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During the 1990s, many of us complained bitterly about rule by the left. We were outraged at how the Clinton administration had so much faith in government's ability to bring about universal fairness and equality. Government, we were told, would make right all relations between groups, equalize access to health care, curb every corporate abuse, and stop all forms of exploitation of man against man, and man against nature.
Except that behind every regulation, every bill, and every central plan, no matter how humane it appeared on the outside, an informed person could discern the iron fist of the state, which the Clinton administration freely used against its enemies. Clinton himself was perhaps never as convinced of the cure of power as the worst Clintonites, but it remained and remains his default worldview.
What was wrong with the leftists' worldview in the 1990s and today? Essentially it is this: they see society as unworkable by itself. They believe it has fundamental flaws and deep-rooted conflicts that keep it in some sort of structural imbalance. All these conflicts and disequilibria cry out for government fixes, for leftists are certain that there is no social problem that a good dose of power can't solve.
If the conflicts they want are not there, they make them up. They look at what appears to be a happy suburban subdivision and see pathology. They see an apparently happy marriage and imagine that it is a mask for abuse. They see a thriving church and think the people inside are being manipulated by a cynical and corrupt pastor. Their view of the economic system is the same. They figure that prices don't reflect reality but instead are set by large players. There is a power imbalance at the heart of every exchange. The labor contract is a mere veneer that covers exploitation.
To the brooding leftist, it is inconceivable that people can work out their own problems, that trade can be to people's mutual advantage, that society can be essentially self-managing, or that attempts to use government power to reshape and manage people might backfire. Their faith in government knows few limits: their faith in people is thin or nonexistent. This is why they are a danger to liberty. We knew this in the 1990s, and we know it today.
The remarkable fact about the conflict theory of society held by the left is that it ends up creating more of the very pathology that they believe has been there from the beginning. The surest way to drive a wedge between labor and capital is to regulate the labor markets to the point that people cannot make voluntary trades. Both sides begin to fear each other. It is the same with relations between races, sexes, the able and the physically and mentally challenged, and any other groups you can name. The best path to creating conflict where none need exist is to put a government bureaucracy in charge.
And yet the left is hardly alone in holding this essential assumption about the way the world works. We have lived through six years of a Republican president. The regime is dominated by a different philosophical orientation. And we have thereby been reminded that there are many flavors of tyranny. Bush's spending record is far worse than Clinton's. After promising a humble foreign policy, war and war spending define our era.
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We're told:
- that every problem with war can be solved through more force;
- that there is nothing necessarily wrong with imprisoning people without cause and without legal representation;
- that torture can be a legitimate wartime tactic,
- that some countries have to be destroyed in order to be made free; and
- that we can have all the warfare and welfare we desire at virtually no cost, thanks to the miracle of debt-driven economic growth.
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Traveling on airplanes reminds us how much freedom we've lost and how we have become accustomed to it. [Editor's Note: I will NEVER become accustomed to violations of the 4th Amendment!] Government bureaucrats presume the right to search us and all our property. We are interrogated at every step. The slightest bit of resistance could lead to arrest. We mill around airports while the loudspeakers demand that we report all suspicious behavior. Sometimes it seems like we are living in a dystopian novel.
Some people say that the real problem with the Bush administration is that it is too far left, and that a genuine right-wing government would be better. I'm disinclined to believe that, for I detect in the Bush administration a particular philosophy of governance that departs from that of the Clinton regime in many ways, except in its unlimited faith in government, that is, force and the threat of force.
I would go so far as to say that the most imminent threat that we face is not from the left but from the conservative right. I would like to defend the idea that rule by the right is as dangerous as rule by the left. Elsewhere, I've referred to members of political groups that support the conservative right as "red-state fascists," and I don't use that phrase merely for rhetorical purposes. There was and is such a thing as fascism as a nonleftist form of social theory that puts unlimited faith in the state to correct the flaws in society.
In the American postwar tradition, the political right has been a mix of genuine libertarian elements together with some very dangerous tendencies. Mises wrote in Omnipotent Government that there is a breed of warmonger who sees war not as an evil to be avoided as much as possible, but rather a productive and wonderful event that gives life meaning. To these people — and Mises of course was speaking of Nazis — war and all its destruction is a high achievement, something necessary to bring out the best in man and society, something wonderful and necessary to push history and culture forward.
Reading Mises's claim in peacetime makes it seem implausible. Who could possibly believe such things about war? And yet I think we know now. There have been hundreds of articles in the conservative press in the last six years that have made the precise claims we see above. Even in the religious world, we see the shift taking place, with new emphasis on the God of War over the Prince of Peace.
During the New Deal and before the Cold War, the libertarian tendencies of the American Right prevailed. But after the Cold War began, the mix became unstable, with the militarists and statists gaining an upper hand. It was during this period that we first heard the term "conservative" applied to people who believe in free enterprise and human liberty — a ridiculous moniker if there ever was one. Frank Chodorov was so fed up with it that he once said: "anyone who calls me a conservative gets a punch in the nose." Neither did Hayek or Mises, much less Rothbard, permit that term to be applied to their world-view.
Nonetheless, it stuck, and the bad habits of mind along with it. It would be impossible to say what policy of the current-day right constitutes the biggest danger to liberty. For now, I would like to leave aside the most commonly talked about issues of the Bush administration, such as its ahistorical view of the power of the executive branch and its post 9-11 violations of civil liberties, which are very real indeed. Instead let's look at the grimmest aspect of the state: its enforcement arm.
LOCK'EM UP
The American Right has long held a casual view toward the police power, viewing it as the thin blue line that stands between freedom and chaos. And while it is true that law itself is critical to freedom, and police can defend rights of life and property, it does not follow that any tax-paid fellow bearing official arms and sporting jackboots is on the side of good. Every government regulation and tax is ultimately backed by the police power, so free-market advocates have every reason to be as suspicious of socialist-style police power as anyone on the left.
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Uncritical attitudes toward the police lead, in the end, to the support of the police state. And to those who doubt that, I would invite a look at the US-backed regime in Iraq, which has been enforcing martial law since the invasion, even while most conservatives have been glad to believe that these methods constitute steps toward freedom.
The problem of police power is hitting Americans very close to home. It is the police, much militarized and federalized, that are charged with enforcing the on-again-off-again states of emergency that characterize American civilian life. It is the police that confiscated guns from New Orleans residents during the flood, kept residents away from their homes, refused to let the kids go home in the Alabama tornado last month, and will be the enforcers of the curfews, checkpoints, and speech controls that the politicians want during the next national emergency. If we want to see the way the police power could treat US citizens, look carefully at how the US troops in Iraq are treating the civilians there, or how prisoners in Guantanamo Bay are treated
A related problem with the conservative view toward law and justice concerns the issue of prisons. The United States now incarcerates 730 people per 100,000, which means that the US leads the world in the number of people it keeps in jails. We have vaulted ahead of Russia in this regard. Building and maintaining jails is a leading expense by government at all levels. We lock up citizens at rates as high as eight times the rest of the industrialized world. Is it because we have more crime? No. You are more likely to be burglarized in London and Sydney than in New York or Los Angeles. Is this precisely because we jail so many people? Apparently not. Crime explains about 12 percent of the prison rise, while changes in sentencing practices, mostly for drug-related offenses, account for 88 percent.
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Overall, spending on prisons, police, and other items related to justice is completely out of control. According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, in the twenty years ending in 2003, prison spending has soared 423 percent, judicial spending is up 321 percent, and police spending shot up 241 percent. When curent data become available, I think we will all be in for a shock, with total spending around a quarter of a trilion dollars per year. And what do we get for it? More justice, more safety, better protection? No, we are buying the chains of our own slavery.
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We might think of prisons as miniature socialist societies, where government is in full control. For that reason, they are a complete failure for everyone but those who get the contracts to build the jails and those who work in them. Many inmates are there for drug offenses, supposedly being punished for their behavior, but meanwhile drug markets thrive in prison. If that isn't the very definition of failure, I don't know what is. In prision, nothing takes place outside the government purview. The people therein are wholly and completely controlled by state managers, which means that they have no value. And yet it is a place of monstrous chaos, abuse, and corruption. Is it any wonder that people coming out of prison are no better off than before they went in, and are often worse, and scarred for life?
In the US prison and justice system, there is no emphasis at all on the idea of restitution, which is not only an important part of the idea of justice but, truly, its very essence. What justice is achieved by robbing the victim again to pay for the victimizer's total dehumanization?
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As Rothbard writes:
The victim not only loses his money, but pays more money besides for the dubious thrill of catching, convicting, and then supporting the criminal; and the criminal is still enslaved, but not to the good purpose of recompensing his victim.
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Free-market advocates have long put up with jails on grounds that the state needs to maintain a monopoly on justice. But where in the world is the justice here? And how many jails are too many? How many prisoners must there be before the government has overreached? We hear virtually nothing about this problem from conservatives. Far from it, we hear only the celebration of the expansion of prison socialism, as if the application of ever more force were capable of solving any social problem.
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LAW-KEEPER, LAW-BREAKERS
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What is striking here is the context of this book [Thomas Hobbes' Leviathan]. Conflict was indeed ubiquitous. But what was the conflict about? It was over who would control the state and how that state would operate. This was not a state of nature but a society under Leviathan's control. It was precisely the Leviathan that bred that very conflict that Hobbes was addressing, and he proposed a cure that was essentially identical to the disease.
In fact, the result of the [British] Civil War was the brutal and ghastly dictatorship of Oliver Cromwell, who ruled under democratic slogans. This was a foreshadowing of some of the worst political violence of the twentieth century. It was Nazism, Fascism, and Communism that transformed formerly peaceful societies into violent communities in which life did indeed become "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short." [from Thomas Hobbes' Leviathan] Leviathan didn't fix the problem; it bred it—and fastened it on society as a permanent condition.
What is striking about Hobbes is that he thought not at all about economic problems. The problem of human material well-being was not part of his intellectual apparatus. He could not have imagined what England would become only a century to a century and a half later: a bastion of freedom and rising prosperity for everyone.
He wrote at the tail end of an epoch before the rise of old-style liberalism. At the time that Hobbes was writing, the liberal idea had not yet become part of public consciousness in England. In this respect, England was behind the Continent, where intellectuals in Spain and France had already come to understand the core insights of the liberal idea. But in England, John Locke's Two Treatises on Government [1679] would not be written for another thirty years, a book that would supply the essential framework of the Declaration of Indepence and lead to the freest and most prosperous society in the history of the world. [Editor's Note: America was once the freest, but the Legislative-Executive-Judicial conspiratorial cabal elected to "represent" us has miserably failed (intentionally) to lawfully enforce the Constitution and has almost destroyed what was once our bastion of liberty for their personal gain instead of their oath to defend the CONSTITUTION! Since they have immunity and you can't impeach the entire CONgress for "high crimes and misdemeanors", WE live with voting for the least corrupt candidate(s) who (seemingly) sincerely propose to muster widespread agreement to restore liberty by significantly reducing the size of federal government to a weak, central government for defensive purposes only (without income tax). Unfortunately, many elected reps are induced and persuaded (by whatever means) into supporting the interests of very well-funded, power-wielding, small groups. Also, many voters cast their vote for a candidate who might enable a vicarious experience of power instead of a real experience of freedom in their life.]
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