To the Antiwar Left
by Max Raskin All wars are the health of the State, not simply Republican ones. Without a radical doctrine as your lodestar, the Left’s opposition to war must merely be an opposition to this war – ambiguous, tepid opposition that will sway with the capricious nature of politics. Why should the Democrats decry the war and massive increase in State power that comes along with it? Don’t they have their own wars against poverty and sickness to fight? Leftists need to embrace libertarianism and its unflinching commitment to universal principles if they ever hope to escape the morass of compromising, reactionary politics and truly stand committed to peace. Opposition to war must go beyond current incompetence and mismanagement; it must cut to the fundamental heart of what war is. Leftists have seen the group of murdering thieves behind the current regime, so why not go one step further and recognize that by nature the State is this tool for evil and it doesn’t matter how benevolent our dictator happens to be. This is the lesson of libertarianism. Taking the basic proposition that theft and murder are wrong, regardless of what the State says, libertarian thinkers have constructed a system of social order that is based on freedom and liberty. The nature of the State is to oppose this system, as government can only exist through a monopoly of coercion and systematic, institutionalized theft, euphemistically referred to as "taxation." So why shy away from these conclusions to oppose war? Why not label war for what it is? A massive expansion of government power that necessarily contradicts the belief that man should be allowed to live freely. Call the State anti–free market; war is the negation of private property. It is a massive socialist enterprise, wherein the State arrogates to itself the power to steal and inflate in order to kill innocent people. If one allows the State to exist, then war is a necessary result. When society gives any group of criminals the right to fund their Wilsonian fantasies indefinitely though a central bank, then how can you expect anything other than war? This argument against the government’s monopoly over the printing press is a uniquely libertarian one. The history of inflation has been one of kings, despots, and democrats surreptitiously taxing the populace by printing more money and expanding credit. The first people to receive the printed money are those nepotistically chosen by the State, most notoriously defense contractors. By the time the populace realizes what has happened, their currency has already been devalued, cost of living has risen, and this causes a pronounced decrease in the standard of living. And what about those defense contractors? They’re making massive profits. Isn’t this an argument against greedy capitalists? In reality, however, Blackwater, KBR, Boeing, and Lockheed Martin are not free market, capitalist businesses. A massive State poses a fundamental problem to the ideals of a laissez-faire economy. How can corporatism, a system where the government wraps its grubby hands around all sectors of the economy, possibly be considered hands off? Capitalism is a system of private ownership. The Bush Administration could not oppose this more emphatically. To Bush, the supreme negator of private ownership, corporatism offers the avenue that he can use to reward his various cronies. On the free market, destruction is destructive. There is no profit in producing bombs and bullets because the populace does not demand these things; they demand iPhones. It is only when the State subsidizes destruction that we get companies like Lockheed Martin. On the free market these companies would not survive because there is no money in the aggressive war business. When libertarians say they want to privatize war, those of the antiwar Left should cheer them on. Private war is waged only when absolutely necessary; consumers would rather spend their money on new cars and clothing rather than on propping up foreign dictatorships and nation building. People fight only when absolutely necessary. Furthermore, because the market will hold aggressive agencies accountable for their actions, there is an incentive to minimize damage to innocent civilians. Because the State has the sole power in society to determine what is just and unjust, there is little recourse for punishing an unjust, but powerful State. With a system of private justice, courts would be allowed to punish any agency that engaged in the murdering of non-combatants. Bush and his regime would be treated like any other band of criminal murderers. Don’t ignore the principles of private property simply because neoconservatives of the Right have hijacked its rhetoric. Thankfully, many Democrats are learning this lesson and have begun to support Republican Ron Paul, who ran as a Libertarian in 1988. It’s not the R or D next to their names that should tell people to fear politicians, but rather the very fact that they want to tell you how to live your life. Though Democrats profess to be antiwar, they have been behind some of the worst ones in American history. The butcher of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Harry Truman was a Democrat. Lyndon Johnson and John F. Kennedy, architects behind the massive bloodbath of Vietnam were both Democrats. Finally, Bill Clinton, often pegged as a great statesman, was really a warmonger behind the invasion of Somalia, the sanctions against Iraq, which caused the deaths of hundreds of thousands, as well as the unjust war in the Balkans. While the Right and Left were behind these wars, the libertarians stood as the only defenders of peace and property. On the typical left-right spectrum, the Right wants to wage war against foreigners, while the Left wants to wage war against the domestic populace with regulations, taxes, and intervention. In reality, the Republicans and Democrats are both for perpetual war – be it a war against drugs, poverty, or terrorism. People do not have an aversion to libertarianism if properly explained. They have an aversion to organizations that are willy-nilly in their principles and refuse to make a stand, regardless of how many people disagree with them. Thankfully, libertarianism isn’t an alienating, but rather an ecumenical philosophy. The idea that people should be allowed to live their lives in the absence of coercion is immensely popular because of its intuitive appeal. Spell out how war and the corporate, inflationist State that necessarily follows is not consistent with private property and free markets and you’ve made a libertarian out of a Leftist. August 15, 2007 Max Raskin [send him mail] goes to high school in New Jersey. He was a summer researcher at the Mises Institute in 2007. Copyright © 2007 LewRockwell.com |
