Our Kind of Central Planning

Our Kind of Central Planning
By Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr.
Posted on 4/25/2007

During the 1990s, many of us complained bitterly about rule by the
Left. We were outraged at how the Clinton administration had so much
faith in government's ability to bring about universal fairness and
equality. Government, we were told, would make right all relations
between groups, equalize access to health care, curb every corporate
abuse, and stop all forms of exploitation of man against man, and man
against nature.

Except that behind every regulation, every bill, and every central
plan, no matter how humane it appeared on the outside, an informed
person could discern the iron fist of the state, which the Clinton
administration freely used against its enemies. Clinton himself was
perhaps never as convinced of the cure of power as the worst
Clintonites, but it remained and remains his default worldview.

What was wrong with the leftists' worldview in the 1990s and today?
Essentially it is this: they see society as unworkable by itself. They
believe it has fundamental flaws and deep-rooted conflicts that keep
it in some sort of structural imbalance. All these conflicts and
disequilibria cry out for government fixes, for leftists are certain
that there is no social problem that a good dose of power can't
solve.

If the conflicts they want are not there, they make them up. They look
at what appears to be a happy suburban subdivision and see pathology.
They see an apparently happy marriage and imagine that it is a mask
for abuse. They see a thriving church and think the people inside are
being manipulated by a cynical and corrupt pastor. Their view of the
economic system is the same. They figure that prices don't reflect
reality but instead are set by large players. There is a power
imbalance at the heart of every exchange. The labor contract is a mere
veneer that covers exploitation.

To the brooding leftist, it is inconceivable that people can work out
their own problems, that trade can be to people's mutual advantage,
that society can be essentially self managing, or that attempts to use
government power to reshape and manage people might backfire. Their
faith in government knows few limits; their faith in people is thin or
nonexistent. This is why they are a danger to liberty. We knew this in
the 1990s, and we know this today.

The remarkable fact about the conflict theory of society held by the
Left is that it ends up creating more of the very pathology that they
believe has been there from the beginning. The surest way to drive a
wedge between labor and capital is to regulate the labor markets to
the point that people cannot make voluntary trades. Both sides begin
to fear each other. It is the same with relations between races,
sexes, the abled and the physical and mentally challenged, and any
other groups you can name. The best path to creating conflict where
none need exist is to put a government bureaucracy in charge.

And yet, the Left is hardly alone in holding this essential assumption
about the way the world works. We have lived through six years of a
Republican president. The regime is dominated by a different
philosophical orientation. And we have thereby been reminded that
there are many flavors of tyranny. Bush's spending record is far worse
than Clinton's. After promising a humble foreign policy, war and war
spending define our era. We're told that every problem with war can be
solved through more force; that there is nothing necessarily wrong
with imprisoning people without cause and without legal
representation; that torture can be a legitimate wartime tactic; that
some countries have to be destroyed in order to be made free; and that
we can have all the warfare and welfare we desire at virtually no
cost, thanks to the miracle of debt-driven economic growth.

Traveling on airplanes reminds us how much freedom we've lost and how
we have become accustomed to it. Government bureaucrats presume the
right to search us and all our property. We are interrogated at every
step. The slightest bit of resistance could lead to arrest. We mill
around airports while the loudspeakers demand that we report all
suspicious behavior. Sometimes it seems like we are living in a
dystopian novel.

Some people say that the real problem with the Bush administration is
that it is too far left, and that a genuine right-wing government
would be better. I'm disinclined to believe that, for I detect in the
Bush administration a particular philosophy of governance that departs
from that of the Clinton regime in many ways, except in its unlimited
faith in government, that is, force and the threat of force.

I would go so far as to say that the most imminent threat that we face
is not from the Left but from the conservative Right. I would like to
defend the idea that rule by the Right is as dangerous as rule by the
Left. Elsewhere, I've referred to members of political groups that
support the conservative Right as "red-state fascists," and I don't
use that phrase merely for rhetorical purposes. There was and is such
as thing as fascism as a non-leftist form of social theory that puts
unlimited faith in the state to correct the flaws in society.

In the American postwar tradition, the political Right has been a mix
of genuine libertarian elements together with some very dangerous
tendencies. Mises wrote in Omnipotent Government that there is a breed
of warmonger who sees war not as an evil to be avoided as much as
possible, but rather a productive and wonderful event that gives life
meaning. To these people - and Mises of course was speaking of Nazis -
war and all its destruction is a high achievement, something necessary
to bring out the best in man and society, something wonderful and
necessary to push history and culture forward.

Reading Mises's claim in peacetime makes it seem implausible. Who
could possibly believe such things about war? And yet I think we know
now. There have been hundreds of articles in the conservative press in
the last six years that have made the precise claims we see above.
Even in the religious world, we see the shift taking place, with new
emphasis on the God of War over the Prince of Peace.

During the New Deal and before the Cold War, the libertarian
tendencies of the American Right prevailed. But after the Cold War
began, the mix became unstable, with the militarists and statists
gaining an upper hand. It was during this period that we first heard
the term "conservative" applied to people who believe in free
enterprise and human liberty - a ridiculous moniker if there ever was
one. Frank Chodorov was so fed up with it that he once said: "anyone
who calls me a conservative gets a punch in the nose." Neither did
Hayek or Mises, much less Rothbard, permit that term to be applied to
their worldview.

Nonetheless, it stuck, and the bad habits of mind along with it. It
would be impossible to say what policy of the current-day Right
constitutes the biggest danger to liberty. For now, I would like to
leave aside the most commonly talked about issues of the Bush
administration, such as its ahistorical view of the power of the
executive branch and its post 9-11 violations of civil liberties,
which are very real indeed. Instead, however, let's look at the
grimmest aspect of the state: its enforcement arm.

Lock 'em up

The American Right has long held a casual view toward the police
power, viewing it as the thin blue line that stands between freedom
and chaos. And while it is true that law itself is critical to
freedom, and police can defend rights of life and property, it does
not follow that any tax-paid fellow bearing official arms and sporting
jackboots is on the side of the good. Every government regulation and
tax is ultimately backed by the police power, so free-market advocates
have every reason to be as suspicious of socialist-style police power
as anyone on the Left.

Uncritical attitudes toward the police lead, in the end, to the
support of the police state. And to those who doubt that, I would
invite a look at the US-backed regime in Iraq, which has been
enforcing martial law since the invasion, even while most
conservatives have been glad to believe that these methods constitute
steps toward freedom.

The problem of police power is hitting Americans very close to home.
It is the police, much militarized and federalized, that are charged
with enforcing the on-again-off-again states of emergency that
characterize American civilian life. It is the police that confiscated
guns from New Orleans residents during the flood, kept residents away
from their homes, refused to let the kids go home in the Alabama
tornado last month, and will be the enforcers of the curfews,
checkpoints, and speech controls that the politicians want during the
next national emergency. If we want to see the way the police power
could treat US citizens, look carefully at how the US troops in Iraq
are treating the civilians there, or how prisoners in Guantanamo Bay
are treated.

A related problem with the conservative view toward law and justice
concerns the issue of prisons. The United States now incarcerates 730
people per 100,000, which means that the US leads the world in the
number of people it keeps in jails. We have vaulted ahead of Russia in
this regard. Building and maintaining jails is a leading expense by
government at all levels. We lock up citizens at rates as high as
eight times the rest of the industrialized world. Is it because we
have more crime? No. You are more likely to be burglarized in London
and Sydney than in New York or Los Angeles. Is this precisely because
we jail so many people? Apparently not. Crime explains about 12% of
the prison rise, while changes in sentencing practices, mostly for
drug-related offenses, account for 88%.

Overall, spending on prisons, police, and other items related to
justice is completely out of control. According to the Bureau of
Justice Statistics, in the twenty years ending in 2003, prison
spending has soared 423%, judicial spending is up 321%, and police
spending shot up 241%. When current data become available, I think we
will all be in for a shock, with total spending around a quarter of a
trillion dollars per year. And what do we get for it? More justice,
more safety, better protection? No, we are buying the chains of our
own slavery.

We might think of prisons as miniature socialist societies, where
government is in full control. For that reason, they are a complete
failure for everyone but those who get the contracts to build the
jails and those who work in them. Many inmates are there for drug
offenses, supposedly being punished for their behavior, but meanwhile
drug markets thrive in prison. If that isn't the very definition of
failure, I don't know what is. In prison, nothing takes place outside
the government's purview. The people therein are wholly and completely
controlled by state managers, which means that they have no value. And
yet it is a place of monstrous chaos, abuse, and corruption. Is it any
wonder that people coming out of prison are no better off than before
they went in, and are often worse, and scarred for life?

In the US prison and justice system, there is no emphasis at all on
the idea of restitution, which is not only an important part of the
idea of justice but, truly, its very essence. What justice is achieved
by robbing the victim again to pay for the victimizer's total
dehumanization? As Rothbard writes: "The victim not only loses his
money, but pays more money besides for the dubious thrill of catching,
convicting, and then supporting the criminal; and the criminal is
still enslaved, but not to the good purpose of recompensing his
victim."

Free-market advocates have long put up with jails on grounds that the
state needs to maintain a monopoly on justice. But where in the world
is the justice here? And how many jails are too many? How many
prisoners must there be before the government has overreached? We hear
virtually nothing about this problem from conservatives. Far from it,
we hear only the celebration of the expansion of prison socialism, as
if the application of ever more force were capable of solving any
social problem.

Kill 'em All

This ideology of power is particularly clear when it comes to war. In
the 1970s, there developed a myth on the Right that the real problem
with Vietnam was not the intervention itself, but the failure to carry
it out to a more grim and ruthless end. This seems to be the only
lesson that the Bush administration garnered from the experience. So
the solution to every problem in Iraq - at least, I can't think of an
exception to the rule - has been to apply more force through more
troops, more bombs, more tanks, more guns, more curfews, more patrols,
more checkpoints, and more controls of all sorts. It's as if the
administration were on an intellectual trajectory that it cannot
escape.

Why the lack of any critical thinking here? How is it that the war
planners and their vast numbers of supporters do not question the
underlying assumption that government is capable of achieving all its
aims, provided that it is given enough time and firepower? It's as if
they are unable to apply the logic behind their support of free
enterprise in any other area of politics.

What's more, it is not even clear that American conservatives are
temperamentally inclined to support free enterprise. Let us never
forget that it was the Nixon administration that finally destroyed the
gold standard and gave us price and wage controls, and it was the
Reagan administration that set the world record on government spending
and debt, before it was broken by the current Republican
administration. There is no doubt in my mind that under the right
conditions, the Bush administration would institute wage and price
controls in the same way that it has pursued an intermittently
protectionist program, regulated business, erected new bureaucracies,
and failed to seriously cut taxes.

Why is it the case that American conservatives cannot be trusted with
the defense of liberty? Here is where we have to penetrate more deeply
into the philosophical infrastructure of American conservatism. I wish
I could say it is derived from the Republicanism of Madison, or the
libertarianism of Jefferson, or the aristocratic old-style liberalism
of Edmund Burke, or the rabble-rousing faith in freedom exhibited by
that American original Patrick Henry. Sadly, this is not the case. Nor
do the conservatives show evidence of having been influenced by the
thinkers discussed in Russell Kirk's book The Conservative Mind, such
as John C. Calhoun, John Randolph of Roanoke, John Adams, much less
the eccentric Orestes Brownson.

Conservatives have become addicted to entertainment radio and
television as the source of their news, and the underlying philosophy
seems not to have any connection to history in any way. But because we
are all intellectually indebted to some body of ideas, we have to ask:
which one is it that informs modern-day conservatism?

Law-Keeper, Law-Breakers

What we have at work here is a crude form of Hobbesianism, the
political philosophy hammered out by the 17th-century Englishman
Thomas Hobbes. His book Leviathan was published in 1651 during the
English Civil War in order to justify a tyrannical central government
as the price of peace. The natural state of society, he said, was war
of all against all. In this world, life is "solitary, poor, nasty,
brutish, and short." Conflict was the way of human engagement. Society
is rife with it, and it cannot be otherwise.

What is striking here is the context of this book. Conflict was indeed
ubiquitous. But what was the conflict about? It was over who would
control the state and how that state would operate. This was not a
state of nature but a society under Leviathan's control. It was
precisely the Leviathan that bred that very conflict that Hobbes was
addressing, and he proposed a cure that was essentially identical to
the disease.

In fact, the result of the Civil War was the brutal and ghastly
dictatorship of Oliver Cromwell, who ruled under democratic slogans.
This was a foreshadowing of some of the worst political violence of
the 20th century. It was Nazism, Fascism, and Communism that
transformed formerly peaceful societies into violent communities in
which life did indeed become "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and
short." Leviathan didn't fix the problem; it bred it - and fastened it
on society as a permanent condition.

What is striking about Hobbes is that he thought not at all about
economic problems. The problem of human material well-being was not
part of his intellectual apparatus. He could not have imagined what
England would become only a century to a century and a half later: a
bastion of freedom and rising prosperity for everyone.

He wrote at the tail end of an epoch before the rise of old-style
liberalism. At the time that Hobbes was writing, the liberal idea had
not yet become part of public consciousness in England. In this
respect, England was behind the Continent, where intellectuals in
Spain and France had already come to understand the core insights of
the liberal idea. But in England, John Locke's Two Treatises on
Government would not be written for another thirty years, a book that
would supply the essential framework of the Declaration of
Independence and lead to the formation of the freest and most
prosperous society in the history of the world.

Because Hobbes didn't think about economic issues, the essential
liberal insight was not part of his thinking. And what is that
insight? It is summed up in Frederic Bastiat's claim that "the great
social tendencies are harmonious."

We Can Get Along

What he means by this is that society contains within itself the
capacity to resolve conflicts and create and sustain institutions that
further social cooperation. By pursuing their individual self-
interest, people can come to mutual agreement and engage in exchange
to their mutual benefit. A critical insight here, one that needs to be
taught to every generation, relates to the law of association.

The law of association points out that people of radically different
abilities, backgrounds, religions, races, and capacities can
successfully cooperate to achieve ever higher levels of social welfare
through negotiation and trade. The law of association is what explains
the method by which humans were able to move out of caves, away from
isolated production, beyond the hunter-gatherer stage, and into what
we call civilization. This law makes it possible for people to stop
stealing from each other, stop killing each other, and begin to
cooperate. It is the basis of society.

Note that the law of association does not suppose that everyone in
society is smart, enlightened, talented, or educated. It presumes
radical inequality and points to the paradox that the world's
smartest, most talented person still has every reason to trade with
his polar opposite because scarcity requires that the tasks of
production be divided between people. Under the division of labor,
everyone plays an essential role. It is the basis of families,
communities, firms, and international trade. Another fact that needs
to be understood is this: the law of association is a fact of human
existence whether or not there is a state. Indeed, the foundation of
civilization itself precedes the existence of the state.

What the law of association addresses is the core problem of freedom
itself. If all people were equal, if everyone had the same skill
level, if there were racial, sexual, and religious homogeneity in
society, if people did not have differences of opinion, there would be
few if any problems in society to overcome because it would not be a
human society. It would be an ant heap, or a series of machine parts
that had no volition. The essential problem of social and economic
organization, aside from scarcity, is precisely how to deal with the
facts of inequality and free will. It is here that freedom excels.

Let us be clear. Bastiat was not saying that there are no such things
as criminals. He was saying that society can deal with malevolence
through the exchange economy, and in precisely the way we see today:
private security companies, private production of locks and guns,
private arbitration, and private insurance. The free market can
organize protection better than the state. Private enterprise can and
does provide the police function better than the state. As Hayek
argued, the state is wildly overrated as a mechanism of order keeping.
The state is and has been in history a source of disorder and chaos.

This essential insight of liberalism is what led the founding fathers
to take such a radical step as throwing off the rule of Britain. They
had to be firmly convinced that chaos would not ensue, that the
American people could manage their own affairs without overarching
leviathan control. They believed that the source of any conflict in
their society was the central state, and that society itself could be
self-regulating. In place of control by the king, they put the
Articles of Confederation, which was a type of government that more
closely approximated anarchy than any system in the modern period. The
government was barely in existence, and had essentially no power.

Why did anyone believe it could work? It was the new science of
liberty that led to this conviction. The American consensus was
precisely that Hobbes was wrong. In the state of nature, life is not
nasty and brutish, or, rather if it is, there is nothing that a nasty
and brutish state can do to improve it. The only way a society can
advance out of barbarism is from within by means of the division of
labor.

This logic has been forgotten by the American Right. Instead they have
bought into the view that society is fundamentally unstable and rife
with a conflict that only the state can solve. That root conflict is
between those who adhere to the law and those who are inclined to
break it. These they define as good guys and bad guys, but it is not
always true, since the law these days is not that written by God on
our hearts, but rather the orders handed down by our political
masters.

This seemingly important point is completely lost on the Republican
mind, since they believe that without the state as lawmaker, all of
society and all of the world would collapse into a muddle of chaos and
darkness. Society, they believe, is a wreck without Leviathan. This is
why they celebrate the police and the military more than merchants and
entrepreneurs, and why they think that war deserves more credit than
trade for world prosperity.

One Faith Per Society

The conviction that society, no matter how orderly it appears, is
really nothing more than a gloss on deep-rooted conflict, expresses
itself in the romantic attachment to the police power and war. But it
also affects the Right's attitude toward religion. Many people are
convinced that, in the end, it is not possible that society can be
religiously heterogeneous. In particular, these days, most
conservatives believe that the United States cannot abide the presence
of Muslims and other religious minorities.

Now, on this question, we can grant that the existence of the
universal franchise does create problems with religious heterogeneity.
But this is a problem created by the state itself. In conditions of
freedom, there is no reason why all religions cannot peacefully
coexist.

The current-day view of conservatives that we are in an intractable
war against Islam also stems from the conflict-based view of society.
In the absence of the state, people find ways to get along, each
preserving their own identities. Religious heterogeneity presents no
problems that freedom cannot solve.

And yet conservatives today are disinclined to accept this view. They
seem to have some intellectual need to identify huge struggles at work
in history that give them a sense of meaning and purpose. Whereas the
founding generation of old liberals was thrilled by the existence of
peace and the slow and meticulous development of bourgeois
civilization, the Right today is on the lookout for grand morality
plays into which they can throw themselves as a means of making some
mark in history. And somehow they have come to believe that the state
is the right means to fight this battle.

In short, their meta-understanding of politics bypassed the liberal
revolution of the 18th century and embraced the anti-liberal elements
of the Enlightenment. Up with Hobbes, down with Locke: that is their
implied creed. Liberty is fine but order, order, is much more
important, and order comes from the state. They can't even fathom the
truth that liberty is the mother, not the daughter, of order. That
thought is too complex for the mind that believes that the law alone,
legislated or by executive fiat, is what separates barbarism from
civilization. Freedom, to them, is not a right but something conferred
as a reward for good behavior. The absence of good behavior justifies
any level of crackdown.

I once heard a leading Republican intellectual, a respected figure
with lots of books on everyone's shelves, express profound regret when
the Soviet Union was falling apart. The problem, from this person's
perspective, is that this led to disorder, and order - meaning control
even by the Soviet state - is the fundamental conservative value. That
about sums it up. Even Communism is to be tolerated so long as it
keeps away what they dread more than death: people within their rights
doing whatever they want.

At the end of the Cold War, many conservatives panicked that there
would be no more great causes into which the state could enlist
itself. There were about 10 years of books that sought to demonize
someone, somewhere, in the hope of creating a new enemy. Maybe it
would be China. Maybe it would be the culture war. Maybe it should be
drugs. At last, from their point of view, 9-11 presented the
opportunity they needed, and thus began the newest unwinnable war in
the tradition of LBJ: The War on Terror.

So must government rule every aspect of life until every last
terrorist is wiped off the face of the earth? Must we surrender all
our liberty and property to this cause, as the regime and its
apologists suggest?

This view of society is certainly not sustainable in these times and
in the future. Ever more of daily life consists in seceding from the
state and its apparatus of edicts and regulations. In the online
world, billions of deals are made every day that require virtually no
government law to enforce. The technology that is pushing the world
forward is not created by the state but by private enterprise. The
places we shop and the communities in which we live are being created
by private developers. Most businesses prefer to deal with private
courts. We depend on insurance companies, not police, to reduce the
risks in life. We secure our homes and workplaces through private
firms.

What's more, these days we see all around us how liberty generates
order and how this order is self-sustaining. We benefit daily, hourly,
minute-by-minute, from an order that is not imposed from without but
rather generated from within, by that remarkable capacity we have for
pursuing self-interest while benefiting the whole. Here is the great
mystery and majesty of social order, expressed so well in the act of
economic exchange.

Many Republicans by contrast live intellectually in a world long past,
a world of warring states and societies made up of fixed classes that
fought over ever-dwindling resources, a world unleavened by enterprise
and individual initiative. They imagine themselves to be the class of
rulers, the aristocrats, the philosopher kings, the high clerics, the
landowners, and to keep that power, they gladly fuel the basest of
human instincts: nationalism, jingoism, and hate. Keeping them at bay
means keeping the world of their imaginations at bay, and that is a
very good and important thing for the sake of civilization.

The Rothbard Revival

Having said all of this about the modern-day Right, I do want to draw
your attention again to the forgotten tradition of the Old Right of
the 1930s and '40s. These were times when Garet Garrett was
celebrating free enterprise against New Deal planning, John T. Flynn
was exposing the warfare state as a tool of socialism, Albert Jay Nock
was heralding the capacity of private education to create literacy and
artistry, and when politicians on the Right were advocating peace and
trade. This period came to an end in the 1950s with the emergence of
the first neoconservatives attached to National Review.

Very few people today know anything about this aspect of American
intellectual history. But in a few months, this period of ignorance is
going to come to an end. The Mises Institute is publishing a
remarkable document. It is Murray Rothbard's unpublished history of
the postwar American Right. The name of the book is The Betrayal of
the American Right. It chronicles both his life and the life and death
of a movement. Ultimately his outlook is hopeful, just as mine is
hopeful.

The manuscript has circulated privately for 30 years. It will soon see
the light of day. He names names. He spares no enemy of freedom. Many
people will cheer. Many others will weep. It will be a great day. If
you would like to join in supporting this project please let us know.
If you want to help in other ways, please talk to us. The Mises
Institute is the powerhouse for publishing and educating in the
libertarian tradition. The young are listening and we are having a
great effect in bringing to life the vision of society that animated
the American Revolution and, indeed, gave rise to civilization as we
know it.

I've spoken about the problem of those who look at society and see
nothing but conflict and no prospect for cooperation. It is a view
shared by the Left and the Right. But truly there is an actual
conflict at the root of history - but it is not the one most people
understand or see. It is the great struggle between freedom and
despotism, between the individual and the state, between the voluntary
means and coercion. The party of freedom knows where it stands.

We do find ourselves not quite in a crowd in this struggle, indeed
depending completely on your help. More than ever, both the Left and
the Right are allied against us, and they are both in league with
power. The forces of liberty have always been in the minority, and yet
we can and do prevail. Thank you for your continued support in the
great struggle between liberty and power.


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Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr. is president of the Ludwig von Mises
Institute in Auburn, Alabama, editor of LewRockwell.com, and author of
Speaking of Liberty. Send him mail. Comment on the blog.

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