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If Browne is right about Reagan, he is wrong about himself

Harry Browne overstates the case against Ronald Reagan and makes himself look small.

There are plenty of libertarian criticisms of Ronald Reagan, from his refusal to veto tax increases, for failing to cut spending, or his support for the ‘War on Drugs’. Where Harry Browne goes well overboard is when he dismissed the effect of Ronald Reagan’s spending cuts rhetoric and on the Cold War.

Browne actually admits that Reagan made the dialogue of spending cuts possible and the mainstream debate. He accuses Reagan of not acting on his words. But what about Harry Browne himself?

In his excellent 1973 book: How I found freedom in an unfree world, Harry Browne claims:

You waste precious time, effort and money when you attempt to achieve freedom through the efforts of a group… I came to see how foolish it was to waste my precious life trying to make the world into what I thought it should be.

Yet by 1996, Browne was writing:

I don’t want to be a politician. I just want our country back.

He then sought the nomination twice as the Libertarian Party candidate for the US federal presidency. Now unless Browne had a grotesquely over-estimated sense of his on importance, he must have realised that the LP candidate was not likely to win. If not to win, why stand for office? The answer I would give is that the Libertarian Party argues the case in public for reducing the federal government. So words do matter. And in any case, Harry Browne has some explaining to do about his 180 degree turn since 1973.

American libertarians hate their government so much they often make barmy comments about the rest of the world. So when Harry Browne suggests that there was no need to engage in an arms race with the Soviet Union, he uses the following argument:

Reagan’s military and Cold-War policies seem to be the least controversial. It’s simply taken for granted that Ronald Reagan ended the Cold War — bringing down the Soviet Union by pushing the Soviets over the edge with increased military spending.

The idea is that the Soviets couldn’t keep up with Reagan’s new arms race.

Okay, suppose that’s true. So what?

Switzerland couldn’t keep up either. And neither could China nor New Zealand nor Tanzania. But those nations didn’t collapse simply because their military budgets weren’t as large as that of the United States.

So what Harry Browne seems to be saying, is that there is no difference between the ideology of worldwide Communist domination, and the political ethos of Switzerland. The reason that the Swiss economy did not collapse in the 1980s under the strain of miltary spending is that the Swiss government was not trying to achieve world wide conquest. If the Swiss government had intended to conquer the planet with a Socialist economy, then I am sure that the attempt would have failed and that the Swiss régime would have collapsed much as Soviet Communism did. If he really cannot tell the difference between Switzerland and the Soviet Union in 1980 (which I doubt), then Harry Browne is a twit.

Rather than admit that Ronald Reagan’s policies brought the Cold War to a positive end, Browne prefers to promote Mikhail Gorbachev, the man who voluntarily joined the Soviet Communist Party when Stalin was still in charge, authorised military actions in Afghanistan that may have included the use of chemical weapons, and who sent tanks into Lithuania to enforce Soviet rule. Yet Gorbachev seems to express a more pro-Reagan view himself.

Of course it is always easy to denounce a policy one disagrees with by deliberately mis-stating it. Ronald Reagan did not set out to cause the economic collapse of the Soviet Union by an arms race. His re-armament policy was designed to prevent the Soviet Union from making further military gains. He did this by upgrading the nuclear capability, increasing the fire-power of the conventional forces. This meant that by 1985 the numeric superiority of the Red Army was no longer relevant. The dramatic US victory in Kuwait against largely Soviet-equipped Iraqi troops in 1991 shows how far re-arming America worked.

Consider the record of the 1970s against the 1980s. In the 1970s Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam, Nicaragua, Grenada, Ethiopia, Angola, Mozambique, South Yemen, Afghanistan all became satellites of the Soviet union and none of them did so by peaceful means. In the 1980s no country fell to the Soviets and Grenada was liberated. In Afghanistan US support allowed the resistance to force a Soviet withdrawal, the only one since 1920 without direct foreign armed intervention.

So the evidence is that Soviet expansion stopped in the 1980s, and like all imperialist systems, once expansion is stopped there is only one way to go.

What Reagan offered was the moral certainty of the justice of resisting the Soviet Empire. Reagan knew that for all its imperfections, the USA was a better place to live than the USSR. What Browne seems to offer is equanimity between Switzerland and and the Gulag, whilst denouncing the USA as worse then either.

As for Reagan the politician, he seems to have had a knack for choosing to fight on issues where he would win. He did however engage in that debate, it is extremely unlikely that his politicial rivals (George Bush I, Bob Dole, Walter Mondale and others) would have spent less. As a self-help writer himself, Harry Browne should recognise that the way to effectiveness is to concentrate on one’s own circle of influence. Reagan may not have slashed federal spending, because resisting the USSR was the big issue that he could do something about.

14 comments to If Browne is right about Reagan, he is wrong about himself

  • Dale Amon

    Harry Browne is quite a decent sort and we have much to thank him for. His efforts for liberty have been continuous and indefatigable. That said…

    Harry is one of those libertarians who fell under the spell of the least defensible part of Murray Rothbard’s positions: that of the counterfactual history. In this world it was a bad thing for the US to become involved in WWI and WWII. While I can come to some agreement about WWI, I cannot (nor could any student of the history of WWII, its causes and aftermath) but laugh hysterically at the alternate history many in that particular camp suggest would have occurred.

    While their isolationist beliefs about WWI, WWII and the current war (III or IV, depending) does show a certain consistancy in thought, consistancy is not always a positive trait. Free societies are a threat to unfree societies by their very existance. If America had stayed out of WWII, how long would it have been before Adolf found American economic power and success and example intolerable? Unfortuneately long enough the ensuing war would have been fought with nuclear weapons, Sanger bombers and the intercontental next generation of the V2. Remember: Werner and company would still have been at Penemunde.

    Likewise today when they do not realize we are in a war we can fight now or fight later… and if we fight it later we might still win… but the death toll on our side would number in millions.

    I give Harry respect where it is due… and I ignore him when he discusses topics in which he is negatively versed.

  • anonymous coward

    Back in 1984, a funny letter appeared in the Wall Street Journal. It was from the ambassador of Burkina Faso to the United States, and read more or less as follows (I must paraphrase): “Once again I read in your pages the silly lie that no country has fallen to the Marxists on Ronald Reagan’s watch. This is obviously untrue, because *we* had a successful Marxist coup (date).” Seems the Burks still get no respect.

  • Antoine Clarke

    ‘anonymous coward’:
    I guess that I stand corrected. Presumably that’s when the country changed name from “Haute Volta” (Upper Volta). This brings to mind the description of Gorbachev’s USSR: “Upper Volta with rockets”.

    Thanks for the tip-off, even if it’s 20 years too late to tell the US State Department. 😉

  • Browne lost the plot post-9/11 and is now considered a complete arse by all by the Raimondo sort of libertarians. One will never know why he went off the deep end.

    Harry Browne should STFU before he completely loses all our respect.

  • Dale, Browne’s views on WWI and WWII are consistent with libertarian views, period.

    A libertarian government SHOULD ONLY be concerned with DIRECT attacks to its sovereignty. OK, yes the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, nonetheless Browne would argue that the Japanese were provoked into an attack due to actions by FDR. The only ‘just’ war from a libertarian perspective that the UK has fought in recent years would be the Falklands. Saddam was NO direct threat to us in EITHER Gulf War.

  • Hank Scorpio

    Saddam was NO direct threat to us in EITHER Gulf War.

    He was a threat to us, and indeed the entire world, because he was threatening the oil supply (y’know, that stuff that powers our entire society and makes possible this wonderful modern world we live in) by his takeover of Kuwait and his sabre rattling towards Saudi. When you threaten the American economy and way of life you threaten America, as far as I’m concerned.

    The issue for me is that there’s no one else capable of performing Britain’s traditional role; international cop. They kept the sea lanes open and ensured that a big portion of the global economy moved smoothly. Like it or not, that’s now our role, simply based on the fact that no one else is capable of assuming it besides us.

    Isolationism is simplistic and attractive, but it’s also not practicable when we’re the largest power, militarily and economically, in the world. As much as I sympathize with a lot of the libertarian philosophy their adherence to ideology over pragmatic realism is why they’ll always be seen as whackos who belong to an also-ran party.

  • I lost all faith in Browne when it became clear that he misapproriated party funds and broke the party bylaws in the process of abusing the trust granted to him by the party — all while glibbly agreeing that the LP was the “Party of Principle.” That was the best measure of his character that I could think of.

    I’m still a little L libertarian, but I’m not a member of the LP anymore.

  • Johnathan

    A shame really. I have a copy of “How I Found Freedom in an Unfree World” and it reads very well. Browne’s subsequent behaviour and comments have lost him rather a lot of my respect.

    Browne like some libertarians is in denial about Reagan’s achievement. The trouble with libertarian purists is a sort of petulant dislike that utopia has not been delivered in 20 minutes after election day.

  • He was a threat to us, and indeed the entire world, because he was threatening the oil supply (y’know, that stuff that powers our entire society and makes possible this wonderful modern world we live in) by his takeover of Kuwait and his sabre rattling towards Saudi. When you threaten the American economy and way of life you threaten America, as far as I’m concerned

    You’ve never heard of nuclear power? Or Coal powered stations? Both have little to do with oil! Who is threatened here, the UK or the US? To me, a ‘threat’ to one’s oil supply (even though other forms of energy exist) does not constitute a violation to one’s self-government.

    And what’s this about ‘protecting the seas’? I thought the Empire had gone years ago. A student of Britain’s foreign policy would state that we punch above our weight in foreign policy terms. Tell me, why should we be interventionist, when other nations of equal military and economic strength (such as France, Germany or Japan) are not interventionist? We should simply scale back from the world as a country of our CONTEMPORARY stature doesn’t warrant a prominent role in policing the world. And this is irrespective of ‘history’.

  • DSpears

    “Harry is one of those libertarians who fell under the spell of the least defensible part of Murray Rothbard’s positions: that of the counterfactual history.”

    This is the reason that I just can’t bring myself to commit myself 100% to the Libertarian way of thinking, and why I always take the Austrian viewpoint with a grain of salt. The Rothbardian conspiracy analysis of history while entertaining and interesting is ultimately lacking in a lot of areas, like actual proof of the myriad of manipulations made by the various members of the ruling classes. To this way of thinking the proof lies in the fact that the conspiratorialist in question could have and possibly did benefit form the outcome of events, thus can reasonably be assumed to have manipulated things. Next to the lack of any sort of “smoking gun” in most cases, the biggest problem with that viewpoint is that it assumes that powerful people can put into place vast deceptive conspiracies on a massive scale and actually achieve the exact results that they want. Of course that flies in the face of a world history rife with unintended consequesnces and the melding of competing schemes into something entirely different than the original crafter of the scheme intended.

    Madison and Hamilton started out agreeing considerably on what the Constitution meant in 1789, but 5 years later they were polar opposites and arch enemies. What resulted was the government took a form neither was entirely happy with (although if he were around today I think Hamilton would be very happy with the US government, Madison less so) or had planned on at the beginning. The Constitution and what it has told the government it can and can’t be was not the result of anybody’s grand plan, it took a third twisted and winding path shooting the gaps in between what the original creators of our government foresaw.

    There is also a sort of intellectual malleability to this where on the one hand despite what Gorbachev and most of the former Soviets have said since then about Reagan’s hand in their demise, the Soviet Union fell on it’s own and Reagan had no effect, in other words his vast scheme didn’t work. But on the other hand JP Morgan created the Federal Reserve to increase his private wealth and power even though he was dead when it came into existence.

    The real truth of history is that there have been constant schemers trying to bring about all kinds of outcomes from the beginning of time. But few vast institutions ended up in their current form because of somebodies grand plan, most institutions arrived at their current character through random chance and the law of unintended consequences as much as through the purposeful design of some conspiratorial cabal. The Federal Reserve is a great example, it ended up being very different from the institution that it’s original creators had hoped for. Whether that’s good or bad is up for discussion, but none of the planners of that institution ever planned for the Wilson administration to alter in the way they did.

    Back to Reagan:

    One of my biggest disappointments with Reagan was that the second leg of supply-side economics, massive cuts in spending, didn’t materialize. I fully concur with the military spending, it was necessary and despite the howls of many (contradicted by the former Soviets themselves) this did push the Soviet Union into bankruptcy. In my view National defense is one of the few truely legitimate functions of the Federal govt (I’m a minarchist, not an anarchist) But I wish more could have been done on the domestic front as far as shutting down whole departments and cutting the budget of each non-national security related program, say 10% for starters.

    The real problem here is overlooked by many who think that everything the government does, good or bad, is the direct result of Presidential action, and nothing else. Reagan dealt with a Congress solidly in the Democratic parties hands, and Senate equally divided, in the hands of both Reps. and Dems. during his 8 years. The fact that he got anything he wanted at all in that situation is a testament to the fact that in 1981 pretty much everybody agreed that America’s government was broken and needed serious fixing.

    But I recall every year when Reagan sent his budget to Congress, Tip O’Neil and the Democtrats would literally have a little ceremony on the steps of the capital where they would pronounce Reagan’s budget “Dead on Arrival”. They would all laugh and woop it up, slapping high fives and congratulating themselves. Then they would go in and write their own budget. At that point the only thing Reagan (or any president) could do was say yes or no to the entire package. The fact that he didn’t veto any of those monstosities is disappointing, but facing down the Soviets was the priority, and vetoing a budget that had lots of Soviet bankrupting stuff in it was unthinkable at the time.

    For the same reasons Reagan did capitulate and sign tax increases, although none of them erased his original tax cut, and neither did Bush’s or Clinton’s. The great change brought about in the structure of the Federal government has remained in tact since 1981 with minor changes since then.

    Dems. went along with his tax cuts because they viewed them as a classical Keynsian move. At this point almost everybody in both parties had been raised form birth on Keynes, and it wasn’t viewed as a theory but a fact. This is why they balked at his spending cuts: they believed that a deficit would get the economy going while Democrats, as they have been since William Jennings Bryan, had no problem with creating inflation (which they wrongly believed would be the result of cutting taxes), in fact liberal Kensian orthodoxy welcomed inflation because it trasfers wealth from creditor to debtor which liberals saw as a positive social goal.

    Ultimately, Reagan was the most Libertarian president of the 20th century, and probably the most Libertarian president since before Lincoln. Libertarians should at least begrudgingly grant him that as their best hope in a hundred years, even though he didn’t accomplish nearly as much as they would have wished.

  • Dale, Browne’s views on WWI and WWII are consistent with libertarian views, period.

    Consistent with a certain libertarian view, for sure… the sort I want nothing to do with, that is also for sure, and nor do most other self-described small-L libertarians. And such anti-survival traits espoused by the LP, which sacrifice sanity for the sake of consistency, are why I increasingly wonder if the term ‘libertarian’ is not fatally compromised post 9/11… time to take back the word that truly describes the people who are liberty’s best friends: LIBERALS.

  • rvman

    Browne running for President was completely consistent with his “don’t find freedom in groups” thesis. He saw the LP as a waste of time, so there was no harm in co-opting it to a more worthy goal – the enrichment, empowerment, and support of Harry Browne. The man ran the party like one of those for-profit “motivational speaking” traveling shows – the big guy goes out, gives a speech, collects a bunch of money, and sends everyone on their way. The “Party of Principle” wasn’t, from 1996-2000.

  • David Mercer

    Only one quibble with Antoine’s excellent deconstruction of Harry Browne, and that’s the line Ronald Reagan did not set out to cause the economic collapse of the Soviet Union by an arms race.

    He most certainly DID set out to do that in a systematic way, and was his primary well-defined goal (restoring America’s “faith in itself” is kinda squishy and hard to measure as a goal, albeit a real one of his too).

    Once again, here’s the definative work on the topic, The Strategy of Technology. Note that that was written long before Reagan was in office, and was co-authored by a close confidant (Dr. Pournelle’s wife gave him his initial nudge into politics, at a BBQ at their house).

    It WAS deliberate, and it was the overarching lens he saw foreign policy through. Of course his enemies don’t like to attribute any deliberate Strategy to Reagan, that’d mean he wasn’t the evil incompetant so often portrayed in leftist circles.

    But that’s just my impression from over 20 years of reading and corresponding with someone who, like, actually knew the man well for many years. Browne’s suppositions seem much more tenuous and self-serving, and as pointed out, ignore the confirmation from the Other Side that what Reagan was up to is what pushed them over the edge.

    But yeah, we need a new name. Libertarian and liberal are both far too loaded now.

  • DSpears

    “But yeah, we need a new name. Libertarian and liberal are both far too loaded now.”

    Yeah, minarchist just doesn’t have that “ring” to it.