War is the Health of…Randy Barnett
by Max Raskin Some may wonder why the libertarian response to Randy Barnett’s Wall Street Journal op-ed has been so unrelenting and merciless. Wouldn’t libertarians welcome a prominent intellectual calling himself one of them? Isn’t any publicity good publicity? Clearly not. Barnett portrays the movement as something that it isn’t, i.e. a group of amoral warmongers pining for death and depredation. Thus, the reaction of true libertarians is the same one that Marxists should have when discovering that Hillary Clinton sat on the board of Wal-Mart. Unfortunately for Barnett, the comments he made were only the tip of his anti-libertarian iceberg. They were not designed to offer a case for the Iraq War, but rather briefly sketch the leanings of the movement. Digging himself into a deeper hole, Barnett posted comments further demonstrating his belief that there is such a thing as pro-war libertarianism. Simply because a person calls himself a libertarian doesn’t make it true; instead to determine whether or not war is compatible with libertarian ideology we must simply ask: Are theft, imperialism, coercion, and murder compatible with libertarian ideology? Barnett was correct – those libertarians who attacked his op-ed did not get the full picture. To really be fair, they would need to offer an even more rigorous vitiation of his position. Instead of tackling Barnett’s entire response, this article deals with the crux of his deviation. Barnett lays out his comments by showing how libertarian antiwar arguments contradict each other. He labels what he sees as the main arguments:
Arguments one, three, and four are correctly characterized, but where Barnett errs is in his description of the second argument. For libertarians, no governments are sovereign. Each State is unjust in its own right, even though some are more evil than others. The point is not about the nature of the foreign States, but rather Barnett’s own. When he points out the contradiction between argument four and argument two, he objects that, "they [evil governments] still cannot be stopped from violating fundamental rights." The point here, however, is that our own State is incapable of protecting someone else’s rights without violating our own. That there exist governments that violate the rights of its citizens does not lead to the conclusion that we need more violations of rights. As all States exist as coercive entities, and all wars are funded through various depredations, including taxation and inflation, there is no way for a State to act that is just. It is, by nature, immoral. It would be like arguing a criminal gang has the right to extort from their "customers," so it can go liberate other "customers." As Sheldon Richman syllogistically puts it:
The point to take here is that wars can be waged justly, provided they are not waged by the State. If a private mercenary wanted to go in and kill the brutal Saddam, he would be well within his right, as Saddam was certainly violating the rights of innocents. Yet the State could never just kill one person. Beyond the inherent immorality of State wars, there is always the fact that with carte blanche to buy deadly weapons, the State, more than private armies, has the proclivity to kill innocents. Knowing that his previous defense would not suffice, he mounts an argument to the libertarian who is audacious enough to point out that:
He says that this argument does not work because it, "…proves too much," in that the argument also, "…would oppose ALL wars INCLUDING WARS OF SELF-DEFENSE…[his emphasis]" The problem with this argument is that the libertarian wouldn’t oppose all defensive wars, only State-fought ones. As Murray Rothbard points out, "But Jones [our government] has no right, any more than does Smith [evil government], to aggress against anyone else in the course of his "just war": to steal others' property in order to finance his pursuit, to conscript others into his posse by use of violence, or to kill others in the course of his struggle to capture the Smith forces." If a war were a just war, then there would be good reason to suspect that private individuals would volunteer their efforts to fight it. If the evil [insert monolithic boogeyman] were to invade, then if people really loved America, they would fight. It should not be up to a tyrant to decide how much a person loves his country; yet this is the very basis behind conscriptive slavery. When privatizing war, we minimize the chances of fighting aggressive wars that kill innocents. Why? Because war is not profitable – it is destructive. Private armies, defense agencies, militias, and citizens would not want to go on globocop adventures to spread democracy – the only people who advocate Wilsonianism have shown themselves to be cowards, chickenhawks, and armchair warmongers. This system ensures that only defensive wars would be fought. There’s no reason to expect a massive invasion of America – even less if there was no centralized government to conquer and use as a tool against the populace. If the strongest military in the world cannot conquer countries like Vietnam and Iraq, then why should we expect a much less powerful foreign army to be able to subjugate us? Barnett says that radical [read: real] libertarians, "…can AND DO disagree about the war in Iraq." Maybe other groups that don’t value liberty can have disagreements, but if we are going to define radical libertarianism as a movement against State power and coercion, a movement against murder and theft – even if labeled collateral damage and taxation – then the only tenable position for the libertarian is to oppose all State wars. July 28, 2007 Max Raskin [send him mail] goes to high school in New Jersey. Copyright © 2007 LewRockwell.com |
