Higgs: War Is the Health of the State, Sickness of the Economy

April 3, 2008 9:13 PM by Anthony Gregory

In the newly announced Independent Institute blog, the Beacon, Robert Higgs has a wonderful piece on how war allows the state to grow, all at the expense of the free and productive economy (even if this is typically obscured by Fed trickery). Indeed, even non-"defense" spending skyrockets during war:

"[D]uring wartime many people increase their broad support for the government, and hence they are less inclined to challenge its actions even when those actions have little or nothing to do with the war. Hardly anyone was surprised that real defense spending (as measured in accordance with the government's own narrow concept) increased by almost 60 percent between 2000 and 2007, while real GDP rose by only 18 percent. Note, however, that the government's real nondefense outlays increased concurrently by more than 24 percent―an increase one-third greater than that of GDP. When people let down their guard because they 'support the troops,' they permit the government to make greater headway in its ceaseless quest to enlarge its spending in a wide range of areas, many of them strictly civilian in nature."

Read the rest, and visit the blog, which features Robert Higgs along with bloggers Peter Klein, Jonathan Bean, David Beito, David Theroux, me and several others.

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Liveblogging My Old Right Journey With Dr. Rothbard, Part V

March 17, 2008 12:25 PM by Anthony Gregory

(To read the earlier installments, go here.)

And at this point, the title I chose for this blog series has become somewhat of a misnomer. It has outlived its time. For no longer is there anything best described as an Old Right. It has died. Its remnant is scarce and far between. The circumstances in which the somewhat tenuous coalition presented itself -- in reaction to the foreign and domestic New Deal of Franklin Roosevelt -- is long gone. The libertarian hard core has been marginalized, or has passed on. Rothbard and a few remain, but the right, in all popularly conceived senses, is nothing like it was in the years of Garrett, Mencken and Nock.

The anti-World War II coalition -- which, as Rothbard astutely and importantly points out, somewhat in passing, was never so grand and impressive once the war was underway; the true non-interventionists were few after the populist America First movement was depopulated by the cataclysm of Pearl Harbor -- gave way to something approximating its precise opposite on the right: The Cold War coalition. Domestically, the alienated and persecuted rightwing struck back at the left with McCarthyism and grassroots red-bating -- a concoction of political revenge so tempting, and so well cloaked in the garb of anti-Communism that Rothbard himself was taken in at first. Then, of course, there was the nakedly coercive backlash: The repression of civilian socialists, a program that our principled libertarian author rejected outright and always saw as a vile and pernicious practice. Then there was the war itself: War against godless Communism, against the greatest threat to mankind, which a totalitarian American bureaucracy, even with Truman at the reins of it all, must be erected and glorified for the duration of the titanic clash between Civilized American Man and the Soviet Devil. On this program, Buckley (RIP) transformed nearly the entire right into a movement for which war, even nuclear war, was the fundamental issue, under which all else would be subordinated, and for which the official gatekeepers would come to purge the movement of classical liberals, antiwar rightists, those with Randian or Bircher alliances and, of course, Murray N. Rothbard. The conservative movement, which has persisted in that essential character to this day, was born. The Old Right was dead.

Thus does the last phase of the story described in Rothbard's The Betrayal of the American Right commence.

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Liveblogging My Old Right Journey With Dr. Rothbard, Part IV

November 1, 2007 5:47 PM by Anthony Gregory

(To read the earlier installments, go here.)

"Taxation Is Robbery." Upon seeing these words, the title of a Frank Chodorov pamphlet printed in 1947, a young Murray Rothbard was stunned. "This was it. Once seeing those shining and irrefutable words, my ideological outlook could never be the same again," Rothbard writes in Chapter 7 of Betrayal of the American Right.

All libertarians have moments in their lives that they remember as being defining in their philosophical development—landmarks that radicalize their thinking, after which they will never return to their previous statist traps. For Rothbard, the influence of simply seeing Chodorov make these radical libertarian arguments was decisive. For the rest of us, the long-term significance could hardly be overstated. For here we have the moment when the father and synthesizer of modern anarcho-libertarianism—the synthesis of natural rights, Old Right anti-imperialism, classical liberal class consciousness, praxeological economics and individual anarchism—himself became radicalized in his moral opposition to the state, and thus a moment that changed the history of the libertarian movement forever.

Conservatives talk the talk when it comes to tax cuts and reductions in social spending, but it is uniquely libertarian to see taxation across the board for what it is: grand larceny—the appropriation of wealth through threats of bodily violence—mass extortion—armed robbery writ large. Rothbard quotes Chodorov:

If we assume that the individual has an indisputable right to life, we must concede that he has a similar right to the enjoyment of the products of his labor. This we call a property right. The absolute right to property follows from the original right to life because one without the other is meaningless; the means to life must be identified with life itself. If the state has a prior right to the products of one’s labor, his right to existence is qualified . . . no such prior rights can be established, except by declaring the state the author of all rights. . . . We object to the taking of our property by organized society just as we do when a single unit of society commits the act. In the latter case we unhesitatingly call the act robbery, a malum in se. It is not the law which in the first instance defines robbery, it is an ethical principle, and this the law may violate but not supersede. If by the necessity of living we acquiesce to the force of law, if by long custom we lose sight of the immorality, has the principle been obliterated? Robbery is robbery, and no amount of words can make it anything else.

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