs had Mitt Romney been elected. On the other hand, it sure has a lot of people talking about secession, which shows that the idea of it remains an important part of the American political consciousness.

But, in response, most of the comments coming from political hacks display a deep, deep ignorance of the history of secession and the Constitutional realities behind it.

In response, I thought I’d list some retorts to the basic myths which most of the anti-secession screeds are intent on perpetuating.

1. The Constitution does not prohibit secession. The legal argument boils down to this: 1. The Constitution does not mention secession. In any way. 2. The Tenth Amendment says: "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people." Now I don’t have a Ph.D. in logic, but even I can figure out that if something is not mentioned, then, according to the 10th Amendment, it isn’t prohibited to the states. In fact, it is the opposite of prohibited. Now I know that the Supreme Court says no secession allowed, which means the federal government has declared that you can’t escape the federal government. Gee, that’s no shocker. So, sure, if you believe that the federal government should be the last word on what the federal government can and cannot do, then that’s fine. Just don’t pretend that we have constitutional government. If the federal government gets to decide what the Constitution says, then the Constitution is nothing more than a suggestion box for the feds.

2. The Civil War did not "settle" the issue. Well, it settled the issue in the way that I settled the matter of ownership of that Steve Garvey baseball card when I beat up that other kid and took it. (OK, that never happened, but you get my point.) Secession was never settled beyond the federal government’s assertion that it has the right to kill people who try to exercise their rights protected by the Tenth Amendment.

3. Secession is treason/unAmerican/craaaazy/for slavers only. Prior to the confederacy, there were some slaveowners who got together and seceded from their government. They were called Thomas Jefferson and George Washington. If you’re opposed to the secession of 1776, then that’s fine, you might be consistent on this issue, but if you’re one of these right-wing pundits who thinks the Declaration of Independence should be read aloud every July 4, and then says that secession is nutso, you might try actually reading that document you profess to love.

The Declaration makes a simple argument:

1. Humans have rights from the Creator.
2. Governments exist to secure those rights (a debatable assertion but we’ll roll with it).
3. When the government fails to secure those rights, we can ditch it and start our own government.

That’s pretty much all it says. If you thought that was true in 1776, when tax rates were 1% and there was no such thing as a the EPA or the FBI or the IRS, why is it not true now? Because we’re so much more free now? And, no, the Declaration did not say that the government is free to violate rights as long as people get to vote on it.

The Declaration establishes that there’s no such thing as treason, and a free government requires the assumption of just secession. Lysander Spooner explains (in No Treason #1):

Thus the whole Revolution [of 1775–1783] turned upon, asserted, and, in theory, established, the right of each and every man, at his discretion, to release himself from the support of the government under which he had lived. And this principle was asserted, not as a right peculiar to themselves, or to that time, or as applicable only to the government then existing; but as a universal right of all men, at all times, and under all circumstances.

Ryan McMaken [send him mail] teaches political science in Colorado.

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Recently by Ryan McMaken: Government Gone Wild: For Greater Glory and the Cristeros

“If I must write…with my hands in chains, I find that much better than if my will were in chains.” ~ Franz Jägerstätter



2012 marks the seventy-fifth anniversary of the papal encyclical Mit Brennender Sorge (“With Burning Anxiety”) which denounced National Socialism and any ideology that “divinizes” the state “to an idolatrous level.” Such ideologies were increasingly widespread in Europe in 1937, and after four years of Hitler, the German state had become increasingly brutal, and even those who escaped slavery or murder saw what few rights they had left under siege. Things would become much worse, and by 1943, when the end began to come into view following the disastrous defeat for the Reich at Stalingrad, there were few Germans left who were willing to resist.



In 1937, however, the full extent of Nazi repression and mass murder was yet to be seen, and Church sympathizers were able to distribute 300,000 copies of Mit Brennender Sorge, which was written in German, and not the usual Latin, to be read by German Catholics en masse. 

In these early years of the Reich, it was thought that the Germans might be convinced to somehow overturn the Nazi tide through resistance by the faithful. At the core of the argument was that the National Socialist ideology, itself a form of extreme nationalism, was illegitimate and contrary to natural law.  The encyclical stated:

…Whoever exalts race, or the people, or the State, or a particular form of State, or the depositories of power, or any other fundamental value of the human community — however necessary and honorable be their function in worldly things — whoever raises these notions above their standard value and divinizes them to an idolatrous level, distorts and perverts an order of the world planned and created by God.


Such notions, long predating the Third Reich of course, were an obstacle to the state, and by 1937, the Nazis had already begun to restrict the free exercise of religion in general, to which Pius responded that:


The believer has an absolute right to profess his Faith and live according to its dictates. Laws which impede this profession and practice of Faith are against natural law…Human laws in flagrant contradiction with the natural law are vitiated with a taint which no force, no power can mend…


Unfortunately, the document did little to promote widespread resistance to the Reich. In fact, Nazi officials interpreted the release of the encyclical as proof that German Catholics were enemies of the Reich, and thus the document led to a redoubling of efforts by the Nazi regime against German Catholic parishes and institutions through arrests, seizure of property, and the prohibition of public displays of faith such as the celebration of religious events on any day other than Sunday.

The repression that followed even this rhetorical resistance on the part of the Catholics set the stage for even worse repression that would later follow, and by the 1940′s, the German Catholic resistance, along with the German resistance in general, was down to a tiny number of courageous Germans, many of whom were imprisoned or murdered for their efforts.

Among the more famous of the Catholic resistance were Bishop Clemens von Galen of Münster and Willi Graf of Sophie Scholl's group, The White Rose. Yet by the 1940's the Catholic resistance had been cut off from Rome and the rest of the world and the remaining laymen and clergy who were still willing to resist would find that they were very much alone. 

While von Galen managed to avoid execution, Graf and many others of diverse religious and ideological backgrounds, such as Hans and Sophie Scholl, were not so lucky, facing death by guillotine for various crimes against the German Reich.

Among the many executed resistors was Franz Jägerstätter, who was put to death for refusing to fight for the National Socialist state.

Jägerstätter was an Austrian who after the Anschluss of 1938 found himself a German citizen. A farmer with a rudimentary formal education, he had been the only one in his village to vote against the annexation of Austria, and even his one vote had been expunged from the official vote to show unanimous support for the National Socialist takeover. By 1943, Jägerstätter had had already long been a critic of the Nazis, and was known to say “pfui Hitler” in response to “heil Hitler” from others in his village.

Jägerstätter, who gave the impression of being an extremely run-of-the-mill farmer, was nevertheless devoutly religious, and over time came to the conclusion that National Socialism was fundamentally incompatible with his faith.

Although he was not inclined toward political activism, he was eventually forced into a position of resistance. Made a citizen of the Reich against his will, Jägerstätter was drafted into the army and forced to take part in training exercises which took him away from his wife and his three young daughters for long periods of time.

His experiences in the army only strengthened his resistance to the National Socialist war machine, and following a long series of delays and furloughs, Jägerstätter was ordered to report for combat duty in March of 1943.

Concluding that he would not kill Poles or Russians for the glory of the German state, Jägerstätter reported for combat duty and declared that he would not fight. He was immediately arrested.

In 1943, he was tried, convicted of treason and "demoralizing the troops", and on August 9th, 1943 at 4:00 pm, he was executed by guillotine in Berlin-Brandenburg prison.

Jägerstätter, who would be declared a martyr by the Catholic Church and titled Blessed Franz Jägerstätter in 2007, had remained almost completely unknown outside his home village in the years following the war. Thanks largely to the work of sociologist Gordon Zahn, however, information on Jägerstätter has become increasingly accessible in recent decades, and with the 2009 release of Franz Jägerstätter: Letters and Writings from Prison, edited by Erna Putz, English-speaking audiences now finally have first-hand access to the Austrian farmer's religious and political thought.

In his letters and private notes, Jägerstätter's religious writings illustrate thinking of a clear and straightforward nature while his political writings illustrate mature, sophisticated and even iconoclastic positions.

By the 1940's, Jägerstätter, spurred on by Mit Brennender Sorge and perhaps also by the anti-Nazi dissent of the local Bishop Johannes Gföllner, looked upon National Socialism as something to be resisted, possibly at even the cost of one's life.

For a German or Austrian who was actually paying attention during this period, it was perhaps not difficult to see the inherent incompatibility between Nazism and Christianity.

The notorious Nazi judge Roland Freisler, for example, had declared before the war that "Christianity and we are alike in only one respect: we lay claim to the whole individual. From which do you take your orders? From the hereafter or from Adolf Hitler? To whom do you pledge your loyalty and your faith?"

Long before the Anschluss, in 1933, when such things could be said without risk of a lengthy prison term, Bishop Gföllner of Linz in Austria declared publicly that "Nazism is spiritually sick with materialistic racial delusions, un-Christian nationalism, a nationalistic view of religion, with what is quite simply sham Christianity."

Again in 1937, Gföllner stated that "It is impossible to be both a good Catholic and a true Nazi."

By 1941 though, Gföllner's death ushered in a new Bishop in Linz who spoke much more cautiously on such matters.

Indeed, the Nazi crackdown against the Catholics of the Reich following the publication of Mit Brennender Sorge meant that the free-speaking bishops in the model of Gföllner were quickly becoming a thing of the past, and this silence spread to Austria after 1938. Dissidents like Bishop von Galen were atypical, and for the most part, clergy at all levels began to view open resistance against the National Socialist regime as not only foolhardy, but very nearly suicidal.

This meant that those like Franz Jägerstätter who actually did resist, would find themselves on their own with little help from clergy or laymen.

This lack of outside reassurance did not daunt Jägerstätter. Writing in 1942, he referred back to Mit Brenender Sorge and concluded that since National Socialism is "even more dangerous than Communism" the Christian was therefore morally free to refuse military service: "Is it not more Christian for someone to give himself as a sacrifice then to have to murder others who possess a right to life on earth?"

Typical for Jägerstätter, in such comments, he was communicating a personal mode of thinking that was far more radical than the popular interpretation of political matters at the time.

In the introduction to Erna Putz's edition of Jägerstätter's texts, Jim Forest notes that, "if not a doctrine found in any catechism, it was widely believed [at that time in Europe] that any sins you commit under obedience to your government are not your personal sins but are regarded by God as the sins of those who lead the state."

In fact, this was precisely the advice Jägerstätter received from the new bishop of Linz, Joseph Fliesser, with whom Jägerstätter met to discuss the morality of his upcoming conscientious objection.

According to Jägerstätter, the bishop may have feared that Jägerstätter himself was a Gestapo spy and preferred to not even discuss the matter, but counseled in favor of obedience. Jägerstätter later commented, without anger, that "[t]hey don't dare commit themselves or it will be their turn next."

But in response to the argument that one is not morally responsible for immoral acts he is ordered to do, Jägerstätter dissented. According to Forest, "for Franz it seemed obvious that, if God gives each of us free will and a conscience, each of us is responsible for what we do and what we fail to do, all the more so if we are consciously aware we have allowed ourselves to become servants of evil masters."

Not allowing oneself to become a servant of "evil masters" was of particular importance to Jägerstätter. He repeatedly criticized his fellow members of the "German-speaking people" for allowing the National Socialists to take power. Referring specifically to the Catholic regions of Bavaria and Austria, Franz asked:

Are Austria and Bavaria blameless in that we now have a N.S. [National Socialist] state instead of a Christian one? Did National Socialism simply fall on us from the sky?

He went on:

I believe that the German-speaking people never participated as strongly in Christian charitable activities as they are now engaging in the N.S. organizations. Nor were they as ready to contribute their money to church programs.

Frequently in his writings, Jägerstätter referred to National Socialism as a "stream" which pulled so many people along in its current, and from which it was difficult to escape.

The nature of this stream helped explain why so few actually resisted the National Socialist regime, for as Franz noted, there are many "who do not want to swim against the stream because to do so is more difficult than to allow oneself to be washed along by the waves."

Yet in Jägerstätter's mind, resistance was always possible no matter how strong the current of the stream might be. No matter how difficult, Jägerstätter wrote that resistance would be worth it:

Many among us have already died, though not for Christ but for a N.S. victory. Was a no such an impossibility and more beyond the capability of many people in 1938 than a yes? I believe not. But what can a no still bring about? Will it require the participation of many people? Without a doubt, one person need not ask others what it would mean and accomplish. For each individual, a no would have value in itself because it would free that individual's soul.

Once the individual refused to consent, he could then take concrete action to refuse to participate in the regime:

In order to come to this personal decision, someone must be ready to stand up for Christ and the Christian faith, even if it means giving up one's life. These people who have come to this decision can immediately withdraw from the N.S. Volk community and make no donations to it. Further, if they want to exercise Christian love of neighbor, they can contribute their wages to the poor without the help of the W.H.W. [the Winterhilfswerk, the Nazi welfare agency] or the Public Assistance program. Then they will be free to do with themselves as they want.

Jägerstätter did all of this himself at great personal cost to himself in the form of alienation from his neighbors and in the form of lost income from the state, from which he refused to accept public assistance.

Interestingly, we see here in Jägerstätter's political program a plan of mass civil disobedience that could have been inspired by Etienne de la Boetie's Discourse on Voluntary Servitude, although it is unlikely that Jägerstätter ever read it.

In fact, we find in his writings a man who understood the key to undermining political power in the face of a dictator with untrammeled power. In Murray Rothbard's introduction to the Discourse, he states that

Thus, after concluding that all tyranny rests on popular consent, La Boétie eloquently concludes that "obviously there is no need of fighting to overcome this single tyrant, for he is automatically defeated if the country refuses consent to its own enslavement." Tyrants need not be expropriated by force; they need only be deprived of the public's continuing supply of funds and resources. The more one yields to tyrants, La Boétie points out, the stronger and mightier they become.

Some would undoubtedly argue that open disobedience would only bring greater repression form those who did remain obedient, but in Jägerstätter's mind, he failed to see how things would be worse had others like him actually stood their ground:

Things would be no worse today for genuine Christian faith in our land if the churches were no longer open and if thousands of Christians had poured out their blood and their lives for Christ and their faith. This would be better than now watching silently as there is more and more acceptance of falsehood.

In Jägerstätter's time, as today, most saw resistance to tyrants as foolishness. It was much better to comply and save one's skin. The Catholic clergy certainly did its part to talk Jägerstätter out of his plan of action.

Jägerstätter's local parish priest, who had himself served time in prison for speaking against Hitler, said that "I wanted to talk him out of it, but he defeated me again and again with words from the scriptures."

Later, as the threat of execution became ever more real, Fr. Ferdinand Furthauer also tried to talk him out of it, and later regretted his intervention saying "I often pray that Franz Jägerstätter may forgive me."

Franz's wife Franziska was one of the few who supported him. According to Erna Putz, "[i]t was immediately clear to everyone that conscientious objection would cost Franz his life. His mother tried through relatives to change her son’s mind. Franziska spoke to him too, at the start. But as everyone tried to talk him round, as the arguments went on and he was quite alone against them all, she stood by him u2018If I had not stood by him, he would have had no one,' she explained."

Although many dragged their heels in going along with the regime, why did Jägerstätter draw such a clear line which brought condemnation down upon him? We know it was not just resistance to National Socialism's inherent anti-Catholicism. The reasons were many.

Jägerstätter explained that "I cannot and may not take an oath in favor of a government that is fighting an unjust war." It is unclear under what circumstances Jägerstätter would have been willing to take up arms for the state, although he did outline his objections to the National Socialist program specifically.

Of great importance is the fact that Jägerstätter simply did not believe the Nazi propaganda. Hitler's speeches and the speeches of his propagandists frequently mentioned God and the defense of Christian civilization as justification for the war. Jägerstätter clearly rejected this on the grounds that the National Socialists were anti-Christian, but also on the grounds that wars of conquest are, in their very nature counter to the act of actually defending the faith.

When our Catholic missionaries went into pagan lands in order to make people Christian, did they go in with fighter planes and bombs…[a]re we Christians today smarter than Christ himself? Do some of us truly believe that we can rescue Christian belief in Europe from a decline…by means of this massive shedding of blood? Did our good savior, whom we should always follow, go against paganism with his apostles as we German-speaking Christians are now going against [Bolshevism]?

We see that it was not just the nature of National Socialism, but also the war itself that Jägerstätter so opposed. And it is important to note that he knew little of the true horrors of the war. What he did know about the atrocities and death camps of the east was largely hearsay and rumor in Jägerstätter's place and time. He simply knew that bombing women and children in the name of national defense or in the name of defending the faith was not something he was going to support.

What of the advice others gave to him to save his own skin and rejoin his family? For Franz, these arguments failed even on a practical level. Consenting to go fight in the war, where he would be called upon to kill innocents, was only playing the odds. There had been already 750,000 casualties for the Reich at Stalingrad alone. If Jägerstätter were shipped off the eastern front, what were the odds he would ever return? So many men in his village had already been killed in action leaving behind impoverished widows and orphans. So Jägerstätter had the choice of playing the odds, abandoning his convictions and hoping he might avoid a meaningless death on the front. Or he might refuse to kill for the state, even if it meant certain death.

If one is to risk one's life, Jägerstätter thought, would it not better to do it for Christ than for Hitler? In Jägerstätter's view, if no one is guaranteed another day on earth, why let what little time one has left be wasted in fighting for the National Socialists? Why not die a free man rather than a slave?

In his last note, Jägerstätter wrote "Now I'll write down a few words as they come to me from my heart. Although I am writing them with my hands in chains, this is still much better than if my will were in chains."

Very few came to the same conclusion, and at the end, even Jägerstätter longed for some corroboration of his position. This came mere hours before his execution, when he was told that Fr. Franz Reinisch had been recently executed for also refusing to fight for the Reich. This news strengthened Jägerstätter's resolve all the more, and although we now know that over 4,000 priests had been executed by the Nazis for various sorts of disobedience, these cases were known by few at the time.

Jägerstätter was executed as a traitor on August 9th and his ashes were buried in a nearby cemetery, far from his family.

In the following years, Jägerstätter's former neighbors regarded him as either an impractical eccentric or as an outright traitor, and they offered his widow little help. In one interview, Jim Forest noted that after calmly recounting the death of her husband, Franziska Jägerstätter "broke down in tears while describing the subsequent behavior of her neighbors." Franziska even lived in fear and later explained that "I thought no one would ever know about him. I hid his letters under my mattress for decades."

Since then, Jägerstätter has become the patron saint of conscientious objectors and a hero to antiwar activists.

His story and his writing have much to teach not only Christians, but also anyone who seeks freedom of conscience and who opposes war and authoritarian regimes in the face of a complacent and obedient population.

For now, we Americans can still legally criticize the state — most of the time — and at the moment, there is no conscription. But history has shown that such a state of affairs is hardly guaranteed in this country or any other country.

It is still possible for now in many cases to say "no" without risking death or a lengthy prison term. But the time may come when it is not as easy, and then many will face choices like those faced by Jägerstätter. But even then, refusing to obey will, in the words of Jägerstätter, "free that individual's soul." It is always still possible to do something, and according to Fr. John Dear, "In an insane world, Franz points the way: refuse to fight, refuse to kill, refuse to be complicit in warmaking, refuse to compromise."

Ryan McMaken [send him mail] teaches political science in Colorado.

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by Ryan McMaken

Recently by Ryan McMaken: Ron Paul's GOP Battle Reveals Some Truths About Political Parties

I'm not one to automatically like a movie just because its politics agree with mine. The Lost City, for example, an anti-socialist historical drama about Cuba, while not horrible, left me wishing it was a much better movie, and less of a long slog through 45 minutes that should have been edited out of what could have been a great 90-minute movie. So, I was a bit worried that I might be in for a similar experience in watching For Greater Glory. Like The Lost City, For Greater Glory has been lauded to the skies by some libertarian and conservative reviewers while being absolutely, and predictably, vilified by many critics in the legacy media. So, as For Greater Glory started to roll on the screen, there was a nagging fear deep down inside me that maybe, just maybe, this movie deserved the bad reviews.

I am happy to report, however, that For Greater Glory is an entertaining, well-crafted and well-acted film about a historical episode that is apparently unknown to most Americans. The film covers a period of Mexican history during which there were a series of anti-clerical purges following the Mexican Revolution which led to a harsh repression of Catholic laypeople and clergy in Mexico. This led to the desecration of churches, widespread executions without trial, and the brutal suppression of Catholic resistance. Eventually, a group of rebels, called Cristeros, took up arms against the central government and demanded the free-exercise of religion under the leadership of the initially-atheist Gen. Enrique Gorostieta (Andy Garcia).

Dramatically, the film is dominated by Andy Garcia, who delivers some of his best work here as the religiously-ambiguous General Gorostieta who is known for his military prowess in previous Mexican wars. Garcia provides the gravitas necessary for a film, which lacking good acting, could easily have become something resembling little more than a series of historical re-enactments. Also key to the dramatic arc of this film is José Luis Sánchez del Rio, played quite competently by young actor Mauricio Kuri. Sánchez del Rio, also a historical figure from the war, was a flagbearer for some of the Cristeros and was eventually captured, tortured and murdered by the Calles regime.

The film is punctuated with portrayals of the sheer brutality of the Calles regime, and it shows the torture, the firing squads, the hangings, and the desecration of churches which so characterized the tyranny of the period.

This has led some reviewers in the legacy media, who apparently know nothing of Mexican history, and who are clearly programmed to regard Catholics as always the oppressors and never the victims, to describe the film as heavy-handed. This description clearly shows a certain bias, since For Greater Glory is decidedly less heavy-handed than, say, Amistad or Dances with Wolves, to name two similar historical dramas. Those films, however, expressed political ideals that are politically fashionable and thus received much critical acclaim, while For Greater Glory expresses ideas that most journalism-majors-turned-film-critic will regard as quaint at best.

If anything, For Greater Glory contains more moral ambiguity than many films like Dances with Wolves or Amistad. Following Sánchez del Rio's death for example, Gorostieta is left wondering how God could allow such things to happen, while the character of Father Vega, a priest who has taken up arms, is a highly conflicted character.

Many critics simply won't allow themselves to believe, however, that governments can and do behave like the Calles regime, and that some things, such as the right to peacefully practice one's religion, really are absolutes.

It's this sort of raging naïveté, of course, that gave us an America in which we have presidents who can legally kidnap, torture and even murder Americans at will while the public declares itself to be free.

Also scandalous in the eyes of some reviewers is the obviously pro-Catholic slant of the film. The movie is hardly some kind of course of Catholic apologetics, but it is pro-Catholic in the same way that Braveheart was pro-Scots or Thunderheart was pro-Sioux. It portrays the victims of government oppression for what they were: victims. However, while we can all agree the Scots and the Sioux got the shaft at the hands of their oppressors, Christians in film are rarely afforded the same treatment, unless the victims happen to be murdered by other Christians as in the case of the excellent film The Mission.

Roger Ebert even went so far as to declare that the movie's themes of religious liberty should have included other religions in the discussions. This is a ridiculous statement, given that this is a movie about the Cristero war, after all. Insisting that this film include a discussion about other religions, which had virtually no relevance to the historical topic at hand, is like suggesting that a movie about Oliver Cromwell include a few conversations about Buddhism.

The worst part of this movie, by far, is the overuse of the musical score which, early in the film, is used to add drama to even the most basic scenes of exposition. Fortunately, this overuse tapers off, or at least ceases to be noticeable, as the film progresses. However, this movie delivers what's promised. It's a historical drama which delivers moments of suspense, some high drama and some well-done battle scenes. It's not a short film, but the early scenes are necessary to allow the audience to get to care about the characters before half of them are killed off.

If nothing else, this film does us a service by entertaining while highlighting a historical period that few Americans know about, although they should. Those who have read Graham Greene's 1940 novel The Power and the Glory will be somewhat familiar with post-Revolutionary suppression of the Church in Mexico, and For Greater Glory may now be counted as perhaps one of only two well-known dramatizations of this period which are easily accessible to English-speaking audiences.

Ryan McMaken [send him mail] teaches political science in Colorado.

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by Ryan McMaken

Recently by Ryan McMaken: The Failure of u2018Law and Order Conservatism'

When things didn't go the way the pro-Romney leadership wanted them to go, they simply created a new GOP to replace the old one. That's what happened in Nevada when Ron Paul supporters managed to gain control of the state's Republican Party apparatus at the state convention. In response, the pro-Romney and establishment Republican forces broke off and formed Team Nevada which is essentially a shadow Republican party. In addition, by pledging support to Romney, Team Nevada is receiving funding from the Republican National Committee. If all goes as planned on the Romney side, Team Nevada will provide Nevada's delegates to the Republican National Convention. The duly-elected Ron Paul delegates, who were elected through state and local conventions in Nevada, will be barred from the convention floor.

The many ways in which the old guard of the Republican party has repeatedly sought to disenfranchise Ron Paul voters and delegates are too numerous to count. Some cases have been noted by Doug Wead and by others with anti-Paul strategies ranging from smearing Paul supporters with carefully edited videos to having Paul supporters arrested for no reason.

People unfamiliar with how parties have functioned historically, may be shocked by such things, but these actions are really just more of the same from the GOP and from American political parties in general.

This year's efforts to simply destroy anyone the party leadership dislikes are hardly the first instances of occasions on which an American political party has taken steps to nullify or ignore primary and caucus results that it did not like. For example, in 2010, Dan Maes, a businessman who ran for governor in Colorado against former Congressman Scott McInnis, was abandoned by the GOP after receiving the nomination. McInnis was heavily favored as the moderate, establishment candidate while Maes was regarded as an upstart from the populist and conservative wing of the party. Near the end of the primary campaign, however, McInnis was accused of taking money from an employer for written work he allegedly stole from someone else.

McInnis's support collapsed and Maes was able to win the nomination as the Republican candidate for governor. The GOP leadership didn't care for Maes for a variety of reasons (some of them very good) and instructed him to pull out of the race so a candidate more to the party leadership's liking could be appointed outside the established nomination process. When Maes refused, the party leadership threw its support behind former-congressman Tom Tancredo who ran on a third-party ticket. Maes was denied all financial support from the Colorado GOP and the RNC.

The analogy here is less than perfect, of course. Maes was a political novice with a shady background, while Ron Paul is a twelve-term Congressman with a well-funded and highly-organized national organization. Paul's base of support is broad and deep while Maes's base was narrow and temporary. Maes's campaign ran on issues quite different from those that drive Paul's campaign, although both did draw support from the populist and anti-establishment wings of the Republican Party against moderate center-left candidates supported by the GOP establishment.

This example coupled with this year's all-out effort on the part of the GOP to prevent even the most mild dissent should make it abundantly clear to all by now that the GOP does not exist to grant a fair process to grassroots-supported candidates, or to adhere to any type of ideological consistency, or to even follow its own rules.

In spite of the substantial differences between the candidates in these two cases, the Nevada and Colorado experiences help illustrate a few truths about how political parties function to enhance and maintain the power of the established leadership.

It should be stated that most everything we say here can be also applied to the Democratic Party, as the two major parties behave in fundamentally similar ways. But it has been in the Republican Party where populist uprisings have been most common in recent years and led to some of the most strident efforts on the part of party leaders to crush anti-establishment dissent.

1. Political Parties exist to elect candidates.

The major parties in the United States do not adhere to any specific ideological program. The written party platforms are all but completely irrelevant in the day-to-day actions of the party and its members. We can also note the lack of ideological inconsistency by looking at the parties over time. Prior to Woodrow Wilson, the Democratic Party was usually the party of small, constitutional government, and it did a much better job of filling that role than the Republican Party ever has. By the 1930's, the party completely changed its orientation, however. The GOP, on the other hand, has always been the party of major corporate conglomerates like railroads and major banking interests. At its founding, it was the party of easy money and federal meddling in the economic system. It wasn't until the New Deal that the Republican Party, by virtue of being the opposition party during the long reign of FDR, found itself solidified as the party associated with free markets, and its record on that issue has been spotty at best.

If we look deeper into these ideological evolutions over time, we find that it is political expediency that drives the ideological claims of political parties, and certainly not loyalty to any sort of intellectual or ideological tradition.

This is not shocking since fundamentally, political parties exist to run candidates. Any decent American Politics 101 class will define political parties as candidate-running machines. Ideology means little, and we have seen this repeatedly in practice. This fact was summed up nicely in Nevada by a GOP partisan complaining about Ron Paul supporters:

"'Our method is we elect Republicans. That’s what the party’s for,' said Dave Buell, chairman of the Washoe County GOP in the state’s northwest corner, the second largest county in the state. u2018Down south, the Ron Paul people down there are pushing ideology rather than electing Republicans.'"

2. Political parties are really just coalitions of interest groups

Far from being organizations devoted to any particular ideological vision, parties are far more correctly described as coalitions of interest groups that have come together to serve their specific interests. Sometimes, these interest groups are fundamentally opposed to each other, as in the case of the environmentalists and organized labor together in the Democratic Party. In the GOP, the presence of small-business and free-market groups together with military contractors and other pro-war groups has led to the incoherent yet enduring myth that small government and free markets are compatible with a huge national-security state. We see here yet again the special-interest tail wagging the ideological dog. The parties don't want to cut off their own bread and butter, so they function as an organization that forces compromises on the least-wealthy interest groups in the name of party unity or defeating the other party. We see this again and again as the forces of small government in the GOP are repeatedly told to get in line behind the more well-heeled interests driving an aggressive foreign policy or protecting endless taxpayer largesse for old people. The result is that votes are delivered for candidates promising to shovel more cash to the most powerful interests. The factions within the parties who bring neither money nor power to the party, such as free-market and pro-peace groups, slavishly vote again and again for the party, naively convincing themselves that the party will do something for them if they can just win one more election.

Those who benefit most from this management of factions and interest groups are the parties themselves, since electoral victories bring with them jobs, power, and many financial rewards. The rich, well-connected interests within the party are regularly rewarded while the other groups within the coalition are told they should just be happy that the other party didn't win.

The members of the party leadership justifies this all in their minds by convincing themselves that they're pragmatists in the service of freedom and justice and all things good. To them, it's just a happy coincidence that all this service to truth and justice happens to bring with it lucrative jobs and positions of power.

3. The party leadership would rather have a safe, establishment candidate from the other party than a "dangerous" upstart from its own.

Having become used to the jobs and the junkets and the privilege and the financial rewards gleaned from protecting the entrenched interests behind each political party, the leadership in each party has no interest whatsoever in overturning their well-stocked apple carts. Insurgent candidates who challenged the entrenched party leadership are repeatedly mocked, opposed and generally blocked from party leadership roles and from receiving nominations. This will be justified with all kinds of excuses ranging from ideological rifts to appeals to be good team players, but the fact is that it's about catering to the interests who control and fund the party. Indeed, most candidates who promise to not upset the party's core interests will encounter little in the way of truly stiff opposition. This is why Goldwater could get the nomination but not Paul. Goldwater promised not to stand in the way of endless taxpayer cash for war.

At the pinnacle of the major parties the interests of those in charge vary little. Devotion to big business, to the warfare state, to easy monetary policy, and to buying off seniors with more and more cash and government favor spans the two parties, and ultimately, were a candidate who threatened these major interests to actually receive a presidential nomination, he would be abandoned by his own party.

Indeed, the Colorado case serves to illustrate what would likely happen if Ron Paul were to somehow manage to actually obtain the party's nomination at the convention. The party leadership would immediately begin searching for a third party candidate it could support. It would deny all RNC money and other traditionally GOP-controlled funds to Paul, and it would begin poisoning the GOP base against its own nominated candidate.

The GOP leadership knows that such a path would guarantee the re-election of Obama, but the GOP establishment would clearly prefer a Democrat victory to a Ron Paul victory. The threat to the GOP's core interests groups would be just too great were Paul actually elected, and it would better, in the eyes of the established party leaderships, to be seen as supporting their special interests rather than side with any victorious anti-establishment grassroots groups from within the party.

This year, the GOP leadership supports just the latest Ivy-League-educated supporter of more debt, more spending and endless war. This new one even helped invent Obamacare.

This is the choice the GOP has decided the party will provide, and anyone who disputes this vision is a radical or a kook who must be disenfranchised. The fruit of this is now being seen as the Romney camp desperately tries to rewrite its own rules and disenfranchise Paul supporters in Oklahoma, Nevada, Massachusetts and elsewhere.

They'll probably succeed, but the benefit of all of this will be that many Americans have now seen our political parties for what they really are.

Ryan McMaken [send him mail] teaches political science in Colorado.

The Best of Ryan McMaken

by Ryan McMaken

Recently by Ryan McMaken: Some Historical Perspective for RonPaulActivists

The death penalty is one of those blind spots that afflict many conservatives who claim to be for small and limited government. Just as some people who claim to be for small government virtually always give the a free pass to the enormous — and enormously wasteful- government bureaucracy known as the U.S. military, conservative proponents of the death penalty appear to labor under the assumption that government courts can be counted on to competently administer justice.

If the state can’t be trusted to deliver the mail on time or run a health care system, why can it be trusted with spy drones, a massive police state apparatus, and a gargantuan standing army? And why can it be trusted to figure out who is guilty of crimes and to then put only the guilty parties to death? Since there’s not time to address the military question here, let’s just let is suffice to say that on the latter question, the answer is this: the state can not be trusted with the death penalty.

The prevention and punishment of real crime is an important function, and even libertarians who wish to privatize everything are still opposed to violent crime. Many of them might even be willing to tolerate government courts as a second-best solution. (By "crime," of course, we're talking about violent actions against persons and property, and not actions of consenting adults such as drug deals and prostitution.) Thievery, rape and murder are indeed truly threats to the maintenance of a just and peaceful society.

In modern America, however, it is becoming increasingly clear that numerous persons convicted of capital crimes (and other crimes, violent and otherwise) have in fact been innocent, and that the extraction of confessions and the use of circumstantial evidence all leave much to be desired from the government courts.

As law professor James Duane has noted, there are many cases of suspects being tricked into murder confessions, and in some of those cases, the suspects were mentally retarded or mentally ill.

Indeed, the Innocence Project has determined that in 25% of DNA exoneration cases, the defendants made incriminating statements, delivered outright confessions or pled guilty. This is a system that, in many cases is built not on physical evidence, but on coerced confessions.

In the case of Eddie Joe Lloyd, who was himself mentally ill, Lloyd signed a confession and was sentenced to life in prison only because the death penalty was not legal in Michigan at the time. According to the innocence project, Lloyd's conviction, in which so many were convinced of his guilt, led to a renewed movement to reinstate the death penalty in the state. After 17 years, however, Lloyd was exonerated through DNA evidence and released. Fortunately for him, and for basic justice, the death penalty could not be imposed.

Not all wrongfully convicted people are as lucky.

The Atlantic recently published an article discussing the case of Carlos DeLuna, who was put to death by the state of Texas in December 1989 for a murder almost certainly committed by someone else in Corpus Christi. DeLuna maintained his innocence to the end, and after DeLuna's execution, the family of Carlos Hernandez came forward and explained that Hernandez, a violent felon, had committed the crime.

We know for a fact that people have been convicted of capital crimes. Robert Dewey, who was recently released after 17 years in prison is one recent example, and the case of Randall Dale Adams, who narrowly avoided the death penalty before being released, is another.

Fortunately for those who lived to be released for prison, they were not executed by a flawed and incompetent government-run bureaucracy known as the criminal justice system. In those cases, the miscarriages of justice were somewhat reversible, if all too imperfectly so. In the case of wrongfully-convicted persons who were executed — and we don't know how many there have been- miscarriages of justice cannot even partially be undone.

Why is it then, that among so many conservatives and others who claim to be for small or minimal government there are so many who are enthusiastic about a government-imposed death penalty?

Conservative judges are guilty of some of the worst hypocrisies in this matter. In 2006, the conservative judges on the United States Supreme Court invalidated a Kansas Supreme Court ruling against some portions of Kansas's death penalty statute. Conservative judges often claim to be "strict constructionists" or supporters of constitutional federalism, but apparently respect for federalism goes right out the door when enthusiasm for government executions takes over. Justices Scalia and Thomas happily overturned the ruling of the Kansas Supreme Court and declared even its minor limitations on the death penalty in that state were not acceptable. So much for conservative support for the prerogatives of the states or for limiting government power

These are the sorts of inconsistencies that arise from willful ignorance about the incompetence of government, and from a need to "get tough" on crime which has for decades been one of the lodestars of the conservative movement. As the recent controversies surrounding the end of capital punishment in Connecticut showed, conservatives and Republicans have kept up the fight in favor of capital punishment for decades, although given the state of the criminal justice system in America, it is increasingly difficult to see how this support can be compatible with any claim to be in favor of a smaller or more limited state.

Getting tough on real crime (excluding non-crimes such as marijuana possession) is indeed a laudable goal, but the just and measured administration of justice in the United States has become so perverted by a never-ending expansion of government law that now declares so many formerly non-criminal activities to now be criminal ones, and by the widespread acceptance of purely circumstantial evidence and coerced confessions in even capital cases.

As Rand Paul recently noted, there are people serving hard time in federal prison for the violation of foreign laws that regulate things such as possession of certain types of fish or the manufacture of guitars. Thanks to the Lacey Act, Americans can be thrown in prison for violation of foreign laws that no sane person would expect Americans to know. This sort of thing all by itself should breed nothing but contempt for federal law, but unfortunately, there is a pervasive attitude among many Americans that violations of laws, no matter how bad those laws may be, should be punished with draconian fines and prison terms.

From capital crimes on down to petty infractions, the movement to get tough on crime has made a mockery of the very idea of just and reasonable administration of criminal justice. We now live in a world in which seven-year-old children who throw tantrums are arrested and hauled off in handcuffs. The get-tough-on-crime movement has given us the "zero-tolerance" polices of today that lead to children being expelled or suspended for giving a friend an aspirin or for drawing a picture of a crucifix.

All of this serves to remind us that we live in a society in which the legal system is fatally flawed and that it is now nearly impossible to comply with the law in one's ordinary daily life. It is a system in which growing the wrong plant or building guitars out of the wrong kind of wood, or marketing the wrong kind of commemorative coin can come with prison terms, and it is a system in which people can be handed death sentences based on coerced confessions and purely circumstantial evidence, with no witnesses and no physical evidence.

If this is the sort of government called for by conservatives who claim to be for limited and responsible government, then they certainly have an odd conception of what a small or limited government is.

Ryan McMaken [send him mail] teaches political science in Colorado.

The Best of Ryan McMaken

by Ryan McMaken

Recently by Ryan McMaken: 6 Myths Catholics Tell About Libertarians

I’ve been somewhat surprised by the absolutely hysterical reaction among some RP activists to Ron Paul’s announcement that he’s shifting resources toward winning more delegates instead of blowing it on straw polls in new primaries. In some of the forums, alleged "supporters" are hurling insults at both Ron and his staffers.

I remember how after 2008, some people I talked to pledged to "never give money ever again" to Ron Paul because he "wasn’t serious" about winning. These people think elections are all that matter, but that’s not how political and intellectual movements work. The election of numerous libertarian candidates will be a lagging indicator, not a leading indicator, of the success of a libertarian movement. The population still isn’t there. Although it will be.

It’s absolutely unbelievable that some people who claim to be champions of freedom are now viciously badmouthing a man who can claim much credit in making libertarianism a household word – as it now is – and has been instrumental in building the most important challenge to central banking and the warfare state in a century. All of this is in addition to taking control of the GOP machinery in numerous states and cong. districts.

I might also note that I turned on the tele the other day and there was Ron Paul talking about central banking. Note to newcomer activists: I know it’s hard to believe, but before RP’s 2008 run, there was once a time when libertarians weren’t on TV regularly talking about Austrian free-market economics and the evils of war. I swear it’s true. Cross my heart and hope to die.

Politically, Ron Paul is doing what the Religious Right successfully did 20 years ago when it became a major force in the party, and he’s rebuilding the intellectual infrastructure of the American right wing in a way similar to what Buckley did in the 1950s. Except, where Buckley only pretended to be for the rule of law and limited government, Ron Paul is the real thing. And Paul’s even doing it without CIA money, unlike Buckley. RP’s the continuation of the old libertarian movement that existed in opposition to war and the New Deal before it was hijacked by the conservative apologists for the state.

Except now, instead of being composed of a few dozen guys who could all have met in a small hotel ballroom, the movement for peace and freedom is a huge nationwide movement.

Anyone who, like me, teaches people in their twenties can already see a huge change. The ideas of libertarianism have a credibility they have not had in decades, if not not since the late 19th century when Herbert Spencer was a best-selling author in America.

Those of us who have been involved in the libertarian movement for more than ten years can see a huge difference, and those who have been around for decades undoubtedly see even more. Nevertheless, I can understand that a younger person, or a person who has never been politically active before, might view one presidential election as some kind of end-all-be-all of the freedom movement, but it’s not.

The Ron Paul phenomenon isn’t even close to being done re-shaping the American political landscape, yet amazingly, some people seem to think that not running TV ads in California somehow signifies a lack of seriousness on the part of the Paul campaign. Only a complete lack of experience and historical perspective could lead one to such conclusions.

Ryan McMaken [send him mail] teaches political science in Colorado.

The Best of Ryan McMaken

by Ryan McMaken

Recently by Ryan McMaken: Equality Before the Law Finally Achieved

Catholic libertarians like myself have become accustomed to being lectured by priests, bishops and Catholic pundits about the inherent incompatibility of Catholicism and libertarianism. This assertion, whether presented in writing or as a harangue from the pulpit, is generally accompanied by a set of reliably tried-and-true myths about libertarianism that often demonstrates a poor grasp of what libertarianism even is. Of course, one never encounters a wholesale condemnation of Liberalism or Conservatism, mainly because large numbers of American Catholics generally self-identify as one or the other. Given the relatively small number of libertarians among the faithful however, one can safely denounce it, and neither courage nor erudition is required.

The opposition to libertarianism stems from a handful of myths that are circulated among Catholics about libertarianism.

Myth #1: Libertarians are libertines

It is certainly true that some libertarians are libertines, just as some people who profess to be Catholic are libertines as well. There is certainly nothing in the libertarian philosophy that precludes a person from being a libertine. Libertarianism after all, is a political theory only, and is based on the idea that it is immoral, except in cases of self-defense, to engage in violence against other persons. The state, being an organization that maintains a monopoly on the means of coercion, is based on the use of coercion and is thus inherently violent. To the libertarian then, the cases in which states can act morally must be either constrained to a very small number of situations or must be eliminated entirely.

So, libertarians merely argue that it is not moral for states to fine, imprison, kill persecute or otherwise coerce human beings who wish to behave in immoral ways that do not involve physical violence against others. For example, if a person wishes to smoke a joint, it is not moral for the state to persecute such a person since he or she has not done anything violent.

Mind you, there is nothing to prevent a private voluntary organization, such as a family or church or club or business from discouraging or denouncing such behavior in its members of employees. Indeed, libertarianism argues strongly in favor of private organizations like churches and families and businesses being free to demand whatever behavior they wish from their own members and employees.

This situation, of course, is what has predominated historically in Christendom. Drug laws, for example are an invention of the 20th century. Did Christians walk around high on drugs every day prior to the prohibition of marijuana use in the 1930s? Obviously not. Indeed one could argue that drug use is far more prevalent among Christians now than it was before drugs were made illegal. Saint Thomas Aquinas famously spoke against civil governments attempting to outlaw human vice. His contention that “[a]ccordingly in human government also, those who are in authority rightly tolerate certain evils, lest certain goods be lost, or certain evils be incurred,” wasn't a declaration that moral vices like prostitution were morally permissible. It was simply a recognition of the fact that to have the state outlaw a vice was often a cure worse than the disease.

Myth #2: Libertarians hate the poor

Those of us who have been involved in right-wing politics for years have all seen how some people might get this impression. Among Conservative and Republican pundits and activists, who often unconvincingly claim to be in favor of "free markets," one will often hear denunciations of poor people who are presumably lazy, deceptive and foolish. This, apparently, means that poor people and their children "deserve" to be poor.

It is very rare that someone will encounter this attitude with a libertarian who is not just a Conservative pretending to be a libertarian in an attempt to appear more hip.

In fact, a major reason that libertarians are so opposed to state power is that we recognize that the state causes most of the poverty that it later then turns around and claims to be eradicating. The current depression is a perfect example. There are now at least 8-10 million unemployed Americans. The current bust is the result of at least 20 years of economic meddling and wealth destruction encouraged by the government through manipulation of the money supply and through a runaway regulatory state. This has led to the current situation of a stagnant economy and rampant unemployment and underemployment.

As the middle class shrinks and millions descend into poverty, thanks to the state, how can we say that the state's most vulnerable victims, the poor, "deserve" their present situation?

Libertarians recognize that providing for one's self and one's family is a difficult job and that people need to be as free as possible in pursuing those goals. Those people should also have more control of their income and their wealth so that they can provide more fully for their Churches as well. As it is, millions of working Americans give 40-50 percent of their income to fund massive government departments in Washington, DC, endless warfare and the bailouts of billionaires. Meanwhile, the government that we are taxed to fund is causing the poverty we're told it can fix. The argument that the government is the best way to provide poverty relief is naïve in the extreme. Indeed, when it comes to letting the government be in charge of reducing poverty, one might as well put communists in charge of food production.

Myth #3: Libertarians neglect solidarity

Many libertarian Catholics, like Thomas Woods, have often made the point that libertarian ideals of a just civil government and just economy are well grounded in the subsidiarity principle –the idea that any act of government should be performed at the most local level possible- that has long been favored by Catholic theologians and popes.

Some Catholic pundits, such as Mark Shea, claim that libertarians inflate a concern for subsidiarity at the expense of solidarity. This notion of course, is based on an acceptance of Myths #1 and #2.

This myth can be dispelled in two different ways. First, we can note that libertarianism is not opposed to the success and legality of non-governmental organizations. Secondly, we note that libertarians oppose the organization that has done more to destroy human solidarity than any other organization in human history: the state.

First, there is nothing in libertarianism that makes libertarians opposed to the success and propagation of organizations and bodies on which solidarity is built. These include families, churches, clubs, association, schools, and even labor unions. Libertarians believe that all of these organizations should be free to exist without molestation from the state. For the Catholic libertarian, the most important foundations of society are of course the family and the Church. Under a libertarian regime, these organizations can be freely supported by any person, and he or she may peacefully encourage others to do so as well.

On the other hand, libertarians oppose the state. It is difficult to image just how exactly pro-state Catholics imagine that the state actually promotes solidarity. Does it promote solidarity by sowing class warfare through the stealing from one class to give to another? Is it the crony capitalism that impoverishes the poor for the sake of billionaires? Do the endless wars promote solidarity? Did the dropping of atomic bombs on women and children help solidarity? How about all the famines caused by governments from Ireland to China? Did the mass murder of priests in Mexico during the twenties promote solidarity?

Some Catholics will say, "You libertarians are too extreme. You want to cut back government too much just because some states have been really awful. If we can just vote in the right people, bad things like that won't happen." In response I have one question: How has that been working out for you?

Myth #4: Libertarians support liberty only because it is in their self-interest

This one is the most easily disproven. Anyone who has been involved in libertarian activism knows that being a libertarian is not exactly a great career move. It is likely to make one unpopular and, if one is lucky, he will merely be considered to be a harmless eccentric by his co-workers and family members. Often, people are not that charitable. Most libertarians support libertarianism because they think it is the right thing to do, and not because there is some kind of expected material benefit. Very few libertarians expect major libertarian victories in the near future anyway.

Although there are real victories, such as the end of global communism in 1989 and the fact that Keynesian economics is now virtually discredited among everyone except government employees and academic economists, no libertarian actually expects to benefit in any meaningful way from the advance of libertarian ideas in his lifetime. For example, a great libertarian victory would be major cuts in military spending and the ending of the government's many foreign wars. How that would monetarily benefit any libertarian who advocates for such a turn of events is hardly obvious.

Myth #5: Libertarians want to persecute Christianity

There are no doubt some libertarians who wish to persecute Christians, but if those libertarians actually adhere to libertarian principles of not using government power against people, then we don't have much to fear from them, now do we?

On the other hand, a strong government is one of the most dangerous weapons in the hands of those who seek to persecute the faith (and also in the hands of those who don't.)

One need not be a historian to notice that Catholicism in the United States has been persecuted to a much smaller extent than in many countries, including many so-called Catholic countries.

This is due in no small part to (quickly-waning) libertarian traditions in the United States regarding how the state interacts with religions. The First Amendment states that Congress shall make no law "respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof." This amendment is born from a tradition that comes to us from many lessons learned over the centuries in both Britain and in the American colonies. The colonials had learned that religious majorities tend to persecute religious minorities, and many of the framers of the Constitution came to the conclusion that the best way to promote Christianity was to leave it alone. Many Catholics have bought into the incorrect contention made by leftists that the establishment clause was the work of secularists, and that the separation of Church and state is somehow detrimental to Churches.

On the contrary, the separation of Church and state in America has been one of the greatest obstacles in the path of those who might have sought to persecute Catholics in what, for most of its history, has been a country imbued with anti-Catholicism.

Why is it, for example, that there have never been anti-clerical purges in the United States as there were in Mexico during the twenties? Why have Catholic women and children never been gunned down specifically for their faith as was the case in Spain during the thirties? Why were attempts at outlawing Catholic schools struck down as illegal? The answer is that there is a tradition in America, when it comes to religion, in which it is believed that the state which governs best, governs least. We call that philosophy a libertarian philosophy.

Unfortunately, in our present age of the unlimited state, the old constraints on the state, even in matters of religion, are breaking down at an increasingly rapid pace.

Not helping matters is the fact that there has long been a pro-state element within the Catholic clergy and hierarchy that has been whooping it up for all types of socialism in the name of poverty-relief.

Recently after decades of naïve pro-government boosterism, the bishops finally figured out that a state that is powerful enough to wage total war and to distribute wealth and regulate on a massive scale, is big enough to persecute and prosecute Catholics who refuse to commit sin in the face of government regulations.

Obviously, such a situation would never come to pass under even a militantly secularist libertarian regime since libertarians would never regulate health care. Catholic doctors, pharmacists and hospitals would be free to govern themselves in line with their Catholic faith.

Myth #6: Libertarians are not pro-life

There is no doubt that libertarians are split as to whether or not abortion should be legal. Since this is an open debate among libertarians, there is no "libertarian position" on the legality of abortion, and any claim that libertarians are "pro-abortion" is simply contrary to the facts.

On the other hand, we can note that libertarians are far less bellicose toward babies that are ex utero than are either Conservatives or Liberals. Both look the other way or actively defend horrific injuries to children in the name of "national defense" or "global democracy." Rare is the Conservative or Liberal who will denounce, for example, the firebombing of Japan as a crime against humanity, in spite of the fact that hundreds of thousands of Japanese women, children, toddlers and infants were burned to death horribly, as can be seen here.

The final document issued by the Second Vatican Council, known as Gaudium et Spes states that "[e]very act of war directed to the indiscriminate destruction of whole cities or vast areas with their inhabitants is a crime against God and humanity, which merits firm and unequivocal condemnation."

Conservatives and Liberals routinely defend this sort of violence against civilians in the name of the war on terror or ridding the world of evil or some other unattainable and impractical utopia, yet it is the libertarians who are supposedly anti-Catholic.

The state is not our friend. Many Catholics oppose libertarians because apparently, some Catholics still cling to notions about government that have never been true, but have contended that states are somehow built on consent and virtue and that they do more good than harm. The reality is much different. Even the most uncorrupted and constrained states sow discord among their people, expropriate massive amounts of wealth to dole out to the politically well-connected, wage wars against civilians, suppress dissent, supplant the family and persecute the religious.

Clearly, this institution that is supposed to bring us so many blessings, is not nearly constrained enough.

The state is fundamentally an institution founded on violence. Saint Augustine once famously compared secular rulers to pirates. According to historian Ralph Raico:

In City of God, St. Augustine tells the story of a pirate captured by Alexander the Great. The Emperor angrily demanded of him, “How dare you molest the seas?” To which the pirate replied, “How dare you molest the whole world? Because I do it with a small boat, I am called a pirate and a thief. You, with a great navy, molest the world and are called an emperor.” St. Augustine thought the pirate’s answer was “elegant and excellent.” Alexander sought to bring civilization and enlightenment to the world. Our own government seeks the same. The times are different, but the outcomes are the same.

Ryan McMaken [send him mail] teaches political science in Colorado.

The Best of Ryan McMaken

by Ryan McMaken

Recently by Ryan McMaken: How the Interventionists Stole the AmericanRight

Like virtually every country on earth, the United States has a long and sordid history of persecuting minority groups in the name of national security, safety and cultural "preservation." This can include racial minorities, religious minorities and even linguistic minorities.

The level of persecution varied from short-term hostility and small-scale mob violence, as with German-speaking Americans during the First World War, up to outright chattel slavery as with the Black Americans in many American states, and to a systematic attempt at extermination as with the plains Indians. And in between are those many groups such as Americans of Japanese descent, or Mexican descent, for example, who at various times in history were denied the protection of American law which led to forfeiture of property, income, privacy and freedom.

In a perverse way then, we can now look upon the National Defense Authorization Act as a great equalizer for Americans of all ethnic, religious and language groups. Obviously, it is still worse to have dark skin, as, for example, is the case in Arizona where, under SB 1070, people who "look like" Mexican nationals are far more likely to be harassed for their "papers" by government agents.

But now every American has the equal opportunity to become an unperson if he is declared to be an "enemy combatant," anywhere in America, if only a bureaucrat in the Pentagon wills it and the president rubber-stamps it. The alleged combatant may then be seized and imprisoned indefinitely with no due process. In addition, such administratively declared enemies of the state may, in practice, if not perhaps in established law, be murdered at the will of the president without due process.

In other words, all Americans now enjoy the same freedoms as a Japanese-American in 1943 or a Black American under Jim Crow.

There are always a myriad of excuses to justify the dehumanization of various groups. With the blacks it was the grave threat of mecegenation, or earlier, slave uprising. Namely, there was a lasting fear that the slaves might actually steal what rightly belonged to them: their bodies.

With the Japanese, they were supposedly all in league with Hirohito, secretly plotting the destruction of factories and highways across America. So they were locked up, and now unable to pay their bills or show up for work, they lost jobs and property, and of course, freedom.

With the modern-day Hispanics, the Anglo gatekeepers of American culture (their version of it, anyway) assure us that these European-language-speaking and European-religion-practicing immigrants coming across our border are the harbingers of doom to European civilization. Demand their papers. Deport them. Create a national ID system!

The Hispanics of yesteryear were also an incalculable threat which is why, following the American war of aggression again Mexico that ended in 1848, the new Anglo immigrants into the region used their influence with Congress and their superior numbers locally to defraud the formerly-Mexican inhabitants of most of their lands and property through legislation like the Land Act of 1851. It was all necessary to protect America from Mexican fifth columnists, apparently.

In 1922, Oregon passed the Compulsory Education Act in an attempt to eradicate all private schools, especially those Catholic ones that taught "foreign" values.

And of course, there was Jim Crow, which the pages of National Review described as the imposition of "civilized standards" on a "servile race." In the end, naturally, it was all in the name of preserving "American" values.

These are just a few examples.

Well, that sort of piece-meal, localized despotism is gone.

We are so enlightened now as to give ourselves an equal-opportunity despotism that knows no borders and no rule of law. Today, we are told, the grave existential threat is terrorism. We look at the persecutions of the past in the name of Anglo-Saxonism or White supremacy or Americanism and we say, "well, we know that was wrong, but this time is different. This time, the destruction of human liberty is absolutely necessary. This time, we got it right."

Some of the supporters of the NDAA, which essentially nullifies a sizable portion of the Bill of Rights, take comfort in the thought that only swarthy people with Arabic-sounding names could only ever be caught up in such a law: "If you're not doing anything wrong, you don't need the Fourth Amendment or the Sixth Amendment."

Such people apparently, don't remember the 1990s very well when it was all the rage to discuss the grave threat that "militias" posed to American civilization. Then as now, the FBI was hard at work infiltrating militia groups, and then funding and encouraging violence among alleged extremists.

Had the NDAA been around in the days following The Oklahoma City bombing, it is not difficult to imagine the mass incarceration, without trial, of "right wing extremists," most of whom were little more than plump middle-aged men carrying hunting rifles through the forests of the Upper Peninsula.

Those who stand up in opposition to such abuse at the hands of government have always been labeled as kooks, as part of the fringe and as "un-American." Such was the case with William Lloyd Garrison, the heroic abolitionist, or with Ralph Carr, the governor of Colorado who opposed the internment of the Japanese, or with Edward Atkinson, the great industrialist and defender of laissez faire who raised money for John Brown's anti-slavery revolt and who, during the Spanish-American War, encouraged American soldiers to mutiny rather than fight to put Filipinos under the American government's boot.

Such men were incessantly denounced for defending the criminal element in America, and that the latest despotism, of whatever era, only existed to defend America, to save lives, and to spread liberty.

But, as Mencken has noted "[t]he trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one’s time defending scoundrels. For it is against scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the beginning if it is to be stopped at all."

Mencken had it slightly wrong. These days, the defense of freedom only requires the defense of alleged scoundrels, since virtually every American is a criminal under the current weight of tens of thousands of federal laws and regulations, and the war on drugs, the war on immigrants, and the war on terrorism.

The craven conservatives and the hypocritical liberals who defend this ongoing destruction of the Bill of Rights attempt to placate the opposition by saying they "welcome debate" and declare that only kooks oppose laws like the NDAA since it is "complicated." This is little more than shilling for the status quo. John McCain simply declares that all proponents of due process "want terrorists to go free." And yet, it is the cranks, who insist on the rule of law, who are "un-American."

When exposed to the persecutions of the past, especially the racially-motivated ones, school children are often left with the impression that things were different in the past, and that somehow, we've moved beyond that sort of arbitrary oppression and disregard for natural rights and natural law. That notion is incorrect. The arbitrary exercise of government power is alive and well. Except now, it applies to everyone everywhere. Equality before the law has been achieved at last.

Ryan McMaken [send him mail] teaches political science in Colorado.

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Thanks to Ron Paul, the Conservative movement is having an identity crisis. The old guard of the Conservative movement, which also happens to be the Republican Party establishment, still clings to the old creation myth of the Conservative movement. Namely, that there was no opposition to the New Deal-Liberal consensus until William F. Buckley and National Review came along in 1955, saving America from the American left, social democracy, moral turpitude and international Communism.

The modern gatekeepers of the movement, and the Republican Party officials, who fancy themselves as the keepers of the last word on the acceptable range of debate within the movement, cannot understand why the Ron Paul movement is more concerned with actually shrinking the size of government than with waging endless wars for endless peace. They cannot fathom that people claiming to be part of the American Right might actually be interested in rolling back government power to tax, wiretap, spy, arrest, imprison and feel up American citizens. This runs contrary to everything they have ever imbibed about what it means to be Conservative in America.

And to a certain extent, they are correct. Since the Buckley-National Review wing of the movement in the 1950s gradually took control of the American Right, the movement became recognizable no longer by any particular concern with freedom or with free markets, but with a struggle against international Communism, with fighting culture wars and with other collectivist and big-government notions that came to dominate the movement by the 1960s. Thus, in response, the modern National Review columnists and the established Conservative punditry has repeatedly attempted to read the Ron Paul movement out of the American Right wing, although to very little effect.

While the modern disciples of Buckley and American interventionism act aghast and claim that the Conservatives and libertarians within the Paul movement have some how betrayed the ideals of the right, it is actually the laissez faire and anti-interventionists among the Paul wing of the movement that have the better claim to being true to the roots of the movement.

The Conservative movement, in its original form, was primarily concerned with laissez faire, with civil liberties and with a restrained and anti-interventionist foreign policy. This wasn't just some quick flash-in-the-pan that occurred before people supposedly wised up about the so-called Communist menace. This was a diverse ideological movement that dominated the American Right for more than twenty years from the early days of the New Deal to the mid-1950s.

The names that come down to us today from what is now called the "Old Right" were powerful voices for laissez faire during the New Deal and post-war years: Albert Jay Nock, Frank Chodorov, Garet Garrett, Leonard Read, Henry Hazlitt and Felix Morley.

Now, these theorists almost never referred to themselves as "Conservatives" in these early years. Frank Chodorov famously threatened to punch anyone who called him a Conservative, but this was the label that was affixed to the movement by its enemies who insisted on branding anyone who opposed the revolutionary and socialist policies of the Roosevelt administration as "reactionaries" and "Conservatives." (Later, the Buckley wing would adopt the term and graft it onto the movement that had earlier thought of itself as a "radical" movement.)

Yet, it was this burgeoning laissez faire movement in opposition to the New Deal and later to a variety of foreign military interventions that provided the foundation of the movement that Buckley and his followers would later distort to fit their own policies of big-government anti-Communism.

Even the Pro-Buckley version of movement history, penned by George Nash, recognizes the primacy or laissez faire and anti-state ideologies in the movement. Indeed, Nash's history of the movement, in its first chapter, titled "The Revolt of the Libertarians," places the anti-government movement, with theorists such as Hayek and von Mises as instrumental in providing the theoretical underpinnings of the movement.

Nash presents this libertarian "stage" of the movement all as a minor and short lived affair of course, and as a mere stop on the way to Buckley-style conservatism. In reality however, Buckley's takeover of the Conservative movement, made possible through connections to the East Coast establishment and by promoting militant nationalism at the expense of laissez faire, allowed Buckley to build on a growing anti-establishment movement, and turn it instead into a movement that actually promoted the establishment through endless military intervention and culture war.

This new movement which was called the New Right (since it was something new) was devoted to an agenda that was opposed to the free-market and small-government ideologies of the Old Right, but which also exploited the popularity of the old libertarian message to hammer together a movement that occasionally made a nod in the direction of free markets and civil liberties.

Thus we see that Buckley had unsuccessfully attempted to purchase Human Events magazine which was itself moving toward aggressive anti-Communism, but still retained many of the laissez faire leanings inherited from past editors Morley and Chodorov. At the same The Freeman, a magazine edited by Chodorov, and later by Hazlitt, was also considered one of the mainstays of the movement, and was printed under the auspices of the Foundation for Economic Education, the first free-market think tank, and founded by libertarian Leonard Read.

Buckley went on in 1955 to found National Review where he could fully depart from the old laissez faire and anti-interventionist coterie that was found at The Freeman, Human Events and among some widely read columnists, such as Henry Hazlitt, who still promoted the old line.

Buckley brought with him a stable of former Communists who had little to no grounding in the established intellectual strains of the libertarian and Old Right movements of the time. Recent Communists like James Burnham, Max Eastman, Frank Meyer and Whitaker Chambers were brought in to displace the old rightists and libertarians who were more interested in freedom than in waging endless crusades against far away countries with second-rate economies.

The ex-Communists were still in awe of the movement they abandoned. For whatever reason, they had turned against their old movements, but they still believed that the economic system of Communism would produce better results than the economic system of capitalism. They believed that Communism as an ideology was therefore more likely to succeed than the far less "disciplined" and "organized" ideologies of the West.

No one held this gloomy view of the future more steadfastly than Whitaker Chambers. Chambers believed that Western opposition to Communism was probably little better than a rear guard action that would only slow the eventual triumph of Communism.

This sort of doomsday Conservatism, based on a weak understanding of economics and a latent Communism that still believed in its inevitable triumph, could only further propel the Buckley movement ever more down the road of an apocalyptic foreign policy that saw the central battle of our time as an Armageddon between the American state and the Soviet state. Naturally, with the stakes so high, all must be devoted to the war.

Buckley had already set the tone in a 1952 essay in which he declared that in the name of eradicating Communism, “we have got to accept Big Government for the duration–for neither an offensive nor a defensive war can be waged…except through the instrumentality of a totalitarian bureaucracy within our shores.”

If one of the most prominent members of the Conservative movement is advocating for a totalitarian bureaucracy, what place is there in the movement for the likes of a Nock or a Chodorov? The laissez faire wing of the movement gradually was pushed out.

Buckely sought backing for this interventionism and for this disparagement of laissez faire by seeking an entirely new ideological framework for the movement. For this reason, Buckley forged an alliance with the traditionalist Conservatives who could provide academic and intellectual underpinnings to the movement and who introduced a novel interpretation of history in which the movement that rose in opposition to the New Deal was actually the successor to the European traditionalist and class-based conservatism of Edmund Burke, Coleridge, Brownson and others.

Russell Kirk became the most prominent theorist behind this new theory of the American Right and most importantly argued that the tradition of laissez faire in America had no place on the American Right or within the Conservative movement. Kirk's larger theory was that it was Conservatism that was responsible for preserving the vital institutions of American civilization, and that the laissez faire individualists were actually at odds with the true American ideological tradition. Thanks to Kirk and the traditionalists (who dominated the masthead at Modern Age magazine), Thomas Jefferson, the Jacksonians, William Graham Sumner, Mencken, Nock, Chodorov and all later individualists were made to be working against the preservation and success of Western civilization that had allegedly been handed down to Americans through the old-style Burkean Conservatives.

Thus were American proponents of laissez faire and individualism made second-class citizens within the very movement they had founded. Kirk went on to create a theory of American exceptionalism, based on its alleged past Conservatism, that he explored in his book The American Cause, which equated militant anti-Communism with the preservation of all things decent and traditional in American life.

Armed with this new theory of conservatism that disavowed any connection to past individualist ideologies and which disparaged free markets, Buckley succeeded in silencing most consistent laissez faire voices within the movement while claiming that the laissez faire Conservatives actually misunderstood their own history. Certainly, Buckley would brook no comment suggesting that American foreign policy should be anything other than highly interventionist.

This sea change in the Conservative movement can be illustrated by the shift in the ideological patrimony of the major movement theorists. Prior to Buckley and the traditionalists, Herbert Spencer was perhaps the most influential theorist among the members of the Old Right and the early libertarian movement. Spencer had been exceptionally popular in the United States during the late 19th century, with his books selling more than 300,000 copies during the last quarter of the century. This would be equivalent of selling well over a million copies today.

Sumner, Nock, Hazlitt, and Chodorov were all heavily influenced by Spencer who had been one of England's most strident individualists and defenders of free markets.

After Buckley, however, Burke replaced Spencer on the American right as the recognized ideological father of the movement.

Thus, by the 1960s, Buckley headed the dominant wing of the American Right, and it is at this time, that we then see the libertarian movement begin to form its own movement.

Now, at this point I must stop and note that some readers may take exception to my inclusion of the libertarian movement within the Conservative movement, or even on the right wing. There are indeed compelling arguments on all sides as to whether the libertarians should be included on the right or on the left or on neither. Looking at the fact of the matter, however, the modern libertarian movement has both historically and organizationally associated with the right wing far more than with the left.

And for this reason, when speaking about the history of the movement itself, it is safe to include the libertarians on the American Right. Perhaps it is helpful to make this important distinction also: While libertarians are obviously not Conservatives, they might nevertheless be placed within that larger ideological movement we call the Conservative movement.

As Brian Doherty notes in Radicals for Capitalism, the patrimony of the libertarians is extremely similar to that of the Conservatives, and Doherty described the important contributions of numerous members of the Old Right and of the libertarians to which Nash, in his own history of Conservatism credits the early foundations of the movement. Thus we see that both the libertarians and Conservatives claim a similar past during the thirties, forties, and even early fifties, as which point the Buckley wing of the movement begins to diverge from the larger movement.

It is the libertarian, however, who carried on the movement that arose as opposition to the New Deal and the social democratic consensus of the thirties, while the Buckley wing of the movement tried to take the movement in an entirely new, different and far less radical direction.

It is no surprise then that today, some of the candidates that command the largest following among Conservatives, such as Newt Gingrich, openly defend the New Deal while denouncing the likes of Ron Paul for wanting to drastically cut back the American government, its abuses and its wars.

The remnants of the Buckley movement, far less dominant today than in decades past, nevertheless still tries to define who is and who is not entitled to be part of the movement, making proclamations without any regard to the historical fact that the Buckley wing of conservatism came to the opposition movement 25 years behind the old individualists, and is based on an unconvincing theory of conservatism that ignores the central role of classical liberalism and laissez faire individualism in American intellectual history.

Modern conservatism of the Buckley strain remains true to its roots of endless foreign intervention, combined with a disregard to civil liberties at home and a half-hearted nod toward free markets.

Thanks to Paul, many Americans, even if they have yet to understand Paul's ideological roots in the pre-Buckley Conservative movement, seek a return to the Old Right and the early libertarian movement that formed the only opposition to the rapid destruction of American during the New Deal and during the multiple wars that followed.

The "mainstream" Conservatives are perplexed by any consistent demand for small government among Conservatives. For them, advocating for constant war, while perhaps throwing in a few smears about homosexuals or Ted Kennedy, is what defines any movement that claims to uphold the freedom tradition in America.

The real tradition of the American right is the laissez faire individualist tradition. That tradition is no longer being ignored.

Ryan McMaken [send him mail] teaches political science in Colorado.

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Perhaps not since the feds hanged Mary Surratt for Abe Lincoln’s assassination have so many been so happy at the thought of seeing a woman lynched. To the outrage of bloodthirsty, bleary-eyed couch potatoes from sea to shining sea, Casey Anthony was found not guilty of the murder of her daughter. 

The case itself is far less interesting than the reaction to it. In spite of all the drama that the despicable “news” media attempted to inject into it, the actual trial was humdrum. In typical fashion, the prosecution built its case on mostly circumstantial evidence and on character assassination. The jury concluded that the prosecution had not proven guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. A not-guilty verdict was returned. Case closed. 

This is exactly how the legal system is supposed to work. People are supposed to be innocent until proven guilty, and guilt must be established beyond a reasonable doubt. We’re not supposed to convict people of capital crimes because we find them distasteful or annoying. 

None of that matters to the great American lynch mob, which, not even being present at the trial, finds itself so magnificently insightful and so morally pure, that its shrill cries for justice echo with unparalleled histrionic fervor down the virtual halls of Facebook and Twitter. 

But of course, we all know that Anthony was guilty because Nancy Grace told us so. Nancy Grace! Here’s a woman who makes Father Coughlin look like a man possessed of great reason and tolerance. Trotting up endless trains of “experts” who assured us of Anthony's guilt, and never tiring of providing the most shallow analysis of every moment of the trial, CNN made it clear that had it been around to report on Anne Hutchinson’s trial in 1637, the network would have ensured that no penalty short of public disemboweling would have been suitable for such a loathesome instrument of The Devil. Indeed, Grace herself assured us that “the devil is dancing” over the Anthony verdict. May the gods have mercy on anyone forced to endure Thanksgiving dinner with a woman so shrill and maudlin as this. 

And it is the reaction to the verdict that is, by far, the most interesting part of this national carnival of self-righteousness. Following the verdict, celebrities — many of whom are apparently famous for nothing more than being famous — made their solemn pronouncements about the sheer injustice of the trial. 

D-List celebrity Vivica Fox, that modern heir of both Cicero and Solon, declared on Twitter that “My heart is ripped apart! How dare those idiots on that Jury not see the truth? That b—- killed her kid! Who the hell killed Caylee then?” Fourth-rate comedian Kevin Nealon said things almost as brilliant. 

The pronouncements from the moralists among the non-famous were essentially identical in their moral indignation and in their metaphysical certitude that Anthony is, in fact, the most guilty person since Osama bin Laden.  And, since Americans were perfectly fine with killing him when unarmed and in captivity, we surely can find it in our hearts to give Casey Anthony the same treatment. 

The moralizing is even more intolerable when considered from a larger context, and the American ideal of "justice" in this case is enforced so selectively as to give even the most cynical observer pause.

The contradictions are so glaring, in fact, that even Rush Limbaugh, for the first time since Bill Clinton left office, said something insightful when he pointed out that had Casey Anthony — assuming she's guilty — simply killed Caylee five minutes before giving birth to her, Anthony would be hailed as a hero by virtually everyone at CNN. 

And of course, how many toddlers have been incinerated by American bombs or poisoned by American depleted uranium in Iraq and Afghanistan over the past decade? Who cares? Those toddlers didn’t even have the decency to be cute Anglo-Saxons.

But, before we throw a noose over a tree branch for Casey Anthony, there are a few lessons we can first learn from the trial:

Number One: We should take nothing we see in the media at face value: In spite of decades of evidence to the contrary, many people still think that they can make well-informed decisions about things based on what they’re given through television “news” programs. In fact, we the viewers are purely at the mercy of what the anchors and produces want us to see. All of the Americans who think that they followed the case “closely” still have access to only a fraction of the information available to jurors. Even someone who watched every single minute of the trial via live video feed can still only see what the camera is showing at any given minute, and can only hear what the microphones pick up. 

In addition, the government has much greater access to the media than the defendant in most cases. From day one of an investigation, the media will generally, without criticism, repeat whatever is said by the police about the suspects. Once the case passes to the hands of the district attorney, the media will then dutifully report whatever is said by the prosecutors. The accused meanwhile is shown to the public through mug shots and in video of being shuttled from jail to the courthouse. 

Number Two: Government prosecutors are not to be trusted. Does this point even need to repeated? Prosecutors routinely make prosecutions for political reasons. Cushy political appointments, elected offices and jobs as state and federal judges are at stake. The Duke Lacrosse Team, Tim Masters, and Lisl Auman can tell you all about it.  In addition, prosecutors are virtually never held accountable for anything. The disbarment of Michael Nifong is a rare case of this, and his punishment amounts to little more than a slap on the wrist compared to what he wanted to do to the accused. 

Number Three: We don’t know how we would react if one of our children ended up dead. The prosecution’s case rested heavily on using Casey Anthony’s strange and distasteful public behavior following the death of her daughter to paint her as a callous murderer. The moralists all declared that “we would never act that way.”

Yet, in real life, people do strange things when under enormous levels of stress, shock, and dismay. Some honest people might willingly admit, that if their children turned up dead, they might go on a three month bender unparalleled in the history of drunkenness. That’s what an honest person might admit, anyway. All of Anthony’s accusers, on the other hand, would no doubt show up to work on time the next morning and swing by the church on the way home and calmly light a candle.

What sort of person would act strangely and erratically following the untimely death of a child? A normal one. 

Number Four:  Intellectually honest atheists and Christians (and probably many others) agree: There is no true justice in this world. For the Christians, justice comes after this life. For the atheists, there’s no justice in any life, since we’re all just headed for oblivion, and Hitler and Sophie Scholl both ultimately met the same fate. 

Thus the public rending of garments and the calls for justice, no matter what the cost, is both dangerous and unrealistic. History is filled with unsolved murders; many of them horrific. They’ll never be solved. The killers will never be brought to justice. Once we include wars in the analysis, the prospects for justice are even more bleak. 

The jury felt there wasn’t enough evidence to convict. Should they have convicted anyway so that they could feel good about themselves? Any decent legal system should preclude the possibility of conviction in the face of insufficient evidence. This is why the ancient Jews required that at least two witnesses must agree on what happened. Nothing less could bring convictions. Anything else amounts to heaping one injustice upon another. One of the few commentators on this case not calling for the immediate execution of Casey Anthony noted that:

This case is good for the criminal-justice system and here's why: if people actually read the jury instructions about reasonable doubt, there would be a lot more acquittals…What this verdict does is demonstrate that unless the prosecution is able to show us how, why, when, and where the crime was committed, a jury is not going reach a decision that could end up sending a defendant to his death. 

Unfortunately, the jury members will need to defend themselves from the moral outrage of the likes of Nancy Grace, but they can take heart in the fact that everyone will forget about them once something more interesting comes on TV.

Ryan McMaken [send him mail] teaches political science in Colorado.

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Ann Coulter, that warmongering demagogue of Conservatism, has declared war on Ron Paul. Naturally, she hates Paul because he stands for peace, free markets and the rule of law. Coulter hates of all of these things since she loves war, the police state, and the destruction of the constitution in pursuit of untrammeled political power for Conservative nationalists. In other words, like most Conservatives, she loves socialism, although she prefers to cloak her socialism in words like "national greatness," "secure borders" and "family values."

In a recent column, Coulter attacks Paul for a variety of his pro-freedom positions. In this column, however, I'll focus only on her wildly inaccurate claims about how marriage is a "legal construct" and how every good American should insist that government maintain its death grip on the institution. She denounces Ron Paul for his insistence that marriage should not be controlled by government and that people should be free to contract with whomever they choose. Coulter of course insists that marriage should be socialized, regulated and controlled by government.

Coulter counters Paul with a claim that "there are reasons we have laws governing important institutions, such as marriage." Well she's right there. There is a reason that governments regulate marriage: Governments couldn't resist the urge to seize control of marriage which was a traditionally religious and non-governmental institution.

Let's briefly examine the history and nature of marriage in the West and see just why we have laws. By "laws" of course, Coulter means secular civil laws. She's not talking about Canon Law or Church Law, which is what governed marriage throughout most of the history of Christendom.

Being a sacrament, marriage was traditionally governed by religious law and was a religious matter. The Church recognized that with marriage being a sacrament, the state had no more right to regulate marriage than it had the right to regulate who could be baptized or who could be ordained a priest.

Indeed, in the Catholic Church to this day, a couple may become sacramentally married without even the presence of any clergy, let alone a government agent. If no clergy is available, couples may simply make vows in the presence of lay witnesses. The marriage is then perfectly valid according to the Church's own law. This further illustrates the traditional, religious status in the West of marriage as a private bond between two persons. There's certainly no state-sponsored marriage certificate required.

Naturally, marriage, being what it is, did nevertheless impact the distribution and ownership of property. Who were the legitimate heirs of a married couple, for example? Could Bastard Jimmy inherit the property of his father instead of First Born Tom who was the child of both dad and his wife? These considerations attracted the state's attention.

The state hates it when property changes hands without being taxed and regulated, so the state set its sights on marriage centuries ago. Over time civil governments inserted themselves more and more into the religious institutions of marriage. This was helped along by the Reformation and by defenders of government-controlled marriage like King Henry VIII of England. As nation-states consolidated their monopolies on all law and over all institutions in society, the state finally displaced religious institutions as the final arbiter on marriage.

So yes, Ann, there is a reason that governments control marriage: They couldn't keep their mitts off it.

The natural outcome of widespread approval of this state of affairs is that governments are now seen as the institution that can legitimately define marriage itself. We now have civil laws deciding what marriage is and what it is not and who can be married and who can not.

For anyone who has an interest in actually defending the historically traditional status of marriage, this power should be viewed as both dangerous and illegitimate. Thanks to the secularizing efforts of Christian reformers and anti-Christian types throughout history, marriage gradually became for many a civil matter only. Many people get "married" in courthouses in totally non-religious ceremonies. Such marriage contracts are in essence no different from run-of-the-mill legal contracts. The fact that we call such unions "marriage" doesn't make them so. In the Judeo-Christian tradition, marriage is a religious matter. Some government judge can't make you "married" any more than can your hair dresser. Here, we see that the so-called "traditional" marriage types who nevertheless defend government civil "marriage" (as defined by them) have already sown the seeds of their own defeat. They've already removed the institution of marriage from its traditional role and status.

What they should be arguing for is the removal of civil governments from the marriage bond altogether. Couples who wish to marry should approach their religious authorities about it. Then, if they wish they can join into some kind of civil union, which is just a contract. People who wish to have a civil union but no marriage may enter into that arrangement, and those who wish for a marriage with no civil union should be able to do that as well. Marriage, properly understood, should be considered off limits from government meddling. People are welcome to contract, but if the "defenders" of marriage had done their jobs right, there would be no confusion today about what is marriage and what is a government-approved contractual union.

Unfortunately, though, when Conservatives and Christian Right types bemoan the loss of so-called "traditional" marriage yet agitate for more government control of the institution, they really have only themselves to blame since they're therefore accepting the proposition that government has the legitimate authority to regulate and control marriage. The power to regulate marriage is the power to destroy it.

This fact certainly doesn't stop Coulter. Coulter is such an authoritarian on marriage, in fact, that she even apparently supports government-mandated blood tests as a means of enhancing government control of the institution:

Under [Ron] Paul’s plan, siblings could marry one another, perhaps intentionally, but also perhaps unaware that they were fraternal twins separated and sent to different adoptive families at birth — as actually happened in Britain a few years ago after taking the government-mandated blood test for marriage.

Here she is apparently using a one-in-a-billion event to justify the forced government drawing and analysis of blood and, by extension, government regulation of who may or may not marry. I know that many Americans probably consider mandatory medical procedures to be no big deal, but all that tells us is how willingly Americans will approve of even the most invasive government regulations.

Nevertheless, some states in the United States, such as Colorado, do not mandate such things. In Colorado's case, we have a few vestiges of frontier traditions of freedom left, and we have yet to totally succumb to a traditions of Coulter-esque police-statism.

No blood tests are required, and indeed a couple can become common-law spouses with not much more than a public declaration that the marriage exists. In Coulter's view, this is pure chaos. How Colorado society manages to function without governments checking up on the health and genetics of our betrothed remains an inscrutable mystery.

And Coulter doesn't stop there. While a true defense of marriage would consist of putting it back in the hands of private institutions, that certainly doesn't fly for Coulter who says that "[u]nder Rep. Paul’s plan, your legal rights pertaining to marriage will be decided on a case-by-case basis by judges forced to evaluate the legitimacy of your marriage consecrated by a Wiccan priest — or your tennis coach. (And I think I speak for all Americans when I say we’re looking for ways to get more pointless litigation into our lives.)"

She seems to think that there are no disagreements about the terms and validity of marriage contracts under the present regime. Well, such disagreements do exist and disagreements over legal contracts are decided on a case-by-case basis right now. So Coulter isn't doing anything here other than simply exhibiting her ignorance about the status quo. One could also point out that, while Coulter presents this point as some kind of big deal, all she's really saying is that a more complex and decentralized system would be an inconvenience to some people, and that this therefore justifies more government regulation of our lives. .

Meanwhile, some societies do in fact base marriage decisions on the judgments of religious organizations. Marriage in Israel, for example, is founded on a system in which the validity of marriage is based on whether or not one's marriage is approved by a religious institution. In other words, this is essentially the system that Coulter says only crazy people would support.

Israel's system is far from perfect — there's far too much government involvement — but it is nevertheless a functional and decentralized system.

Why not let your Wiccan "priest" also be considered a legitimate authority for approving marriage? So what? Why is this the state's business? It certainly has no effect on my views about the validity and -dare I say it? – superiority of my own Roman Catholic marriage. Wiccans will disagree with me, but that's their business.

Of course, when you're a Conservative, everything is the state's business from whom you hire (no foreigners!) to what you smoke in your living room, to what your genitals feel like at the airport.

Coulter grudgingly is forced to admit that "eventually — theoretically — there could be private institutions to handle many of these matters" so we're forced to assume that she's unaware that private institutions handled marriage in Western Europe for at least 1,500 years. But this admission also shows that her insistence on government control of marriage isn't actually necessary. It's just her personal preference.

As with most Conservatives, Coulter can't imagine a world in which government isn't a massive overweening institution that regulates the personal decisions of millions of people every minute of every day. Only crazy people want freedom in her mind, and Coulter will be happy to condemn anyone like Ron Paul who dares challenge the status quo.

Ryan McMaken [send him mail] teaches political science in Colorado.

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Hunter S. Thompson was one of the 20th century’s greatest literary social critics, and one of the most anti-authoritarian. In the tradition of Mark Twain and H.L. Mencken, Thompson never flinched at exposing the hypocrisies and contradictions of American life and ideology, and his contempt for authority permeated not just his writing but his life as well.

Thompson killed himself in 2005, shortly before his remains were shot out of a giant cannon in Aspen, Colorado. Yet, right up to the end, Thompson made himself a gadfly and a nuisance and an enemy of the agents of the state who have so much power over the lives of the powerless.

In Dear Dr. Thompson, writer Matthew Moseley has provided an entertaining first person account of Hunter S. Thompson and his "Last Gonzo Campaign." Through the book, which is both a true crime account and a study of Thompson the man, Moseley details Thompson’s involvement in the Lisl Auman case in which, Auman, then barely out of her teens, was kidnapped by a drug addled gangbanger who murdered a police officer. Later, prosecutors claimed Auman had assisted the murderer and, thanks to media hysteria and prosecutorial recklessness in the name of "sending a message" to cop killers, Auman was sentenced to life in prison without parole under the felony murder law in Colorado.

Then one day, while serving her life sentence in a Colorado prison, Auman wrote a letter to Hunter S. Thompson a few hours away in Aspen. Thompson’s assistant Deborah Fuller read the letter aloud to Thompson. The letter spawned the "Free Lisl!" campaign which would turn out to be Thompson’s last great campaign against injustice.

The Murder

Lisl Auman was handcuffed in the back of a police car in the parking lot of an apartment complex when skinhead Matthaeus Jaehnig, whom Auman had met that morning, murdered a police officer.

Denver’s Westword newspaper provides a concise description of the scene:

Freeze this image in your mind.

It’s the afternoon of November 12, 1997. Lisl Auman, 21 years old, is standing in front of a boxy condominium…Behind her is the hulking form of Matthaeus Jaehnig, struggling frantically with the lock on the condominium door. In front of Lisl are first two, then three police officers. She has her hands up. She is taking one, two hesitant steps forward.

In seconds she will be on the ground, hands behind her for the handcuffs, an officer’s knee in her back, his voice in her ear, yelling, calling her a bitch. She will be bundled into a police car and driven a short way off in the condo parking lot.

Jaehnig, meanwhile, will have veered from the door, around a set of stairs–coming within a few feet of the officers–and into an alcove…There is no exit from it other than the stairs he has just passed or the locked doorway to a second condo.

Officer Bruce VanderJagt arrives…VanderJagt is a courageous and much-admired eleven-year veteran of the Denver Police Department. He has twice received a Distinguished Service Cross–once for disarming a gunman terrorizing the employees of Porter Memorial Hospital, once for running into a burning building to help save the occupants…VanderJagt peers around the corner. There’s a fusillade of shots. More quickly than the mind can grasp, a bullet rips away the right side of VanderJagt’s head. For long seconds he remains standing. Then he falls.

Minutes later, Jaehnig takes VanderJagt’s service revolver and kills himself.

Auman is taken to the police station for questioning. Police assumed that Auman had been an accomplice of Jaehnig’s and that she and Jaehnig were allies and perhaps friends. The truth was more complicated.

Auman and Jaehnig had only met earlier that day. Jaehnig was the friend of a friend whom Auman had asked for help in retrieving some of her belongings from the apartment of a former boyfriend who had been abusive and had been keeping many of Auman’s belongings in his apartment at the Hudson Hotel in Buffalo Creek in the mountains above Denver.

Auman’s friend invited along Jaehnig, a skinhead with a long history of violence in Denver. But Lisl Auman didn’t know anything about Jaehnig’s past. By the time the group reached Buffalo Creek, it was apparent that Jaehnig was someone to be feared, and when Jaehnig started burglarizing Shawn Cheever’s apartment, Auman couldn’t do much about it.

Many hours later, as Jaehnig was leading the police on a high speed chase through the city streets of Denver, Auman had become a hostage to the heavily armed and obviously violent Jaehnig who forced Auman to hold the steering wheel while he leaned out the window and fired wildly at the police in pursuit.

The chase eventually ended at the apartment complex in Denver where Auman fled from Jaehnig and where Jaehnig murdered Bruce VanderJagt.

Was Auman a hostage or was she an accessory to murder? And if she was an accessory, could she be charged with first degree murder for a crime that took place while she was locked in the back of a police car?

Under the felony murder law, the answer to the latter question is yes.

Felony Murder

Moseley describes the concept of felony murder:

Felony murder is a favored statute of prosecutors because it allows them to cast the widest possible net around a crime to include people who may have had no intent for the crime to happen. Colorado law states u2018 the purpose of the felony murder statute is to hold a participating robber accountable for a non-participant’s death, even though unintended, as long as death is caused by an act committed in the course of or in furtherance of the robbery or in the course of immediate flight therefrom. [Emphasis Moseley's] Prosecutors have used it to ensnare forty-five people under the age of eighteen in Colorado, and over 2,000 juveniles in the U.S., who are all serving sentences of life without parole.

The problem in the Auman case is that it was not clear at all that Vanderjagt’s murder in Denver had anything at all to do with the theft that occurred in the mountains many, many hours before. Nor was it clear that Lisl Auman was in the course of immediate flight from the burglary. Indeed, it was most likely that Auman ran to police protection in flight from Jaehnig himself, who had obviously been endangering the life of Auman for hours before the final shoot-out.

However, as one of the attorneys who sympathized with Auman noted, the way the law was being interpreted by the courts meant that "she could have jumped out of the car [as Jaehnig sped down the highway] and she still would be guilty."

A prosecuting attorney later pointed out that the fact that Auman had been in police custody did not matter: "It does not matter where she was. She could have been at McMurdo Sound in Antarctica. She could have been on Mir Space Station." She was still guilty because, as the prosecutors claimed, both Auman and Jaehnig were in the course of immediate flight from the burglary of Shawn Cheever at the Hudson Hotel in Buffalo Creek, Colorado.

Another benefit of the felony murder law is that prosecutors don’t even need to show that the defendant intended to kill anyone. According to Jeffrey Hartje, a criminal law professor at the University of Denver, "Conspiracy and felony murder are the favored children in the prosecutor’s nursery…With felony murder and conspiracy, you don’t have to show intention, making a conviction much easier."

Freed of having to show that Auman intended to kill anyone, the prosecutors simply sought to show that she was somehow in league with Jaehnig. In order to convince a jury of the justice of locking Auman away forever, in spite of the fact that she seemingly was no accomplice at all, prosecutors contended that Auman had handed Jaehnig the gun he had fired at police. The police had absolutely no physical evidence of this, but a police officer later changed his original statement to claim that he had indeed seen Auman hand Jaehnig a gun.

The police and prosecution painted a picture of Auman as a surly skinhead and as a misfit and as a angry young women who raged against authority. The local media dutifully repeated and reprinted the prosecution’s theories. The police, the public and the media had apparently decided that someone had to pay for VanderJagt’s death, and since Jaehnig was dead, Auman was going to have to do.

After an endless number of press conferences organized by prosecutors, numerous condemnations of Auman in the press, and a short trial, the jury voted to convict in spite of the fact that no fingerprints or evidence of gunpowder residue could be produced to connect Auman to any weapons, and the fact that no intent was ever proven.

Auman was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.

Auman writes to Thompson

While serving her life sentence, Auman wrote a letter to Thompson, noting that Thompson’s books had been banned from the prison library. (The prison system says this is not the case.) After being read the letter, which briefly outlined Auman’s plight, Thompson declared to his staff "What the f*** are you so cheerful about? If I were you I’d slit my wrists." According to Moseley, from this point on, Lisl’s case slowly "sparked an inner rage" in Thompson.

In January 2001, Thompson used his Hey Rube column at ESPN.com, which the editors thought was supposed to be about sports, to write a column denouncing the treatment of Auman, thus beginning Thompson’s public campaign to free Lisl Auman.

At his high-powered Super Bowl party that year, Thompson called together all the powerful and influential friends he could muster, including various well-connected attorneys and politicos, "and the National Committee to Free Lisl Auman was born that night."

Thompson wouldn’t accept that someone could be locked in prison for life for a crime that occurred when the "guilty" party was locked in the back of a police car. He also refused to believe that there was anything unique about Auman’s story, or that she was justly paying the price for her carelessness, or that she was "asking for it." For Thompson, Auman was exactly like a million other non-criminal young women, except that they had been lucky enough to not find themselves on the wrong end of a police smear campaign. For Thompson, America is a place where people end up on the wrong side of the law without much effort.

As Thompson would later write in an appeal for help from friends and colleagues:

There is no such thing as Paranoia. Your worst fears can come true at any moment… What happened to Lisl Auman can happen to Anybody in America, and when it does, you will sure as hell need friends….Take my word for it, folks. I have been There, and it ain’t Fun.

Thompson Joins the Fight

There’s no room to delve into the legal details of Lisl Auman’s appeal here, but what is important is that, by shining light on the Auman case, Thompson shone a light on prosecutorial misconduct, police corruption, and the injustice of the felony murder statutes.

This suited Thompson perfectly well. Dear Dr. Thompson provides a variety of amusing and interesting insights into Thompson’s views of police power and the corrupting nature of government power. Thompson’s gift for thoroughly accurate hyperbole would rub many the wrong way, but his disdain for official abuse of power seemed to know no bounds, and this came through in his comments and behavior throughout the campaign to free Auman.

Thompson was well aware of the political nature of the district attorney’s office, and he doubted the scruples of then district attorney Bill Ritter who would later use his position as a launching pad to become governor of Colorado.

According to Moseley, "Thompson thought Ritter wouldn’t support Lisl because of pressure from the police union, which he called a mafia. u2018The police union needs a cooperative DA and the DA needs a cooperative police union…[But you shouldn't be] allowed to abuse just because you have a gun and a badge. It is savage behavior. It’s uncivilized. It goes back to the law of the tooth and the fang…’"

For Thompson, the prosecutors served the police and the police served the prosecutors. The public, on the other hand, was on its own. This cozy arrangement was all the more troubling to Thompson because he saw that so little was being done about it.

When queried on the matter, Thompson would become rather animated.

"They (the police) just think they can get away with it. They tell each other that. u2018We the brave, the true, the just.’ S**t on them." he said getting peeved and pounded on the kitchen cabinet. "See I get a little excited when I think about taking on the cops again. Somebody says u2018Aren’t you worried about this [his involvement in the Lisl Auman case] Aren’t you concerned to fight the police? After all they are very powerful.’ Well, they are as powerful as you let them be."

By the time he got to commenting on the chief of police at the time, Thompson certainly wasn’t holding back:

Richard Nixon was so crooked he had to have his servants screw his pants on every morning, and so is Denver Police Chief Gerry Whitman. He and his force have committed more crimes against humanity than Lisl Auman ever dreamed of.

The sheer ferocity of Thompson’s outrage in the matter was what made Thompson such an effective force behind the Free Lisl! Campaign. Thompson vowed to overturn the felony murder law and free Lisl Auman. He railed against the injustice of her imprisonment to influential friends, lawyers, celebrities and reporters. Lisl Auman, who had been locked away years earlier and forgotten, was suddenly someone Thompson would not let be forgotten. He worked behind the scenes, "work[ing] the phones every night," to make sure that Auman’s appeal to the Colorado Supreme Court was the best that could be mustered. Moseley himself, a seasoned public relations man, was enlisted by Thompson to make sure that the press, which had so obediently followed the prosecution’s line in the court of public opinion during her trial, might this time give Auman a fair chance. Thompson used his celebrity status and threatened to crusade against and to even run for office against local politicians who maintained that Auman should remain in prison. This wasn’t an idle threat. Thompson had caused political havoc in Colorado before, and everyone knew it. In a close race, an enraged Hunter S. Thompson could spell defeat for those he might target.

Thompson wasn’t simply thrashing about looking for attention. Although Auman’s freedom essentially came down to a decision by judges, Thompson wasn’t so naive as to think that judges aren’t influenced by the public or the press. Just as politics and a hostile media had helped lock Auman away, so, Thompson hoped, an overwhelming campaign to turn public opinion in her favor might help save her.

Thompson knew the public must begin to see "justice" in America as he saw it, even if just for a little while. As Auman’s appeal progressed, Thompson called long time Denver Post reporter Ed Quillen and, according to Moseley, "Quillen was so taken with the conversation that he wrote a provocative column about Lisl’s case" containing the following lessons to be learned:

1. When a policeman is killed, somebody has to pay. If the killer is already dead, then some other party must be found and prosecuted, no matter how far the prosecutors have to stretch to make a case, no matter how many cops have to change their stories before the trial.

2. Do not ever talk to the police without a lawyer, no matter how innocent you think you are. Until your lawyer gets there, keep your mouth shut. That’s your right and you should exercise it.

3. If you somehow end up in the company of a homicidal maniac whom you’ve never met before that day, pray he lives through the shoot out.

Thompson’s Last Good Deed

In the end, although the Supreme Court did not overturn the felony murder law, it did conclude that the jury had received faulty instructions during her trial, and in 2005 Lisl Auman was freed from prison and remains out of prison to this day. It was a technicality. And it was one that called no larger issues of law into question, suggesting that perhaps the court was looking for a reason to set her free without upsetting the legal apple cart too much. And ultimately, it suggests that Hunter’s scorched-earth campaign against all who maintained the justice of Lisl’s imprisonment, just might have made the difference.

Thompson killed himself shortly before the Court handed down its decision, so he never knew how it had all turned out. But many were uneasy with the fact that it had taken so much to get justice for Lisl Auman.

"Do you think anyone gave a rat’s ass about Lisl until Hunter came along?" asked Mary Ellen Johnson of the Pendulum Foundation, who tracks felony murder cases. "No. They didn’t and it shouldn’t be that way. I wish no child had to have a guardian angel like Hunter Thompson and that it was based on justice, but it was not. Lisl’s story is not even that unusual. The only thing unusual about it is Hunter. Otherwise nobody would care."

And people did care because of Thompson. Not only did he help to free Lisl Auman, but he inspired those around him to understand that justice is not free in America, and it’s not blind, and it can be turned against you to serve the political ambitions and the thirst for vengeance in others.

Lisl’s case is not unique, but at least she was actually tangentially involved in the murder committed by Matthaeus Jaehnig that day. Others, like Tim Masters or Randall Dale Adams, to just name two, were not guilty of anything criminal in any way, and were locked away for years to suit the prejudices of prosecutors and police.

Dear Dr. Thompson is an important contribution to the literature on miscarriages of justice, but it is also an important account of the final days of Hunter S. Thompson, who, in addition to writing some of the best journalistic prose of the last fifty years, never backed down from a chance to take on the same forces whom he wrote so forcefully against for so long.

And finally, Moseley himself deserves credit for working to bring the details of this case to light. The same institution that wanted to lock up Lisl Auman for life is none too enthusiastic about advertising the fact.

According to Moseley, the district attorney’s office took over a year to respond to his request to review the case files, and when they finally did respond, they demanded hundreds of dollars in "retrieval" and "redaction" fees.

These are just some of the many barriers that the state throws up against anyone it doesn’t want snooping around, and the state holds almost all the cards. Moseley wasn’t discouraged, however, and in the end he produced a work of journalism which is no doubt an embarrassment to some powerful people, but is nevertheless an important account of how the legal system works in America.

Ryan McMaken [send him mail] teaches political science in Colorado.

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by Ryan McMaken by Ryan McMaken Recently by Ryan McMaken: The Real Legacy of AlanGreenspan

Last December, Brian Doherty wrote a column for Reason in which he noted that there are two major schools of libertarianism that matter: The moderate Hayekian school pushed by the Cato Institute and the much more radical Rothbardian school pushed by Ron Paul and the Ludwig von Mises Institute.

While refraining from badmouthing the Hayekians, Doherty makes the case that Ron Paul’s Rothbardian school is the driving force behind whatever libertarian mass movement exists today:

The Paul movement, the largest popular movement motivated by distinctly libertarian ideas about war, money, and the role of government we’ve seen in the postwar period, is far more Rothbardian than it is directly influenced by the beliefs or style of any of the other recognized intellectual leaders or influences on American libertarianism. The Paul crowd is the sort of mass anti-war, anti-state, anti-fiat money agitation that Rothbard dreamed about his whole activist life.

The Paulites stress Rothbard’s key issues of war and money, with that populist hint of what he called "power elite analysis" — and that the uncharitable call "conspiracy theories." Indeed, as I learned from my reporting on the movement during Paul’s primary campaign, a majority of them are pretty much learning their libertarianism directly from Paul himself, and the Internet communities surrounding Paul. But Rothbard was a friend and influence on Paul, and central to the Paul Internet community is the very Rothbardian Mises Institute website and the personal site of Mises Institute Chairman Lew Rockwell, who was a close partner of Rothbard’s in the last 13 years of his life.

For those of us who live and work outside academia and outside the beltway, these remarks about the mass movement are obviously true. To the extent that regular middle-class Americans have experience with libertarianism, it is with the Ron Paul/Rothbard school of thought. Ron Paul is a household name. No other libertarian comes even close in this level of fame, so his intellectual background matters.

And it is also impossible to discuss this branch of libertarianism without noting the central importance of the Austrian School of Economics. And here we find a very similar and parallel breakdown along the lines of libertarianism with a dividing line between the moderate Hayekian branch of Austrian Economics and the much more radical Rothbardian branch.

These branches stem from slightly different intellectual backgrounds.

Rothbard carried on the radically anti-interventionist economics of Ludwig von Mises who denied the value of government intervention in markets virtually 100 percent of the time. Rothbard takes this even further in his political economy, but for the educated layman, the economics of Mises and Rothbard will differ very little.

Hayek, on the other hand, was far more accepting of government interventions, even going so far as to speak well of tax-funded old-age pensions and government regulation of food production. Hayek was a great popularizer of many Austrian ideas, and he was the most famous critic of Keynes in his day, but his policy prescriptions are not what animate the reformers of today.

Note that I do not expel Hayek into the outer darkness for these sins, but it is nevertheless clear that this division between the Rothbardians and the Hayekians is one between radical reformers on the one hand, and those who are far more accommodating of the status quo on the other.

Given the rhetoric surrounding the libertarian mass movement today, however, it is clear that it is the Rothbardian branch and the Ron Paul movement that is the animating force behind the spread of the ideas of Austrian Economics.

So, I raised my eyebrows a bit when I read in the Wall Street Journal recently that a George Mason University economist was "emerging as the intellectual standard-bearer for the Austrian school of economics[.]"

The economist in question is Peter Boettke, who is no doubt a competent economist and a helpful opponent of the American mega-state. But given the intellectual pedigree of the most active and expansive branch of Austrian Economics in America right now, it is odd that the Journal would choose as the standard bearer of the movement an economist who is in many ways a Hayekian rather than a Rothbardian, and who has in recent years even attempted to distance himself from the phrase "Austrian Economics."

As Robert Wenzel has pointed out:

It would probably be best to describe Pete as the standard-bearer of the Uptight Wing of the Austrian School of Economics. The Uptights tend to promote the work of Noble Prize winning economist Friedrich Hayek, over the work of the Austrian economists Ludwig von Mises and Murray Rothbard. Discussing Hayek but ignoring Mises is something akin to discussing Scottie Pippen when talking about the championship years of the Chicago Bulls and not mentioning Michael Jordan. Nothing wrong with Pippen, but Jordan was “The Man.”

Now, in defense of the Wall Street Journal, one could point out that the word "libertarian" appears nowhere in the article at all, and that this article could perhaps be read as a discussion about Austrian Economics within the academy that has little to do with the mass movement outside academia. After all, Ron Paul isn’t an academic economist at all.

If it were true that the Wall Street Journal editors were approaching this topic in good faith, this would then prove that the Wall Street Journal is guilty of extremely poor journalism since the article completely ignores the intellectual and political context surrounding Austrian Economics right now. Indeed, if one wishes to be cinematic, one could imagine Boettke and the reporter sitting in the Economics Department lounge discussing the safe and moderate ideas of Hayek while a throng of students listens to Ron Paul denounce the Federal Reserve right outside the window on the quad.

So at the very least, the Journal is guilty of extremely uninformative and selective editing.

One could also read this article, however, as an attempt to cast the Rothbardian school as irrelevant while propping up the Hayekian school as the "respectable" kind of Austrian Economics. This would be perfectly in line with the Wall Street Journal’s generally conservative slant, and the Journal has shown itself to be a friend to neither Ron Paul nor any other serious or trenchant critic of the current kleptocracy.

As Wenzel notes, the failure to mention Mises is odd at best. If there is a deliberate effort to obscure the importance of Mises or Rothbard, it is also certainly unlikely that a mere beat reporter sent to interview Boettke would insist on such a thing. Such a policy is far more likely to originate at the editorial level, where it can be absolutely guaranteed that a discussion of Austrian Economics will mention neither Mises nor Paul nor Rothbard nor anyone else who is presently central to the real-life political milieu surrounding the Austrian School today.

If this second option is indeed the case, it wouldn’t even matter what Boettke said during his interview, and I seriously doubt Boettke went into this with a goal of making Rothbard or Ron Paul look bad. I’ve worked with the media long enough to know that Boettke could have gone on for 45 minutes to the Wall Street Journal about how he considers Rothbard to be his personal lord and savior, and the Journal still would have still expunged any mention of him or Mises.

So either the Journal is incompetent, or it has deliberately tried to disparage Ron Paul’s Rothbard wing of the libertarian movement. I suspect the latter, although the former is always a possibility.

None of this should surprise anyone who is familiar with the debate between the Hayekian branch and the Rothbardian branch. Twenty-eight years ago, Lew Rockwell was told in no uncertain terms that his efforts would be sabotaged by the existing libertarian establishment if he tried to name his new institute after Ludwig von Mises who was labeled as "too radical." Rothbard’s eventual inclusion in the effort only solidified the animosity toward what is now the Rothbard school.

So this latest controversy has roots that run deep, and the Journal’s story has already reignited some animosity between the two branches. However, as someone who is not part of a libertarian think tank and who doesn’t have time to have an opinion on every little intralibertarian debate, the first question that crosses my mind with controversies like this is: "Should I even care about this?"

The answer is yes and no. Given the Journal’s target audience, this piece will have little effect on the mass movement that is libertarianism and which draws upon Rothbardian economics for its intellectual muscle. One the other hand, the Journal piece serves as a signal to its readers who crave respectability that the Hayekian school is the safer more relevant school of Austrian Economics. Those Rothbardians can be ignored. They’re conspiracy theorists and fringe types, after all. Boettke himself hinted at this in a January 2010 blog post.

The proper response here is to not excommunicate fellow travelers, of course, but to simply point out the truth that the driving force behind today’s movement to finally rein in the power of our massively irresponsible, abusive and bankrupt government is the radical, consistent and principled legacy of Ludwig von Mises, Murray Rothbard and Ron Paul.

Respectability has its limits, and it is likely that there was never a successful libertarian movement led by the established and respectable members of society. The Cobdenites of the Anti-Corn Law League, the Jeffersonians, and the classical liberal reformers of every age know that if they wait for the approval of the respectable ones, they’ll likely be waiting a very, very long time.

Ryan McMaken [send him mail] teaches political science in Colorado.

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by Ryan McMaken by Ryan McMaken Recently by Ryan McMaken: Feds Busy Rewriting the History of theCollapse

Panderer to Power: The Untold Story of How Alan Greenspan Enriched Wall Street and Left a Legacy of Recession, by Frederick Sheehan, 2010, McGraw Hill

For those of us who were mere economics undergraduates in the 1990′s, Alan Greenspan was rather like a god. Admittedly, the vision of Greenspan handed down to the undergrads by the faculty wasn’t one of vulgar hero-worship. Greenspan’s mumblings and evasions were, after all, treated with bemusement by the faculty. But, there was the feeling that Greenspan, for all his lack of clarity, seemed to understand things that the rest of humanity didn’t understand, and there was indeed faith in the idea that he must possess almost supernatural powers in fine-tuning the economy to ensure economic prosperity indefinitely.

Later, some of us were cured of the Greenspan religion by Austrian economics, but for most, the image of Greenspan as The Maestro (to use the term popularized by Bob Woodward) continued right up until even the fall of 2008 when The Panic set in.

Greenspan’s reputation has suffered since then, although many still pay him six-figures for 45 minutes of his wisdom. And, while Greenspan himself may be having trouble portraying himself as a mere innocent bystander in the current economic collapse, Greenspan’s policies are alive and well in his successor. Ben Bernanke has shown that Greenspanism at the fed is in no danger of going away. Easy money in the form of subterranean interest rates, microscopic reserve requirements, and endless praise of debt was Greenspan’s eternally favorite strategy, and Bernanke clearly plans to continue the binge indefinitely.

Frederick Sheehan’s Panderer to Power documents Greenspan’s rise to power, his skill at playing the political game, and his ability to convince virtually all the world that he was perhaps the greatest economist of the age. He accomplished all of this, Sheehan notes, in spite of a record as one of worst forecasters of economic trends at every stage of his career.

While there are many books about Greenspan, Panderer to Power is perhaps the only book (other than Fleckenstein’s Greenspan’s Bubbles) that looks in depth at Greenspan’s work leading up to the 2008 financial panic and its aftermath. And as a result, the book has a completely different story arc from the other Greenspan books. While the pre-bust books feature a story of a meteoric rise of a brilliant economist ending in apotheosis, Panderer to Power is the story of an economist whose primary skill was self-promotion, and who in the end became increasingly divorced from economic reality. Even as early as April 2008 (before the bust was obvious to all), the L.A. Times, observing Greenspan’s post-retirement speaking tour, noted that “the unseemly, globe-trotting, money-grabbing, legacy-spinning, responsibility-denying tour of Alan Greenspan continues, as relentless as a bad toothache.”

Alan the God had become Alan the Mere Mortal.

Sheehan’s overall thought on Federal Reserve Chairmen in general is that the good ones resist political pressure, and thus resist inflating the money supply to please the elected politicians. Receiving favorable treatment by Sheehan are the term of William McChesney Martin and the early years of Paul Volcker’s term. Sheehan contrasts these Chairmen, who warned about inflation and clashed with Congress and the White House over the matter, against Greenspan who, always the political opportunist, consistently provided the politicians with what they wanted: easy money, inflation, and at least the appearance of a booming economy. The politicians also wanted an economist willing to always say that everything was going to be all right. Greenspan was the perfect man for the job.

Sheehan takes the reader through Greenspan’s work advising Nixon, his term on Ford’s Council of Economic Advisors, and his time advising Carter. Over the years Greenspan became a constant fixture in Washington, omnipresent at the cocktail parties and making himself ever-present to those who might be able to help his career.

Indeed, well before Greenspan had managed to make it into the upper circles of the Washington social scene, Ayn Rand had asked Nathaniel Branden: “Do you think Alan might basically be a social climber?”

It is Greenspan’s relationship with Rand that even today drives the myth that Alan Greenspan is or was a doctrinaire free-marketeer. Sheehan disputes this version of history, noting that “Rand and Branden were instinctively suspicious of Greenspan’s motivations" and that “Branden recalls a man without philosophical inclinations.”

In the end, Greenspan’s association with the Rand circle paid off (by Greenspan’s standards) when Martin Anderson, a Randian who later was a member of the Reagan Administration “would prove instrumental in Greenspan’s rise.”

Nevertheless, one of Greenspan’s very few actual contributions to the field of free market economics is his 1966 essay “Gold and Economic Freedom” which provides an eloquent defense of gold and sound money. The fact that Greenspan spent the entirety of his career at The Fed working against sound money illustrates the sort of philosophical conviction possessed by Alan Greenspan. Greenspan was so at home with cognitive dissonance, in fact, that years later, when Congressman Ron Paul gave Greenspan a copy of “Gold and Economic Freedom” and asked the Chairman if he’d like to add a disclaimer, Greenspan responded “No…I wouldn’t change a single word.”

Not surprisingly, the most engaging and dramatic part of Panderer to Power is the lead-up to the financial collapse of 2008. Sheehan meticulously documents Greenspan’s commentary through the 1990s and into the last decade. From 1987 to the end of his term, Greenspan inflated the money supply nonstop. Interest rates, while occasionally moved slightly upward by Greenspan’s Fed, fell again and again with Greenspan always claiming that there was neither a stock market bubble (as he did in 1999) nor a housing bubble (as he did in 2006).

In all this time, Greenspan virtually never considered inflation to be a serious problem, or even a potential problem. Unlike his predecessors Martin and Volcker, who at least recognized money-supply inflation as a problem, Greenspan instead created convoluted theories to explain why such inflation was not a problem, and why growth would constantly provide a fail-safe protection against price inflation.

His most famous theory of this sort was his productivity theory. For years, Greenspan waxed philosophical about how productivity due to new technologies would prevent imbalances in the economy from such massively loose monetary policy. This theory, coupled with a restructuring of the CPI to drive down the official inflation rate in the 1990′s, allowed Greenspan to claim there was hidden wealth being created behind the dour statistics. In Greenspan’s mind, corporate earnings (which were falling) were larger than they seemed due to productivity and the fact that “everyone had been wrong” by overestimating inflation.

Greenspan, before the burst of the tech and stock market bubble in 2000, had already begun claiming that it was impossible to predict or manage bubbles. Greenspan, however, never explained why the Fed bothered to employ economists and computer models since identifying trends and bubbles had become futile in his mind.

Having been shown to be utterly without insight regarding the 2000—2001 recession, Greenspan nonetheless escaped any widespread criticism. As he had done for years, Greenspan continued to gush over the benefits of derivatives and massive amounts of leveraging to finance ever more risky investments. Liquidity, with Greenspan’s help, was redefined so that the term no longer referred to cash, but now referred to potential lines of credit.

Greenspan criticized American consumers for not spending enough on consumer goods and real estate. For Greenspan, consumer spending was essential regardless of where one got the money. So, in 2001 when Greenspan, who greatly approved of cashing out home equity to buy consumer goods, observed that the “general level of consumer expenditures seems to be holding up, I suspect in large part because of capital gains in homes,” the next great bubble had already been set in motion.

As the housing bust grew ever closer, Greenspan showed true talent at giving terrible investment advice while being even worse at making predictions.

In 2004, Greenspan trashed fixed-rate mortgages, told Americans they could learn a thing or two from foreigners who supposedly used more adjustable-rate mortgages, and then declared that, compared to an adjustable-rate mortgage, a “traditional fixed-rate mortgage may be an expensive method of financing a home.”

Greenspan also had no qualms about becoming the real estate industry’s best friend in denouncing all talk of a housing bubble. In 2002, building on Greenspan’s forecast, the chief economist at the National Association of Home Builders declared that “[t]he time has come to put this issue to rest. The nation’s home builders have said it…and now Alan Greenspan has said it once again, in no uncertain terms; there is no such thing as a current or impending house price bubble.”

In 2006, Greenspan declared that “[m]ost of the negatives in housing are probably behind us” and that the fourth quarter of 2006 will “certainly be better than the third quarter.” The National Association of Realtors then launched a $40 million advertising campaign trumpeting Greenspan’s enthusiasm about the housing market.

Although Greenspan had always had a terrible record on perceiving trends in the economy, Sheehan’s story shows a Greenspan who becomes increasingly out to lunch with each passing year as he spun more and more outlandish theories about hidden profits and productivity in the economy that no one else could see. He spoke incessantly on topics like oil and technology while the bubbles grew larger and larger. And finally, in the end, he retired to the lecture circuit where he was forced to defend his tarnished record.

Sheehan excellently catalogs Greenspan’s rise to power as an affable technocratic politician who played the part of an economist with a knack for numbers and for justifying inflationary policies that made Presidents and Congressmen happy. Greenspan always told everyone what they wanted to hear. The rich and famous basked in his perceived genius.

Today, those who still defend Greenspan’s policies, if not the man himself, maintain that “no one” predicted the bubble and the crash. This isn’t true, of course. The predictions of economists and investors who predicted the crash are well documented. But, Greenspan, The Maestro, said that everything was fine, so those with actual insight were ridiculed and ignored.

Yet, even with the end of the Greenspan era, little has changed. As Sheehan shows, Bernanke has made Greenspan look almost timid in his quest for debt, bailouts and endless leveraging.

Sheehan does not condemn the Federal Reserve as an institution in Panderer to Power, although it is clear from his work that The Fed is ill-equipped to resist the political pressures to print money around the clock. Sheehan is clear that some Fed Chairmen are more responsible than others. But given the very nature of the institution and the sheer amount of power it holds in inflating the money supply, bailing out the well-connected, and building mountains of debt in the name of growth, it is clear that the Federal Reserve is one of the greatest obstacles we now face in regaining a sound economy.

Ryan McMaken [send him mail] teaches political science in Colorado.

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