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A price worth paying?

My recent posting Can we agree? appears to have proved a point. No, we cannot. Consider this extract from Elliot Temple’s contributions to the discussion that flowed from my piece:

Also, I think it’s Perry’s position that government is a threat to our liberties. Whereas, I disagree again.

I think Mr Temple will find that the view that government is a threat to our liberties is more widely held than by Perry de Havilland. Every form of anarchist would agree. So, presumably would the 55,000,000 people killed in the Second World War. The 1,000,000 murdered by the Soviet occupiers in “liberated” Eastern Europe. The Jews (3,000,000? 6,000,000? 10,000,000?) murdered by the Nazi German government. In Communist China is it “only one hundred million”? I remember one government official once claiming that “only one per cent” of his country’s population died in labour camps.

Even where states are not deliberately violating freedom, governments are a threat simply by the scale of their power and the unintended consequences thereof. The US government in the 1960s did not set out to create a crime epidemic by offering welfare to single mothers, reducing prison sentences for juveniles, criminalizing drugs and introducing wage controls. Yet if the policy had been to force-feed children with crack cocaine, to napalm-bomb certain districts of major cities, to introduce the death penalty against men with low-incomes for staying with their pregnant girdfriends and to make it illegal for a shop-keeper to hire a student, the effect would have been pretty much the same by the mid-1970s.

If there is a reason why some states are less horrendous than others, it may just be that the better places are where more people are wary of the state as a vehicle for creating goodness, and in the worst, the state is busy “doing good”.
To be a libertarian does not necessarily imply that one favours anarcho-capitalism, anarcho-syndicalism or anarcho-communism. But it does imply a generally sceptical attitude towards any claim that the state is an institution to be entrusted with ever greater power.

On that point at least, we should all agree. On this basis, some libertarians can support a U.S. attack on Iraq – for a variety of reasons. But if they are not letting their emotions cloud their judgement (especially fear and the desire for revenge) they should look beyond the war and ask themselves how much damage to freedom in the US, and elsewhere, the war will cause.

To give but one example: the US has rejoined UNESCO in an attempt to buy votes from other states for their support in a war against Iraq. If this process doesn’t frighten you, ask yourself what governments wouldn’t trade. The US is also paying subscriptions back-dated to UNESCO. This means that an organisation which is dedicated to the destruction of free-market education worldwide is about to receive a massive financial windfall, plus the official blessing of the US government. Goodbye private education in India. Hello global permanently subsidized illiteracy.

12 comments to A price worth paying?

  • I’m happy to be quoted, however, as I asked before, I’d like a link to my website to go with my name. If you refuse that for some reason, could you at least give readers my email address?

  • I can agree that government in general and war in particular slowly encroaches on freedoms that are our natural rights as individuals.

    Yet bear with me: If we do not go to war, will we natuarally as a consequence lose more liberties than if we had not? For the public WILL demand that the government do SOMETHING to protect them from another 9/11. If not war, than what is left? You guessed it, it will be more regulations, more registration of all sorts, and more bans.

    Now this is hardly a justification for war all by itself. But it does indicate that the war may be neutral towards civil liberties, or even friendly towards them as the public looks towards the Iraq situation rather than clamoring over which canidate legilates those terrorists out of existance the best.

    The choice is not between civil liberties abuse and no civil liverties abuse, given that some morons have equated giving up liberty for security. The choice is now weather to break up terrorist backers abroad or to turn the government eye inward, to catch them after they arrive.

  • blabla

    But it does indicate that the war may be neutral towards civil liberties, or even friendly towards them as the public looks towards the Iraq situation rather than clamoring over which canidate legilates those terrorists out of existance the best.

    I disagree. If anything, war contributes to the loss of civil liberties at home. Sacrifice by soldiers abroad leads to calls for phoney sacrifices by citizens not directly fighting the war.

  • Oh, and just what do you expect another major terrorist attack will do to civil liberties, if the gaze is turned inward, and the accepted way to deal with terrorism is to pass laws on those who are targeted?

  • Sacrifice by soldiers abroad leads to calls for phoney sacrifices by citizens not directly fighting the war.

    Perhaps your experience has been different, but I have yet to see one single, solitary argument that the reason we should give up liberties is because our soldiers are sacrificing their lives. Perhaps you could enlighten me with a quote or five.

    On the other hand, I have definately seen, and I suspect you have as well, how utterly contemptuous of liberties government is when its citizens demand that the govt DO SOMETHING!!! and they don’t particulary care what.

    I’d rather have our government violate Saddam’s right to torture his citizens than our right to not live in a panopticon, all other things being equal.

  • Julian Morrison

    I am an ancap and I increasingly find that minarchism is mistaken not only by the “it won’t last” argument but in practical and immediate fact: to support the state at all puts you in the position of supporting it utterly, or else waffling and contradicting yourself and being pushed statewards by inrements.

    Freedom is a limitation on the power of the state – if the state is good, freedom is always an obstacle at some point or another; vice versa, any state at all tends to inch freedom out by the closing of loopholes – where “loophole” means: the contradiction between desired force and inconvenient liberty.

    This is why I don’t support the “war against terrorism”, the Iraq war, or any other state action at all, ever, regardless. Do otherwise, and soon enough you’ll find yourself asking “when should sedition be illegal?” or “how should we balance communications privacy against the detection of our nation’s enemies?” or some such.

    Note that I support the private free choice of any individual to snipe Saddam dead, and good riddance to him. I also look down on the cowardice of those who call for war from the comfort of their couch.

  • I am a pragmatist and I increasingly find that dedication to purity of principle over “what works?” results in human misery.

    Pure demoracy will trample the minority and make short-sighted descisions. We need elements of republic government to make it work.

    Pure communism suffers from the tragedy of the commons, with only force and/or murderous force as a brake.

    Pure capitalism treats human workers like fodder and tends to breed monopolies, which then turn oppressive: the counterbalancing forces of government and goverment-enforced communism (labor unions) take some of the rough edges off.

    Remember that the working conditions of the pre-labor union factories was atrocious: You could expect to lose a limb or your life to your job.

    Pure socialism is unworthy of debate.

    Purity at the expense of humanity is atrocity waiting to happen. Hold to your ideals, but never allow them to rule you.

    I hope you get some of what you seek. We’ll all be better off. But I don’t wish you a total victory.

  • blabla

    Pure capitalism treats human workers like fodder and tends to breed monopolies, which then turn oppressive: the counterbalancing forces of government and goverment-enforced communism (labor unions) take some of the rough edges off.

    Propaganda. Working conditions were improving, wages were increasing, and real prices were decreasing in pre-union times. Those conditions look horrible as we look back from today, but in relation to 100 years to previous to those times, they were a marked improvement. “Pragmatism” unfortunately, often is the notion by which well-meaning people give up ever more liberties to the state.

  • T. J. Madison

    Idealism + Pragmatism = Results.

    The goal is more liberty. The means are open to debate.

    Fascism/Corporatism/Socialism/Communism aren’t intrinsically evil. They’re evil because they have been empirically shown to get us less liberty — a lot less.

    >>Pure capitalism treats human workers like fodder and tends to breed monopolies, which then turn oppressive: the counterbalancing forces of government and goverment-enforced communism (labor unions) take some of the rough edges off.

    Corporatism is not capitalism. The big abuses show up when large companies buy the government for the purpose of getting subsidies, monopoly privileges, and exceptions from rule of law. All of these are anti-capitalistic, that is, they infringe on property rights of individuals.

    Labor unions, ideally, are not communistic at all, but are “labor corporations” which lease their “stockholders’ human capital” to other businessess. Like all corporations, they will engage in rent-seeking behavior if given the opportunity.

    In a free market, the interlocking directories, labor unions, small businesses, scabs, and independent operators all fight it out, while the government keeps people from shooting each other and burning things. The result: we get MORE CRAP for LESS WORK.

  • Mike

    This is the best antiwar website to pass around to everyone concerning NATO Aggression: Infowars.com

  • Madison: I totally agree with everything in your comment, especially the clarifications I wish I had made myself.

    Pragmatisim without idealism is itself monsterous. Can we say ‘realpolitik’, boys ang girls? I knew you could.

    My warning is this: beware what you would sacrifice on the altar of purity… libertarian purity included.

  • Julian Morrison

    If you’re “sacrificing” anyone else, it’s not libertarian purity. Except if what you’re sacrificing is their claimed “right” to rob you and boss you about.