How States Fall and Liberty Triumphs (continued)
*****
The notion of liberation in Afghanistan lasted only several weeks before those who were still paying attention realized that it had been a myth cooked up by US war planners. Today the country is rife with violence, poverty, criminal gangs, and the Taliban forming to stop the enormous rise of drug production that began only weeks after the Taliban was thrown out of the capital. As for Iraq, with bombings, killings, human suffering all around, and nothing in sight but the bad choices of continued military dictatorship or fundamentalist Islamic rule, everyone but the war planners now regards Iraq as a disaster.
The war planners believed that their will alone was enough to make and remake a country (whether Iraq or Afghanistan) and the world, simply because they operated the levers of state power. State power sees people as pliable, all events as controllable, and all outcomes as the inevitable working out of a well-constructed plan. Being the top dogs of the world's only superpower, they never doubted their ability to dictate the terms and so they had no plan for what to do if things went wrong.
What went wrong? They forgot several essential components of the structure of reality. People's free will is often backed by the willingness to undertake enormous sacrifice. Most especially it overlooks certain underlying laws that limit what is possible in human affairs. In the scheme of how the world works, even the largest state is only a bit player. It is capable of creating enormous chaos and transferring huge amounts of wealth, but not of controlling events themselves. This is why government action often generates results the opposite of those the policy is constructed to create.
Donald Rumsfeld's famous memo gives the whole game away. He admits that he does not know whether the US is winning or losing, but he is suspicious that it is losing. He admits that he lacks any means to discover whether the government is winning or losing. He admits that the private armies are doing better with millions than he and his government armies are doing with billions. He goes so far as to contemplate whether the government is capable of beating its enemies or whether another organization is needed.
If these comments don't strip away the façade of the warfare state, I don't know what would. Indeed, the entire apparatus of the warfare state is defeated by this fact: Human beings don't respond well to being treated like prisoners in someone else's central plan. If the desire is to wholly manage the future, the mega-planner is always a mega-failure, if not always in the short term certainly always in the long term. The Bush administration had bigger dreams than Wilson or FDR. But the group that began believing that it could reshape the world is now merely responding to events.
No effort at all was put into how the conquering heroes would manage an economy after they took power. It's as if they just completely forgot about the people's needs for electricity, clean running water, food, and communications.
The one principle that has guided the occupiers in their economic affairs in Iraq has been that whatever happens, the US should be in charge of it. The error has led them to kick out private entrepreneurs who attempted to start cell phone companies and airlines. Even now, the US is putting street vendors out of business, establishing monopoly providers, and throwing around US tax dollars to well-connected corporations in the name of rebuilding the country it first destroyed.
The war party has never really understood what freedom means. They have believed it is something granted by government, or the military as a proxy for government. They believed that freedom is something that exists because of the people running the government or the laws that manage society. In fact, freedom means the absence of despotism of all sorts. It can never be granted by the state. It can only be taken away by the state. If a government manager desires freedom for a society, his only path is to get out of the way.
The level of arrogance also had an effect on how the administration believed it could fund this war. It is increasingly clear that the total cost of the Iraq war will run into the hundreds of billions, and they proceed as if there are no worries about paying it. Of course the administration benefits by the presence of that great marble palace down the street that promises to print unlimited quantities of dollars to pay for whatever government wants to do.
The war policy of this administration may have failed in every way to achieve its stated aims, but it has succeeded in the one way war does succeed: it has transferred huge amounts of money and power from the private sector to the public sector. In believing that war is good for the ruling regime and its cronies, rarely have so few been right about so much.
If the government cannot be trusted to run wars, or provide the national defense that so completely failed on September 11, it surely cannot be trusted with the job of managing such crucially important institutions as education. And yet the Bush administration has succeeded in making unprecedented inroads into local schools with its "No Child Left Behind" policy. Just the name alone is worthy of the age of despots who purported to be the father and educator of every child. Yes, I know it is supposed to represent a humanitarian spirit to be concerned about the education of every child, but we need to ask ourselves whether having the government as the imparter of values, at taxpayer expense, is a good idea.
Evidently, many people think it is a bad idea. As public school enrollment falls in both rural and urban schools in most places around the country, home schooling is taking off, and creating a cottage industry of textbooks and materials that parents themselves use to educate their children. The effect of this is fantastic, not only for the children who are the main beneficiaries but also for the parents.
A major problem of public schools is that they socialize the parents into believing that they do not need to take responsibility for the education of their children. But homeschooling is bringing back an old value that parents bear primary responsibility for their children's education and for their training generally. Homeschooling is still small by comparison to public education but the trend line is enormously encouraging.
Nor do I intend to slight private schools, which are also growing in size and diversifying in shape. They are rising up to meet the needs of parents, whose values are ever more diverse. And this fact raises an interesting point. The growing multiculturalism of the American public is often treated as a problematic issue for national unification, but this presumes that there is political value to homogeneity.
Believers in freedom should question this assumption. It could be that the rise of multiculturalism will indeed make the country ever less governable at some level. It will reduce the extent to which the population is attached to the central state as an expression of their values. A multicultural people will be ever less attached to the symbols of national unification. This could end up as one means by which the central state – heavily premised on the idea of a unified population – could unravel.
Like all empires in human history, especially ones with a growing population and rising prosperity, this country is far too large and diverse and complex to be managed by a central state. It is essentially an unviable project, one destined to fail just as it has failed. If it is true that the population is becoming ever more diverse in its values, as the political left constantly tells us, it makes no sense that there should be a single state that would presume overarching political jurisdiction over the entire entity. It is heresy to say it, but it is long past time that we bring into question the words of the pledge: "One Nation, Indivisible."
Crucially important in the process will be the growing problem of Social Security and the welfare state. For all the attention given to the income tax, it is increasingly less significant as a factor in the looting of average Americans. For three-quarters of US taxpayers, the bite that the payroll tax takes out of the paycheck – if you admit that both the employee and employer tax come directly out of worker wages.
And what does the worker get in exchange? A bankrupt system that doles out a pittance should you happen to reach the officially defined age of retirement. For the generations after World War II, this might have seemed generous, but for those who will retire in 20 years, it is nothing short of pathetic. Then there is the absurdity of retirement itself. The very idea that people need to throw in the towel at the age of 65 is a gross anachronism that takes no account of dramatically changed mortality statistics.
Even more fundamentally absurd is the idea that Washington, DC, which can't manage even the slightest improvement in our well-being, can care for us in old age – providing a steady income stream to substitute for the care given by savings and family. This very idea alone drives a wedge between the generations and pits young against old. For young people these days, they know that they will be caring for their elders and that they need to provide for themselves in old age. The government apparatus that loots them day after day, and which is under intense financial strain, is nothing short of a fabulous failure.
If the welfare state in the US in under strain, it has reached the breaking point in most parts of Europe, where nearly everyone recognizes that something must be done to dismantle the grave errors of the postwar planners who instituted huge redistribution schemes. The choice at this stage is between continuing decline and a revival of prosperity by sweeping away the old structures that are inhibiting free initiative and capital accumulation.
Equally anachronistic is the idea of centralized fiscal and monetary management. The Keynesian planners from the 1930s through 1970s imagined themselves as masterminds operating this huge machine called the macro-economy. But they made a terrible mess of things, exactly as we might expect. They believed they were boosting aggregate demand, when all they were doing was looting the private sector and ballooning the national debt.
They believed they were stimulating production by creating new money and credit but all they did was generate inflation and the business cycle. In their management of international trade, they believed they were harmonizing regulations across borders to create efficiency, and protecting domestic industry from competition, but all they did was loot American consumers, entrench inefficient industries, and create conflicts between nations.
Even in this current recessionary cycle, the Bush administration has reached deep into the old Keynesian grab bag and pulled out 50-year-old gimmicks, none of which have helped the economy but instead only forestalled recovery. It is time the macroeconomic planners stop pretending and give it up. What is desperately needed are intellectuals who understand the utter futility of all kinds of central planning, including fiscal, monetary, regulatory, and trade.
These are far rarer than you might think. Even today, people who call themselves economic libertarians also counsel the Federal Reserve to provide more liquidity to the system and otherwise attempt every manner of gimmickry to stimulate the economy. They haven't absorbed the central lesson of the liberal tradition: society doesn't need central management by the state.
Why is that such a difficult message to get across? Those of us steeped in libertarian theory and the economics of the Austrian School are sometimes amazed that it takes others so long to come around to our point of view. But we must remember that it takes intellectual work to begin to see the logic of economics and apply it to our world. The ignorance is vast and overwhelming, and we must do everything we can to combat it.
Sometimes people ask why it is that if liberty is so central to the Mises Institute's mission, we concentrate so heavily on economics. Mises gave this answer: the study of economics, properly considered, is the study of the rise and fall of civilization itself. Aside from the beauty and elegance of economic theory, economics delivers a bracing message to the state: your power is limited. The structure of reality limits the possibilities for power to have its way in this world.
Socialism will fail. Central planning will fail. Protectionism will fail. Regulations, taxation, welfare, warfare – all these programs – will often produce the opposite of their stated aims. Economics says to the state: society does not need you. The cooperative work of billions of people, exchanging and creating, is the very source of the quality of life, the very core of peace and prosperity. Economics sets the limits for the state, helps us understand our world, and leads us to make sense of the passing scene. With economics, we never would have been deceived about the true nature of the Emperor's clothes.
This is not a message the state wants to hear, which is why we must be passionate, aggressive, and entrepreneurial in delivering it. We are fortunate that the message is capable of connecting very closely with ordinary people. If we look at the way people conduct their affairs in daily life, we find that people are utterly and completely dependent on free enterprise and the institutions on which it rests, and less and less so on the products of the state.
We are enormously fortunate to live in times when the wonders of free markets are constantly before our eyes. We can observe the way the seeming anarchy of the market economy, which is global in scope, operates as an orderly, productive process that improves our standards of living in every way. It not only provides us the goods and services we need to live. It is daily creating alternatives to the statist way of doing things.
Whether we look at communication, education, security, managing disputes, or any other area of life, the wonders of liberty and the failures of the state are all around us, in a grand procession in which the emperor marches onward in a humiliating pose and the rest of us wait for someone to break the silence and point out what is true.
Murray Rothbard argued that there are two conditions that must be in place in order to bring about a revolution: objective and subjective. The objective conditions are in place. Most everywhere in the world, people have embraced the promise and prosperity of freedom and rejected the poverty of despotism. The institutions we love – commerce, creativity, enterprise, property, trade, voluntary association – are on the march, while the state is languishing with its creaking and aged institutions of coercion, compulsion, war, and welfare.
What’s left undone is for people like us to work toward achieving the subjective conditions essential for revolution. We must make the intellectual case and teach the world to see the benefits of consistently embracing liberty in theory and practice. Our odds of victory are no better and no worse than they were in the 18th century, when the founding generation threw off the rule of a foreign king, and they are no better or worse than they were in the Soviet Union in the late 1980s, when the people dismantled an imperial system of despotism.
I'm optimistic about the prospects for liberty because our side has enough energy and enthusiasm to match and exceed anything coming from the partisans of stagnation and state power. The application of this energy in the area of political and intellectual activism has a cumulative effect over time. As you know, in the workplace, the employee who is just slightly more productive than the average can end up as a champion in a year or two.
It is the same in the intellectual arena. Long ago, we had become accustomed to thinking of ourselves as a tiny remnant of true believers, glad to write for anyone willing to read, but seriously hindered in our ability to get the message out. After 1996, all that changed with the web, when suddenly we found ourselves in a position to get our message out not only to the thousands we knew were interested but also to the millions we did not know anything about.
A key question to ask of any body of ideas is whether it is living or dying. Looking at the body of ideas of the Austro-libertarian tradition, and where they stand today as compared with 10 or 20 years ago, there can be no doubt as to our status. We are living and growing at compounded rates, and this is paying off in so many ways.
Twenty-one years ago, there were only a handful of Austrians teaching in economics departments around the world. Today there are hundreds, and they no longer have to hide their views. On the contrary, they are hired precisely for their Austrian connections. It is easy to see where this is headed. Not too many years from now, it will become the rule rather than the exception for every economics department at a vibrant institution to have at least one faculty member who embraces the Misesian tradition.
The history of the Mises Institute proves this much: a little work done each day adds up over time. Multiply that work by millions and we have a revolution on our hands. What should that work be? It depends on circumstances of time and place. We must first work to improve our own cultural circumstances, and this is something we can control. We must free ourselves from the party line and help others to do the same.
We must be good examples. An outstanding entrepreneur is the living embodiment of the power of private enterprise. A great teacher is a living example of idealism in practice. A great father or mother, of which we have many here, is living proof that the family is not a den of pathology as the left claims. A wonderful statesman like Ron Paul is proof that a politician need not be motivated by power lust.
No revolution in history has gone precisely according to plan. Every case is different, and the timing and nature of social change surprises its most brilliant intellectual architects. But know this: every time you learn something new about liberty; share a book, article or idea; contribute to a good cause; write a letter to the editor; or give another hero of liberty moral support, you are taking a sledgehammer to the foundation of despotism in our time.
We don't know when it will finally crack but we do know that it is intellectual work, above all, that will bring it down. In its place, we must plant a garden of liberty that must be constantly cultivated, from its inception until the end of time.
All states everywhere enjoy power only because people are willing to continue to obey and not challenge the powers that be. This means that power is ultimately based on that illusive notion called legitimacy. Legitimacy can vanish in an instant, exposed as a façade that covers up the massive looting machine that is government. It is the role of all of us to break the silence. It is the role of the Mises Institute to teach, so that young people can state the truth in a way that others find compelling. The emperor may continue his march, but he will never again do it with the confidence that he can fool all the people, all of the time. Let us work toward a time when he fools no one.
Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr. is president of the Ludwig von Mises Institute in Auburn, Alabama, and editor of LewRockwell.com. |
