In “Libertarianism vs. Liberty,” published in HuffPost on April27, Peter Schwartz of the Ayn Rand Institute criticizes libertarians like Ron Paul who support a non-interventionist foreign policy. These evil people do not want to start a war with Iran. How can they fail to see, Schwartz asks, the “incontrovertible fact” of a direct threat to America’s survival?
It seems not to occur to Schwartz that the critics of interventionist foreign policy do not share his view of the facts. Incredibly, he takes the libertarian critics of intervention to believe that there is no right to respond to threats: any use of force is illegitimate.
Why do libertarians hold this strange position? The answer, according to Schwartz, is that they are anarchists. As such, they deny objective law. They are emotionalists who think that people should be free to act on any whim. Murray Rothbard, the leading theorist of anarchist libertarianism, had an “anti-American orientation.”
Schwartz’s claims are nonsensical. Rothbard explicitly argues for natural rights and objective law. He and non-interventionist libertarians who follow him do not deny the right of self-defense. Rather, they question the inflammatory propaganda of the State about supposed threats that require war and a more powerful State. Schwartz’s mistakes about Rothbard have over and over been pointed out to him, to no avail. He just keeps repeating the same falsehoods. (My thanks to Laurence Vance for calling Schwartz’s article to my attention.)
10:23 am on May 1, 2015
