“Liberalism is not anarchism, nor has it anything whatsoever to do with anarchism. The liberal understands quite clearly that without resort to compulsion, the existence of society would be endangered and that behind the rules of conduct whose observance is necessary to assure peaceful human cooperation must stand the threat of force if the whole edifice of society is not to be continually at the mercy of any one of its members. One must be in a position to compel the person who will not respect the lives, health, personal freedom, or private property of others to acquiesce in the rules of life in society. This is the function that the liberal doctrine assigns to the state: the protection of property, liberty, and peace.
“The German socialist, Ferdinand Lassalle, tried to make the conception of a government limited exclusively to this sphere appear ridiculous by calling the state constituted on the basis of liberal principles the “night-watchman state.” But it is difficult to see why the night-watchman state should be any more ridiculous or worse than the state that concerns itself with the preparation of sauerkraut, with the manufacture of trouser buttons, or with the publication of newspapers. In order to understand the impression that Lassalle was seeking to create with this witticism, one must keep in mind that the Germans of his time had not yet forgotten the state of the monarchical despots, with its vast multiplicity of administrative and regulatory functions, and that they were still very much under the influence of the philosophy of Hegel, which had elevated the state to the position of a divine entity. If one looked upon the state, with Hegel, as “the self-conscious moral, substance,” as the “Universal in and for itself, the rationality of the will,” then, of course, one had to view as blasphemous any attempt to limit the function of the state to that of serving as a night watchman.”
“It is only thus that one can understand how it was possible for people to go so far as to reproach liberalism for its “hostility” or enmity towards the state. If I am of the opinion that it is inexpedient to assign to the government the task of operating railroads, hotels, or mines, I am not an “enemy of the state” any more than I can be called an enemy of sulfuric acid because I am of the opinion that, useful though it may be for many purposes, it is not suitable either for drinking or for washing one’s hands.
“It is incorrect to represent the attitude of liberalism toward the state by saying that it wishes to restrict the latter’s sphere of possible activity or that it abhors, in principle, all activity on the part of the state in relation to economic life. Such an interpretation is altogether out of the question. The stand that liberalism takes in regard to the problem of the function of the state is the necessary consequence of its advocacy of private ownership of the means of production. If one is in favor of the latter, one cannot, of course, also be in favor of communal ownership of the means of production, i.e., of placing them at the disposition of the government rather than of individual owners. Thus, the advocacy of private ownership of the means of production already implies a very severe circumscription of the functions assigned to the state.
“The socialists are sometimes wont to reproach liberalism with a lack of consistency, It is, they maintain, illogical to restrict the activity of the state in the economic sphere exclusively to the protection of property. It is difficult to see why, if the state is not to remain completely neutral, its intervention has to be limited to protecting the rights of property owners.
“This reproach would be justified only if the opposition of liberalism to all governmental activity in the economic sphere going beyond the protection of property stemmed from an aversion in principle against any activity on the part of the state. But that is by no means the case. The reason why liberalism opposes a further extension of the sphere of governmental activity is precisely that this would, in effect, abolish private ownership of the means of production. And in private property the liberal sees the principle most suitable for the organization of man’s life in society.
“Liberalism is therefore far from disputing the necessity of a machinery of state, a system of law, and a government. It is a grave misunderstanding to associate it in any way with the idea of anarchism. For the liberal, the state is an absolute necessity, since the most important tasks are incumbent upon it: the protection not only of private property, but also of peace, for in the absence of the latter the full benefits of private property cannot be reaped.
“These considerations alone suffice to determine the conditions that a state must fulfill in order to correspond to the liberal ideal. It must not only be able to protect private property; it must also be so constituted that the smooth and peaceful course of its development is never interrupted by civil wars, revolutions, or insurrections.
Mises, Liberalism (In the Classical Tradition),
pp 36-39, published by Sheed Andrews, &
McMeel, Inc. 1978* * *
Epilogue
by Sam Wells“Thus, the great Austrian economist advocated and recognized the necessity of political states, laws, and governments while he was one of history’s most powerful intellectual opponents of statism. Contrary to a common misunderstanding by some followers of the late Murray Rothbard, “statism” is not the mere existence of a political state or when a given geographical area has one government. Statism is the doctrine or policy of subordinating the individual unconditionally to a state or government with unlimited powers. Statism includes welfare statism (modern American “liberalism”), mercantilism, fascism, and other systems of systematic positive government interventionism on up to and including full socialism. (See Mises, Bureaucracy pp. 74-76 & 78 and Omnipotent Government pp. 5, 44-78, & 285) Statism is not the same thing as the state, and the classical liberal political system of a constitutional republic and the concomitant private property order and unhampered market economy which Mises advocated fervently until his death is not a system of statism and is in contradistinction to statism. Under a policy of laissez faire, the scope of authority of government is limited by the rule of law to the protection of the private properties and individual liberties of peaceful citizens from violence and fraud, and the government itself is proscribed from interfering with non-violent, non-fraudulent activities of production and exchange. Under statism, in contrast, the state may do whatever it wants to an individual or his property unconditionally and without limitation.”
Tag Archives: statism
Slouching Toward Austerity
Charles Hughes Smith at “Of Two Minds” blog describes the politics of resentment succinctly and ends:
“Now that the “housing never goes down” fantasy has imploded, the dwindling remains of the once-great middle class are slouching dejectedly through the ruins of the political center (which cannot hold because there is no center, only a State/Plutocracy Elite and a rabble of State dependents defending their fiefdoms), filled with bitter resentments at this undeserved plight–for isn’t this the Greatest Empire the World Has Ever Known?–beset by anxieties about the rough beasts (let us call them austerity, restraint, humility, responsibility, patience, sacrifice and thrift) whose hour has come round at last.”
Well On The Road To Serfdom
Rob Viglione at Seeking Alpha:
We can explain the rapid declines in homeowner wealth with the real estate bubble bursting in 2007, but how can we explain the general shifting in real estate capital structures going from 84% equity in 1945 to a mere 38% in 2010? Continue reading
Mark Twain’s Battle Hymn Of The Republic
The Battle Hymn of the Republic Updated
by Mark TwainMine eyes have seen the orgy of the launching of the Sword;
He is searching out the hoardings where the stranger’s wealth is stored;
He hath loosed his fateful lightnings, and with woe and death has scored;
His lust is marching on. Continue reading
Gaza Flotilla Like Jewish Refugees In Exodus Says Former Mossad Agent
Victor Ostrovsky in SpyTalk at The Washington Post:
“The Israeli commando attack on a civilian flotilla was “so stupid it is stupefying,” says former Mossad agent Victor Ostrovsky. Ostrovsky spent six years in the Israeli navy, rising to the rank of lieutenant commander before Mossad recruited him in 1982. He quit after four years and in the 1990s he wrote two highly critical, first-person books about the intelligence service. Continue reading
Albert J. Nock On The Criminality Of The State
Albert J. Nock in The Criminality of the State, March 1939:
“In this way, perhaps, our people might get into their heads some glimmering of the fact that the State’s criminality is nothing new and nothing to be wondered at. It began when the first predatory group of men clustered together and formed the State, and it will continue as long as the State exists in the world, because the State is fundamentally an anti-social institution, fundamentally criminal. Continue reading
Ron Paul: Governments Never Want Peace
“Meanwhile, it is rumored by the Financial Times, AFP and others that Greece may spend more than it saves from austerity measures on arms deals with Germany, France and the US as a potential condition of receiving bailout funds.
If true, it is certainly not unprecedented for the global military industrial complex to benefit from deals made by their friends in the central banking community. After all, war is the health of the state. The last thing big government proponents want is for peace to break out in the world.”
Universal Soldier
State Terrorism: The Ukrainian Genocide, 1933
The Ukrainian genocide at the hands of Stalin was as great as the Holocaust engineered by the Nazis, but is much less well known. The silence of prominent Western journalists is one reason why. Walter Duranty of The New York Times, a Pulitzer prize-winner, admitted privately that ten million or so peasants had been intentionally starved and/or killed, but in public he dismissed reports of this as exaggeration and anti-Soviet propaganda. It turned out later that Duranty was being sexually blackmailed by the KGB.
“Estimates of how many people died in Stalin’s engineered famine of 1933 vary. But they are staggering in their scale — between seven and 11 million people.
But despite the horrific number of people who died, the world is relatively unfamiliar with this grisly chapter in Soviet history which claimed lives on the same scale as the holocaust. One of the main reasons is that the Germans were eventually defeated, and thousands of eyewitnesses told their stories about concentration camps and massacres. The experience was also captured unforgettably in photographs, film, and written accounts, and many of those responsible for the genocide were captured and put on trial………
British historian Robert Conquest is an expert on the period and his 1986 study of the famine, “Harvest of Sorrow,” brought much information about the tragedy to Western audiences for the first time. Conquest said another contrast between the famine and the holocaust is that while Adolf Hitler had written down much of what he intended to do, Stalin did not go on record about the famine.
“In the first place, [the Germans] were caught, so it ended and they had themselves got into an operation where they said what they were doing. Stalin never said he was trying to starve anyone to death. He just took away their food. He never went on record. It was all done under the auspices of humanist talk, socialist talk — or else denied altogether. The operations were different. And in other ways they were different, too. Hitler did many horrible things but he didn’t torture his friends to tell lies. The operation was a different one.”
Conquest is in no doubt that the famine was primarily aimed at Ukrainians and that Stalin hated not only the country peasants but even senior Communist leaders, like Mykola Skrypnyk, who eventually killed himself…………
“[Stalin] was trying to break the Ukrainians, as you know, with the leading Ukrainian Bolshevik Skrypnyk committing suicide under the pressures that were put on them when they tried to defend just the ordinary alphabet of the Ukrainians. Here [Stalin] was trying to alter it, things like that. I think he also proved he never trusted Ukrainian Communists. The whole Ukrainian Central Committee was totally purged in 1937, even the ones who supported him. He had this terrific distrust of everybody, but particularly of Ukraine.”
Luciuk of the Ukrainian Canadian Civil Liberties Association has a different theory for why news of the famine never reached the West. He blamed a number of Western journalists based in Moscow at the time who knew of the forced starvation but chose not to write about it or deliberately covered it up.
The journalist he says played the most influential role in the cover-up was “The New York Times” correspondent Walter Duranty. A drug addict with a shady reputation, Duranty was also an avid fan of Stalin’s, whom he described as “the world’s greatest living statesman.” He was granted the first American interview with the Soviet leader and received privileged information from the secretive regime.
Duranty confided to a British diplomat at the time that he thought 10 million people had perished in the famine. But when other journalists who had traveled to Ukraine began writing about the horrific famine raging there, Duranty branded their information as anti-Soviet lies. Conquest believes that Duranty was being blackmailed by the Soviet secret police over his sexual activities, which reportedly included bisexuality and necrophilia.
The year before the famine, in 1932, Duranty won the Pulitzer Prize, America’s most coveted journalism award, for a series of articles on the Soviet economy. Luciuk says members of the Ukrainian diaspora, as well as Ukrainian politicians and academics, earlier this month launched a campaign to have Duranty’s award posthumously revoked. He said he hopes the campaign will make more people in the world aware of the famine….”
“Compassionate” Conservatism: Statist Propaganda
Let me put this as bluntly as possible. A state cannot be “compassionate.” Policies might have well-intentioned goals, but they are policies – that is, legal and administrative enactments, often backed by force, that must be followed by whoever falls under their jurisdiction, regardless of their state of mind.
On the other hand, compassion is a quality of heart and intention. An involuntary A non-voluntary action consequent to a policy cannot be compassionate. Obedience to a legal requirement cannot be compassionate. Compassion can be understood only by the context and the state of mind of an individual.
Libertarianism is not..should not be…and cannot be… compassionate.
Instead, it is the attitude to government policy and law that best allows human beings to act with the compassion each is capable of. To force “compassion” on people who don’t want to be “compassionate” is simply force, just as surely as if you were forcing anything else on them that they didn’t want. What looks like “compassion” to you might, after all, look like “expropriation” to me.
“Compassionate” policies might indeed achieve some immediate goal that makes some group of people more satisfied than they previously were. But it surely makes another group unhappy in order to do so. Now, the trade off might..or might not…be worth it. But the entity making that utilitarian calculation isn’t an individual, it’s at best a committee of hacks, at worst, a mafia of thugs….or worst of all, some economic model cooked up in a Harvard professor’s study.
By transferring “compassion” to the state, “compassionate conservatism” encourages people to become less compassionate personally. People actually become meaner. Why wouldn’t they? They’re already being taxed at a third to half their money, effectively. Even the good lord only asked for ten percent.
More on the subject by Robert Ringer, The Tea Party Goes Docile:
(Note: I don’t necessarily agree with Robert Ringer’s other views on defense. I don’t see a necessity for the US to be on a perma-war footing that involves aggressive wars overseas and an extensive network of bases. As a libertarian, I endorse a strong defense but one that’s decentralized and limited to volunteers, not mercenaries. It would be based on universal ownership of and training in firearms and would refrain from interfering in foreign internal affairs. This would go along with a decentralized government, supported by state and citizen militias. Most of all, I endorse economic freedom and prosperity as our greatest defense. The more attractive the US is as a trade partner, the less foreign states are going to hurt their own economic interests by turning hostile.
Far from strengthening the country, anti-market economic policies and a perpetually intrusive foreign policy are draining money, time, and energy from it.
(Nonetheless, I don’t think we can disarm unilaterally “at one fell swoop,” without opening up a can of worms, now that the government has actually created multiple foreign threats by its belligerence).
“I repeat what I said earlier: If anything, I believe the tea-party rally on tax day was far too docile. It once again demonstrated just how intimidating the far left can be. Not only intimidating, but clever.
How so? The BHO oligarchy has managed to change the Big Question from ”Is Obama a socialist?” to ”Is the tea-party movement dangerously immersed in racism, hate speech, and violence-prone affiliations with paramilitary groups?” Never sell the Saul Alinsky crowd short when it comes to turning every negative around and pointing it in the direction of its accusers.
I honestly believe that Der Fuhrbama believes his verbal skills are so powerful that he can embarrass the tea-party people into submission. He may be a lightweight in most respects, but he’s a lightweight with an abundance of (over)confidence. The tea-party people had better take a page from Rules from Radicals and press down twice as hard on the accelerator, lest they lose their momentum long before November 2.
Docile simply doesn’t cut it. Just ask the compassionate conservatives who are now in the process of going down in flames.”