TomPalmer says in his comments to this post that for Murray Rothbard to have celebrated the fall of Saigon and the overthrow of the Republic of Vietnam was a “disgrace,” a “departure…from the entire philosophy of liberty with which he was so closely associated,” and a few other things too. Well, here is a news item I found in my file. The death penalty for spreading rumours of a currency devalution? Death for hoarding? It helps reminds us just what kind of regime the US was propping up.
Source link: http://blog.mises.org/2750/price-controls-enforced-by-death-penalty/
Price Controls Enforced by Death Penalty
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Well, being libertarian myself I also believe that Rothbard’s flirting with the Left was a gross mistake and left a mark of disgrace on his great name. I think that this story had strong links to some theoretical errors Rothbard made which sometimes led him to the sheer conspirology.
As for the episode you refer to, Palmer makes his point crystal clear:
“The South Vietnamese government was certainly no paragon of liberalism, but what replaced it was also decidedly not a liberation, no matter how romantic Ho Chi Minh might have seemed to some.”
Thus it makes no sense to recall many wrongs committed by the Saigon government. It was clearly less oppressive than the Hanoi one.
You can complain all you want about the incompetence and corruption of American puppets, and their harsh (threatened) punishment for free marketeers. But no American puppet is even in the same league as the communists and Islamofascists who deposed them, when it comes to murder and mayhem. Chiang Kai-shek for example, was the very model of a rank, corrupt, brutal, incompetent, currency-inflating Yankee puppet, yet his legacy was a fairly free and prosperous nation. Meanwhile, his successor on the mainland was busy making history as the biggest butcher since Hitler, and practically halted the economic progress of a billion people for 30 years.
I think that American imperialism belongs in a special historical class, quite unlike the blatantly self-serving and much more obviously harmful conquest and colonial empires of the Spanish, French and English. The American empire rather resembles the commonwealth-type organization that Adam Smith advocated as a replacement for the costly and inefficient British Empire.
The true crime being committed in American foreign policy right now (and in domestic policy) is the crime of lying to ones citizens about the cost of all of the combined forays into welfare and military conquest and control.
Rothbard’s main point was that the regime managed to convince most of the citizens that it was not worth keeping. Thus was it overthrown. The news clipping illustrates why. Here Rothbard makes the general point that even tyranny rests to some degree on public consent; when people are no longer willing to put up with it, it can melt away.
Overthrown from within? Or conquered by outsiders? There was a little of column A and a little of column B going on, but I would bet a year’s worth of dinners in a Vietnamese restaurant that without the presence of a huge North Vietnam Army, and without massive amounts of aid from other Communist countries, the citizens of South Vietnam would never have succeeded in “removing their consent” to be governed.
Another reason why people melt away is that they can smell defeat and they thought that being red was better than being dead.
When and where did Rothbard makes this remark? Is it in print?
Of course the fall of Saigon was caused not by the particular economic policies of South Vietnam but mostly by the fragmented structure of the South Vietnamese society and popular desire to see the country united and free of foreigners, plus extensive support of the Northerners from the outside. No conceivable economic policy of the South could have changed the situation unless the South was firmly shielded by the US (like it were the case of South Korea and Taiwan).
Having said that, even if there were no North Vietnam and no external forces – does the mere fact that the most citizens happened to erroneously believe that the communist regime is better than the severely corrupted capitalist regime justifies anyone’s celebration?
Had Rothbard witnessed the fall of the Weimar republic in 1933 or of the Russian revolution in October 1917 – would he celebrated such a disgrace of the rotten and corrupt state and triumph of the popular will as well?
Rothbard was pretty clear that celebrating the downfall of the South Vietnamese puppet government (the man was an anarchist, for heaven’s sake!) was hardly the same thing as celebrating the communists taking over.
Under the circumstances of the time the downfall of the South was absolutely identical to the communists taking over. It was simply impossible to celebrate the former without celebrating the latter.
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