Return to Misguided Libertarian Support for the Afghan War
To further reply to Chris Sciabarra, although he agrees with my points regarding the immorality, economic foolishness and disgraceful history of U.S. interventionism, he apparently considers all such points irrelevant if he feels threatened. Suddenly, the laws of economics and morality become situational for him and his unnamed “mentor” because we do not have an overall defense “system” based on bonded privateers. Chris is in effect saying that because government bureaucracies create monopolies, we are obligated to support such monopoly “systems” even if they are unjust and counterproductive, that no practical alternatives can or will exist, and we should not rock the boat for such monopolies which are our best chance for survival.
My question to Chris is: has use of the national security state made you safer, and at what cost in lives and treasure are you willing to expend via warfare statism? Iraq itself is a disaster and now the world’s major recruiting ground for terrorists, and Afghanistan is rapidly imploding:
http://www.cnn.com/2004/WORLD/europe/07/29/uk.afghan.iraq/index.html
But to answer his question, the first problem here is that all government actions are intended to create monopoly power through the use of coercion. So what? Does this mean we should not critique them and propose alternatives? Does this somehow mean that monopoly socialist/corporatist “systems” can be made to work and must always be supported as government officials regularly pronounce some new national “emergency”? Can collective farms somehow be made to produce food for all? Can the disastrous track record of CIA intelligence gathering and analysis somehow be made to function efficiently and dependably? Can trade restrictions create economic growth and lower prices? Can bombing a city block safeguard those peaceful people who live there?
The fact that New York City has a housing stock that suffers from the foolishness of rent control should not stop those who are economically literate to seek alternatives and insist on abolishing such price controls and implementing wholesale economic liberalization of housing markets. And, the same is true of any government domains.
The solution to the disasters created by collective farming or mining is to denationalize it, not support collectivism because that is what exists. National security in the U.S. has been nationalized over a period of 150 or so years, but especially since World War II. It is time to reverse this and begin denationalization.
For example, when President Carter launched his military campaign to release U.S. government hostages held in Iran in the late 1970s, the entire adventure was a disaster with almost everyone killed. But the fact that the national security state also fully existed then did not stop Ross Perot to organize his own privately funded military operation to rescue the employees of his own firm also held hostage. Indeed, if he had not, these people would likely have not survived. Should we have supported Carter or Perot?
In other words, there is no reason why existing trained military personnel could not be privately deployed to go after Al Qaeda. Clearly the existing war-socialist approach is doomed to failure just as is rent control. Private military operations are utilized in most parts of the world today because they are far more effective than the ineptness, unaccountability and expense of collectivist ones. Competing private security firms to protect people and property worldwide have created an enormous industry. (Please note that this is utterly different from the cronyism and neo-mercantilism of existing cost+ defense contracts.) To say that private firms could not have been utilized after 9/11 or now is simple nonsense. A private firm was even hired to protect the new President of Afghanistan, and private firms are regularly used to rescue hostages, fight terrorists and criminal gangs, track down and capture criminal suspects and fugitives, and provide security for people and property throughout the world.
Similarly, although the public police are responsible for criminal law enforcement, the track record of public police “systems” in tracking, arresting, and protecting people from criminals is abysmal, especially compared to private police and bonded bounty hunters. In fact, there is no comparison (see for example Bruce Benson’s book, To Serve and Protect: Privatization and Community in Criminal Justice: http://www.independent.org/books/brief_to_serve.html). And today, in the U.S. there are three times as many private to public police.
What should be done by anyone seeking to protect freedom and the lives and property of Americans is not to cheer on the national security state, knowing full well that it will fail and in fact cause even greater dangers and innocent deaths, but to insist on the ethical and practical precision and accountable measures from private entrepreneurial operations (subject to the rule of law) and an end to U.S. government interventionism. The Founders understood this and they fought a revolution to protect themselves against the corporatism of an imperial standing army.
The second problem is, as I have noted, to get over the view that the U.S. was suddenly attacked for no reason at all. As I have noted, the attacks of 9/11 and since are in retaliation to U.S. interventions in the Mideast. The first matter of business then should obviously be to stop poking this hornets’ nest, which should not have been happening in the first place! But, somehow, supporters of U.S. warfarism believe that despite common sense and all of the empirical evidence, there is no alternative than for the U.S. to intervene more in the Mideast, kill and torture more people, occupy more countries, and spend more tax dollars. Somehow only then will we be safe and our liberty protected.
After 9/11, too many sunshine “libertarians” dropped their devotion to the idea that all individuals have a right to life, liberty and property and instead firmly embraced war collectivism and mass murder as the “only practical option.” The wholesale taxing and killing of innocent people was suddenly okay so long as was not them or those they identified with. Moreover, many such people viciously attacked those of us who questioned such policies based on the very same ideas that they once claimed unswerving devotion.
Only as the war in Iraq began to turn sour and our points were being verified about the truth regarding the build-up to and conduct of the war and occupation, have we seen these same people begin to reconsider their unreserved support for U.S. warfare statism. But for them, the fact remains that ethics, the rule of law and economic principles are situational and can and must be suspended when politicians declare a “war crisis.” They then suddenly believe that the government is “us” and is acting in “our” interest.
Furthermore, regarding Chris’s analogy of a Chinese restaurant in which you cannot order a pizza, it is important to recognize that the “state” itself is simply an idea that some people have the right to impose their coercive rules “legally” on the others (see Etienne de la Boetie’s The Politics of Obedience: Discourse on Voluntary Servitude: http://www.blancmange.net/tmh/articles/laboetie.html). The state is not a restaurant or any building, or a piece of paper, or a tank or aircraft carrier, or a group of legislators. And, Chris’s analogy of a Chinese monopoly restaurant for an entire city is a straw man. There is no such “restaurant” anymore than there is a “federal government” that has just sovereignty over 50 “states.” Moreover, the terrorists did not attack “America” or “us” on 9/11. They attacked the symbolic centers of the U.S. global corporate state. There are of course only individuals who think, live, act, and make choices. The question regarding human interaction is whether each individual (private or public) is acting peacefully with others or is using aggression to accomplish his/her aims. And if some individuals believe that only one monopoly restaurant should be legal in a city or that federal invasive power is justified at home and abroad, it does not make it so or make it inevitable. Such ideas are fundamentally flawed and can be refuted. So why not do so? In fact, this is the only way to overcome the situation. To also use an analogy, it does not matter how much a sailor may believe that drinking seawater will quench his thirst or how much will do so. It never will. Embracing preemptive war and national security statism is hardly our only option and is no solution at all.
My question to Chris is: has use of the national security state made you safer, and at what cost in lives and treasure are you willing to expend via warfare statism? Iraq itself is a disaster and now the world’s major recruiting ground for terrorists, and Afghanistan is rapidly imploding:
http://www.cnn.com/2004/WORLD/europe/07/29/uk.afghan.iraq/index.html
But to answer his question, the first problem here is that all government actions are intended to create monopoly power through the use of coercion. So what? Does this mean we should not critique them and propose alternatives? Does this somehow mean that monopoly socialist/corporatist “systems” can be made to work and must always be supported as government officials regularly pronounce some new national “emergency”? Can collective farms somehow be made to produce food for all? Can the disastrous track record of CIA intelligence gathering and analysis somehow be made to function efficiently and dependably? Can trade restrictions create economic growth and lower prices? Can bombing a city block safeguard those peaceful people who live there?
The fact that New York City has a housing stock that suffers from the foolishness of rent control should not stop those who are economically literate to seek alternatives and insist on abolishing such price controls and implementing wholesale economic liberalization of housing markets. And, the same is true of any government domains.
The solution to the disasters created by collective farming or mining is to denationalize it, not support collectivism because that is what exists. National security in the U.S. has been nationalized over a period of 150 or so years, but especially since World War II. It is time to reverse this and begin denationalization.
For example, when President Carter launched his military campaign to release U.S. government hostages held in Iran in the late 1970s, the entire adventure was a disaster with almost everyone killed. But the fact that the national security state also fully existed then did not stop Ross Perot to organize his own privately funded military operation to rescue the employees of his own firm also held hostage. Indeed, if he had not, these people would likely have not survived. Should we have supported Carter or Perot?
In other words, there is no reason why existing trained military personnel could not be privately deployed to go after Al Qaeda. Clearly the existing war-socialist approach is doomed to failure just as is rent control. Private military operations are utilized in most parts of the world today because they are far more effective than the ineptness, unaccountability and expense of collectivist ones. Competing private security firms to protect people and property worldwide have created an enormous industry. (Please note that this is utterly different from the cronyism and neo-mercantilism of existing cost+ defense contracts.) To say that private firms could not have been utilized after 9/11 or now is simple nonsense. A private firm was even hired to protect the new President of Afghanistan, and private firms are regularly used to rescue hostages, fight terrorists and criminal gangs, track down and capture criminal suspects and fugitives, and provide security for people and property throughout the world.
Similarly, although the public police are responsible for criminal law enforcement, the track record of public police “systems” in tracking, arresting, and protecting people from criminals is abysmal, especially compared to private police and bonded bounty hunters. In fact, there is no comparison (see for example Bruce Benson’s book, To Serve and Protect: Privatization and Community in Criminal Justice: http://www.independent.org/books/brief_to_serve.html). And today, in the U.S. there are three times as many private to public police.
What should be done by anyone seeking to protect freedom and the lives and property of Americans is not to cheer on the national security state, knowing full well that it will fail and in fact cause even greater dangers and innocent deaths, but to insist on the ethical and practical precision and accountable measures from private entrepreneurial operations (subject to the rule of law) and an end to U.S. government interventionism. The Founders understood this and they fought a revolution to protect themselves against the corporatism of an imperial standing army.
The second problem is, as I have noted, to get over the view that the U.S. was suddenly attacked for no reason at all. As I have noted, the attacks of 9/11 and since are in retaliation to U.S. interventions in the Mideast. The first matter of business then should obviously be to stop poking this hornets’ nest, which should not have been happening in the first place! But, somehow, supporters of U.S. warfarism believe that despite common sense and all of the empirical evidence, there is no alternative than for the U.S. to intervene more in the Mideast, kill and torture more people, occupy more countries, and spend more tax dollars. Somehow only then will we be safe and our liberty protected.
After 9/11, too many sunshine “libertarians” dropped their devotion to the idea that all individuals have a right to life, liberty and property and instead firmly embraced war collectivism and mass murder as the “only practical option.” The wholesale taxing and killing of innocent people was suddenly okay so long as was not them or those they identified with. Moreover, many such people viciously attacked those of us who questioned such policies based on the very same ideas that they once claimed unswerving devotion.
Only as the war in Iraq began to turn sour and our points were being verified about the truth regarding the build-up to and conduct of the war and occupation, have we seen these same people begin to reconsider their unreserved support for U.S. warfare statism. But for them, the fact remains that ethics, the rule of law and economic principles are situational and can and must be suspended when politicians declare a “war crisis.” They then suddenly believe that the government is “us” and is acting in “our” interest.
Furthermore, regarding Chris’s analogy of a Chinese restaurant in which you cannot order a pizza, it is important to recognize that the “state” itself is simply an idea that some people have the right to impose their coercive rules “legally” on the others (see Etienne de la Boetie’s The Politics of Obedience: Discourse on Voluntary Servitude: http://www.blancmange.net/tmh/articles/laboetie.html). The state is not a restaurant or any building, or a piece of paper, or a tank or aircraft carrier, or a group of legislators. And, Chris’s analogy of a Chinese monopoly restaurant for an entire city is a straw man. There is no such “restaurant” anymore than there is a “federal government” that has just sovereignty over 50 “states.” Moreover, the terrorists did not attack “America” or “us” on 9/11. They attacked the symbolic centers of the U.S. global corporate state. There are of course only individuals who think, live, act, and make choices. The question regarding human interaction is whether each individual (private or public) is acting peacefully with others or is using aggression to accomplish his/her aims. And if some individuals believe that only one monopoly restaurant should be legal in a city or that federal invasive power is justified at home and abroad, it does not make it so or make it inevitable. Such ideas are fundamentally flawed and can be refuted. So why not do so? In fact, this is the only way to overcome the situation. To also use an analogy, it does not matter how much a sailor may believe that drinking seawater will quench his thirst or how much will do so. It never will. Embracing preemptive war and national security statism is hardly our only option and is no solution at all.
Re: Preemptive war and national security statism is no solution at all
(#39488)
by Chris Matthew Sciabarra on August 5, 2004 at 8:27 AM
by Chris Matthew Sciabarra on August 5, 2004 at 8:27 AM
David, it is not true that I consider morality and economic foolishness "irrelevant" if I feel "threatened."
What is true is that we live in a historically specific time and place. Things are what they are. This doesn't make morality "situational." But it does make the application of moral principles contextual. And if we don't recognize the current context as relevant, our principles become disconnected, floating abstractions. This is not a question of being "obligated to support" government monopoly systems. I have not said that it is incorrect or immoral to discuss or even attempt to implement practical, voluntary parallel institutional alternatives. Nor have I suggested that we "should not rock the boat" or that "[government] monopolies ... are our best chance for survival."
I have been deeply critical of the US government in this "War on Terror" from the very beginning, all the way back to my first posts on the subject on September 12, 2001, even though I lost many friends, acquaintances, and neighbors in the terror attack on the WTC... even though other friends and family members have been permanently scarred by their escape from the inferno.
I don't know if you're suggesting for one moment that I've been among those who have "viciously attacked those of us who questioned [US] policies"; I have been one of those on the "antiwar" side of this equation, fervently opposing the Iraqi war, and fervently criticizing the way in which the war in Afghanistan was fought. I wouldn't know where to start in terms of providing links for you to read, but perhaps I can suggest a perusal of my "Not a Blog": http://www.notablog.net , or of my website: http://www.chrismatthewsciabarra.com
You write: "Does this mean we should not critique [government] and propose alternatives? Does this somehow mean that monopoly socialist/corporatist 'systems' can be made to work and must always be supported as government officials regularly pronounce some new national 'emergency'?" You write further that "The first matter of business then should obviously be to stop poking this hornets’ nest, which should not have been happening in the first place! But, somehow, supporters of U.S. warfarism believe that despite common sense and all of the empirical evidence, there is no alternative than for the U.S. to intervene more in the Mideast, kill and torture more people, occupy more countries, and spend more tax dollars. Somehow only then will we be safe and our liberty protected."
As we say here in Brooklyn: You gotta be kiddin' me. Where on earth do you suppose that I would endorse such things? I've been critiquing and proposing radical alternatives to the US system of neocorporatism and cronyism for the last 20+ years. I've advocated a radical move toward noninterventionism in US foreign policy.
But where I differ from you is this. I might agree with you that "National security in the U.S. has been nationalized over a period of 150 or so years, but especially since World War II. It is time to reverse this and begin denationalization." I just don't believe that such denationalization is possible without a comprehensive revolution against the warfare-welfare state. That revolution must be aimed first at the philosophical and cultural foundations upon which statism is built. You simply can't graft some new political structure upon a nonexistent foundation. Nor can you sit by and wait for everything to change before you do anything in response to attacks on your family and your neighbors.
Yes: You do whatever you can, privately, as Ross Perot did, to save your family and your neighbors. But in the absence of fully developed private parallel institutional alternatives, there are few tools one can use other than the ones in place in response to such an attack. All the more reason to be as specific as possible in one's advocacy of the nature of that response. Shooting missiles at known terrorist camps, taking out Al Qaeda operatives in commando raids, destroying financial and other networks of support, are all important means of waging war. It does not require full-scale invasions, occupations, and the creation of umpteen enterprises in "democratic nation-building," a cancerous neocon idea. But it is cancerous precisely because one can't graft "democracy" or "freedom" onto tribal foreign cultures, for the same reason that one can't graft radically individualist political solutions onto a tribal domestic culture here in the United States.
It is culture that must be altered over time for such solutions to become genuinely viable.
Oh, and btw, my "unnamed 'mentor'" was a Marxist: Bertell Ollman, a gent who happened to have been a comrade of Murray Rothbard and others in the Peace and Freedom Party back in the 1960s. He's not been "unnamed" anywhere in my various publications, where I give him credit for many methodological points, while criticizing him rather fundamentally for his Marxist perspective. And I consider Rothbard a personal mentor of sorts as well; see here, for example: http://www.lewrockwell.com/orig3/sciabarra1.html
I'm not an anarchist; I went through an anarchist phase. My fundamental problem with anarchism, however, is the same fundamental problem I have with many minarchists: There is just not enough attention paid to the cultural and philosophical foundations for a free society. You can't simply get rid of the state and expect social problems to wither away; odds are, in the culture we have today, even if we eliminated the state and its props immediately, it would only come back tomorrow.
The Founders understood a lot; but the Founders also had an Enlightenment culture upon which to build. That culture is gone with the wind...
What is true is that we live in a historically specific time and place. Things are what they are. This doesn't make morality "situational." But it does make the application of moral principles contextual. And if we don't recognize the current context as relevant, our principles become disconnected, floating abstractions. This is not a question of being "obligated to support" government monopoly systems. I have not said that it is incorrect or immoral to discuss or even attempt to implement practical, voluntary parallel institutional alternatives. Nor have I suggested that we "should not rock the boat" or that "[government] monopolies ... are our best chance for survival."
I have been deeply critical of the US government in this "War on Terror" from the very beginning, all the way back to my first posts on the subject on September 12, 2001, even though I lost many friends, acquaintances, and neighbors in the terror attack on the WTC... even though other friends and family members have been permanently scarred by their escape from the inferno.
I don't know if you're suggesting for one moment that I've been among those who have "viciously attacked those of us who questioned [US] policies"; I have been one of those on the "antiwar" side of this equation, fervently opposing the Iraqi war, and fervently criticizing the way in which the war in Afghanistan was fought. I wouldn't know where to start in terms of providing links for you to read, but perhaps I can suggest a perusal of my "Not a Blog": http://www.notablog.net , or of my website: http://www.chrismatthewsciabarra.com
You write: "Does this mean we should not critique [government] and propose alternatives? Does this somehow mean that monopoly socialist/corporatist 'systems' can be made to work and must always be supported as government officials regularly pronounce some new national 'emergency'?" You write further that "The first matter of business then should obviously be to stop poking this hornets’ nest, which should not have been happening in the first place! But, somehow, supporters of U.S. warfarism believe that despite common sense and all of the empirical evidence, there is no alternative than for the U.S. to intervene more in the Mideast, kill and torture more people, occupy more countries, and spend more tax dollars. Somehow only then will we be safe and our liberty protected."
As we say here in Brooklyn: You gotta be kiddin' me. Where on earth do you suppose that I would endorse such things? I've been critiquing and proposing radical alternatives to the US system of neocorporatism and cronyism for the last 20+ years. I've advocated a radical move toward noninterventionism in US foreign policy.
But where I differ from you is this. I might agree with you that "National security in the U.S. has been nationalized over a period of 150 or so years, but especially since World War II. It is time to reverse this and begin denationalization." I just don't believe that such denationalization is possible without a comprehensive revolution against the warfare-welfare state. That revolution must be aimed first at the philosophical and cultural foundations upon which statism is built. You simply can't graft some new political structure upon a nonexistent foundation. Nor can you sit by and wait for everything to change before you do anything in response to attacks on your family and your neighbors.
Yes: You do whatever you can, privately, as Ross Perot did, to save your family and your neighbors. But in the absence of fully developed private parallel institutional alternatives, there are few tools one can use other than the ones in place in response to such an attack. All the more reason to be as specific as possible in one's advocacy of the nature of that response. Shooting missiles at known terrorist camps, taking out Al Qaeda operatives in commando raids, destroying financial and other networks of support, are all important means of waging war. It does not require full-scale invasions, occupations, and the creation of umpteen enterprises in "democratic nation-building," a cancerous neocon idea. But it is cancerous precisely because one can't graft "democracy" or "freedom" onto tribal foreign cultures, for the same reason that one can't graft radically individualist political solutions onto a tribal domestic culture here in the United States.
It is culture that must be altered over time for such solutions to become genuinely viable.
Oh, and btw, my "unnamed 'mentor'" was a Marxist: Bertell Ollman, a gent who happened to have been a comrade of Murray Rothbard and others in the Peace and Freedom Party back in the 1960s. He's not been "unnamed" anywhere in my various publications, where I give him credit for many methodological points, while criticizing him rather fundamentally for his Marxist perspective. And I consider Rothbard a personal mentor of sorts as well; see here, for example: http://www.lewrockwell.com/orig3/sciabarra1.html
I'm not an anarchist; I went through an anarchist phase. My fundamental problem with anarchism, however, is the same fundamental problem I have with many minarchists: There is just not enough attention paid to the cultural and philosophical foundations for a free society. You can't simply get rid of the state and expect social problems to wither away; odds are, in the culture we have today, even if we eliminated the state and its props immediately, it would only come back tomorrow.
The Founders understood a lot; but the Founders also had an Enlightenment culture upon which to build. That culture is gone with the wind...
Re: Preemptive war and national security statism is no solution at all
(#39572)
by Mark Fulwiler on August 6, 2004 at 5:14 PM
by Mark Fulwiler on August 6, 2004 at 5:14 PM
I'm surprised that Mr. Theroux just about totally misread what Chris Sciabarra said, and obviously had not bothered to read, much less seriously understand and analyze, almost all of Mr. Sciabarra's earlier work. I think the anarchy/minarchy debate is an open question, but the anarchist side is not well served by this lack of intellectual rigor.
Chris Sciabarra is saying that, given that fact that we have a state and given the fact that the state has supressed many private options and institutions, we may have to ~reluctantly~ utilize it at times. Is Mr. Theroux such an anarchist purist that he refuses to spend .37 to mail a letter by U.S. Mail and instead sends all his mail by Federal Express at 40 times the cost?
Chris Sciabarra is saying that, given that fact that we have a state and given the fact that the state has supressed many private options and institutions, we may have to ~reluctantly~ utilize it at times. Is Mr. Theroux such an anarchist purist that he refuses to spend .37 to mail a letter by U.S. Mail and instead sends all his mail by Federal Express at 40 times the cost?
by David J. Theroux on July 31, 2004 at 10:06 PM