Generation Rothbard
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From Paul Lyons’s American Conservatism: Thinking It, Teaching It:
This class began today with the assignment of the first paper — on fusionism — the handing out of an Ayn Rand selection from The Virtue of Selfishness, and a short discussion of her life and work. Then we began a lively, focused discussion carried over Tuesday about the different takes on libertarianism by Frank Meyer and Murray Rothbard. Rothbard’s principled libertarianism, castigated as libertine by Meyer, is attractive to many of my students, including some of the liberals, because his style is modest and direct and his argument seems consistent — any state intervention is coercive, from taxation to the military draft, from censorship to drug laws. Meyer, on the other hand, argues that liberty must be a means but not an end, that it must serve the good, the quest for virtue. Rothbard unashamedly counters that libertarianism isn’t concerned with “what a person does with his or her life,” which he sees as “vital and important but … simply irrelevant to libertarianism.”
Allen Ginsberg once told Norman Podhoretz, “We’ll get you through your children!” Turns out it’s not only the left-wing kids who reject neoconservatism, but a great many liberal and non-liberal students alike are turning to Rothbardianism. Ron Paul, of course, has done much to popularize a vision close to Rothbard’s, and the new Young Americans for Liberty continues this work. Along a parallel front, I get reports from other campuses telling me that a traditionalism akin to that of the Front Porch Republicans is taking hold in place of the neocon Right. No doubt there’s selective bias here — the young Rothbards and Bill Kauffmans are still outnumbered by College Republicans, and it’s the relative rarity of the former that makes them stand out to people like me. But I do think the anti-imperial Right (or post-Right) is growing while neoconservatives fail to reproduce. The neos still have the money, though, and the institutions of the conservative movement. It’ll be a hard fight yet to dislodge them, but youth, and therefore time, may be on our side.
You can get a sense of the how the younger generation feels about Meyer from this piece by George Hawley. I would like to offer a strong apologia for Meyer, who by all accounts was a marvelous individual and a man of great learning. But I have to agree that those qualities don’t come through very well in his manifesto In Defense of Freedom.
I recommend Lyons’s book,
P.S. Here’s Rothbard’s generous but critical take on Meyer.
Filed under: Liberty, Philosophy, Ron Paul
I’m one of those youth you’d have to discount, I suppose. It’s not like I don’t support any of those things- in fact, a night watchman state sounds very appealing to me. I find isolationism to be a very weak strategy however, one that inherently produces an image of weakness to both our para military foes abroad as well as to rogue states with nukes. Call it Dennis Miller libertarianism, if you will. But I think you’ll find less people around my age so loathe to protect our national interests abroad as you might hope- it’s not like I just watch Hannity to get my views on foreign policy, nor do a lot of other folks who hold this neo-libertarian philosophy like me. You can be for the legalization of gay marriage and drugs and still support missile defense buildup and pre-emptive military operations overseas- just because one is for a drastic reduction of government domestically does not discount support for a very strong military. I think it’s actually a very good idea- you need something to protect your property, so why not a veritable “night watchman state” where the watchman protects your property with insurmountable force?
Libertarians who support empire, Tripp? That’s what aggressive expansion of a nation’s military activity abroad amounts to. The empire is justified by the threat– and one can always find a threat– and then it demands militarism, which must be fed (taxes), and then it must quell dissent(patriot act). That same insurmountable force is taking your property with every paycheck.
By the way, Dennis Miller is the most tiresome hack since (insert obscure allusion).
Whoah whoah whoah- empire? That’s such a copout- there’s a difference in peace through strenghth and imperialism. There’s no Cecil Rhodes-esque shenanigans in my foreign policy views. I never said I was a libertarian anarchist- I’m a libertarian who believes in a government agreed upon in the manner of a Lockean social contract that protects the rule of law and the lives and property of the individuals who agreed to enter in to that contract. Nor do I believe that our Constitution is necessarily the perfect social contract that Locke would have imagined after the Two Treatises. But in order to protect such livelihood, one cannot overlook the threats to said property or people’s lives for that matter. Look, we have para military guerillas motivated by a hateful religion whose sole objective is to re-establish a caliphate and to kill the “infidels” who are not followers of Allah’s prophet Muhammed. They are periodically reinforced by actual state actors or are given assistance by them, and if not, they still have access to weaponry and munitions that give them the ability to attack citizens of our nation here at home regardless of our promises of diplomacy and neutrality in foreign conflicts. It’s stupid to say we should bury our heads and hope that in the avoidance of canards like the “military industrial complex” we won’t get hit with a dirty bomb in the process. These people are maniacal fanatics who cannot be abided with, and we must do everything we can within reason to fight them because it is inevitable that they will fight us. This is not synonymous with establishing an American empire with the false pretext of the “war on terror” or whatever that some false neo-cons as I describe them like David Frum would indeed advocate. My reading of neo-conservatism constitutes pursuing realism in matters of foreign policy in the interest of protecting the citizens- not by coercion, but by using our superior military capabilities to protect our interests. Mearschimer and Walt for instance seem to subscribe to the theory that we’re over there and we’re pissing them off, etc. This completely omits all of the humanitarian and military missions this country has taken on for Muslims throughout the past decades. Wahhabism as per Sayyid Qutub doesn’t allow for coexistence with infidels and as such springs non-state actors like Al Qaieda who require new tactics to be dealt with. Realism in foreign policy with this particular problem is somewhat inapplicable, because it doesn’t take extreme religious motivation into account.
I’m not saying we need to bomb Iran or go venturing forth searching for new conflicts while casting rationality to the wind, either. We’ve done a fair job dealing with these threats, and all I’m saying is that at the end of the day it wasn’t unjustifiable as far as the war in Iraq was concerned, for example.
I’m not sure what you mean by saying Dennis Miller is a “hack” either. Plenty of his views and mine don’t coincide with party platforms. It just so happens that certain aspects of the Bush administration’s foreign policy aren’t as unpalatable to us as to someone like Lew Rockwell. I could throw Trey Parker and Matt Stone out there too.
Why do people have to turn their feelings of persecution into grandiose conspiracies? It makes for great storytelling but poor policy.
You should more time and ressources invest to popularize Murray N. Rothbard outside of America, particularly in Europe!
Sorry, Tripp. You probably have some good things to say in there, but I read this on my lunch hour. Next time, try bullet points.
Great points, Daniel. Tripp, whatever you are, you are not a conservative.
Libertarian anarchist-type college student reporting in. I’d probably be less radical and more in line with AmConMag if I wasn’t a pessimist though.
I used to read NRO for politics back in high school. Now I read AmCon for the foreign policy and Mises.org for the economics/hardline philosophy.
If one doesn’t remember legitimate concerns about Soviet power it’s easy to be for isolationism.
Similarly, if one wasn’t around during segregation and the civil rights movement it’s not so hard to be for “state’s rights.”
I’ll spare the line about laissez-faire and the 1930s, because I wasn’t around then either.
If the only alternative is post 9-11 regime change neoconservatism, sure, teenage Rothbardism may look attractive.
But it isn’t likely to convince people who were around 30 or 40 years ago.
And even for young people those aren’t the only political alternatives today.
I am one young man that is part of the new generations of conservatives this author calls “rothbard” conservatives. I’d rather call myself a Ron Paul conservative because he’s the one who turned me conservative plus I can convince most of my friends and family to agree on his conservative view points (they are mostly libs or minorities).
We have to look to the youth to see the future of conservatism. If the republicans (me included) had not excluded ron paul they wouldn’t be so pathetic.
Tripp, your ignorance is astonishing. The US has been a dishonest broker since 1948 in the Arab-Israel conflict.
There are no great humanitarian works being done now
or in the past by the US in the Near East. To the contrary
we have propped up police states from Israel to Kuwait
and in between. There is no reason for a strong military
except for imperial aggression. Turning the US from a
Republic into an Empire was done by statist liberals like
Wilson, FDR, Truman, Kennedy and LBJ and now stupidly
supported by the Dumb Rightists of the Dennis Miller
stripe. The great growth of big government is far more due
to the warfare state than the welfare state and most of that “welfare” is corporate welfare related to the military-
industrial-academic complex. There was never any threat
to the US from Spain in 1898 to the Kaiser in 1917 to Hitler
in 1939. FDR deliberately provoked Japan into attacking us,
see Back Door To War by Charles Callan Tansill. Also see
The Origins Of The Second World War by A.J.P. Taylor.
We were in no danger from North Vietnam, North Korea
or Iraq, nor are we in danger from Iran now. The US has either
bases or treaties with over 100 countries and that constitutes
imperialism by any definition.
Finally you need to read The Zionist Connection by Dr. Alfred
M. Lilienthal for some actual history of the Near East. Our
support of Israel to the tune of hundreds of billions of stolen
tax dollars just since 1967 has brought about the resurgence
of fundamentalist Islam and anti-American feeling all over the
Near East. That you could feel more comfortable with Bush (!)
proves that you are no libertarian or even conservative.
Rothbard was right in foreign policy, Buckley and Rand
were dead wrong.
And the aliens were actually the ones to cause the USS Maine to explode, thus causing a huge Zionist conspiracy to open up an empire in the old Spanish holdings in the Carribean and the Phillippines. And THEN, the military industrial complex secretly asserted itself by ghost writing the Zimmerman telegram, thus causing our involvement in the Great War.
It’s such typical pseudo/paleo conservative trope to say we should have stayed out of every war since the Revolution, or even that we shouldn’t have rebelled from England. I never said I was a “conservative” either in this erudite post-modern Front Porch Burkean whig mold nor in the mold of, well, whatever. I consider myself a neo-libertarian. If your worldview is informed like mine you’d find it’s a lot more complex to answer foreign policy questions than to supply naive platitudes like “it’s not our fight” to every question. I don’t know how more ignorant that could be of the nature of world actors be they nation states or otherwise. As for economics and social issues, I don’t think any of us really disagree on that. If the one resource state expenditures focused on was providing for our national defense, that’d be fine with me. People here seem to forget the bigger problems than disagreements over international relations theory- specifically, the radical expansion of our social democratic state here. One points to a canard when one says that the “warfare state” whatever that is is the reason for big government here- the real reason is progressivism, started in the late 19th century with the regulation of interstate commerce and so on.
Tripp, you again show your utter ignorance of history by failing to deal with any specifics that I bring up and being forced to resort to the lowest form of humor, sarcasm. The main reason why the state has expanded in the 20th and 21st centuries is war and the threat of war. You would greatly benefit by reading Why American History Is Not What They Say:An Introduction To Revisionism by Jeff Riggenbach, available from Amazon. He goes into all of our many wars and shows that none of them from 1812 on were justified and that even much of the Revolutionary War folklore is historically inaccurate. One third of the population had to flee from Washington’s terror tactics to Canada and Hamilton was an avowed Big Government statist from the get-go.
In terms of both expenditures in a quantitative sense and
the quality of war statism both world wars and the cold war greatly overshadow any and all “progressive” reforms from
Wilson. In the early 60s we were still spending over 70%
for war and war related activities including the space program, CIA, etc. Only under Nixon did the non-defense
part of the budget actually briefly overtake the defense
(so-called) portion. The ultimate cost of just the Iraq War
is going to be three trillion, the “Patriot” Act is far more
intrusive of individual rights than any welfare legislation.
We have no need for any large “national defense” establishment and frankly the military is the most statist,
most collectivist, most communist, most socialist and most
fascist part of the whole government. Pentagon welfare is simply state welfarism on a massive scale that dwarfs everything but social security and medicare. The interest payments on the national debt are the third largest part of the budget and before WW2 & the Cold War they were insignificant. Neocons like you are literal Know-Nothings, you mindlessly swallow every line from FDR forward on
US interventions. Read For A New Liberty by Murray Rothbard and The Cold War And Its Origins, 2 volumes,
by D.F. Fleming. The US started the Cold War by supporting
fascist regimes in Greece, Turkey, China and South Korea
and encircling the USSR with missiles. Stalin ONLY was in
east Europe as a result of the defeat of Germany, that was
the main result of that “good war.” See Buchanan’s The
Unnecessary War for a debunking of WW2. NATO never should have existed as Taft noted and at least should have been abolished when the Warsaw Pact was. You are like
Rand where she allegedly said the 1950s tax rate of 80%
was justified because it was for defense ! Defense is as much a weasel collectivist term as public welfare. If you
don’t like paleocons go write for The Weekly Standard or
Commentary. As far as Zionism goes, AIPAC boasts that
it can get 400 Members of the House and 95 Senators to
sign ANYTHING on Israel it wants. That doesn’t sound like
a conspiracy to me but unbridled, arrogant power.
Foreign policy impacts on our statism at least as much or
more than domestic policy. It requires an enormous amount
of government and taxation to support an Empire.
You are no libertarian and please stop trying to fly under false colors.
You actually the Hearst fables about 1898 ??????????!!!!!!!!
In my last line I left out the word “believe” before “the Hearst fables about 1898.” The US intervention there was an incredible amalgamtion of big lies. Obviously the US blew up the Maine to get into the war to steal the Spanish colonies
as part of “our Christian effort to civilize our little brown brothers” as McKinley put it. We ended up killing hundreds of thousands of Filipinos after we doublecrossed them and decided to keep the Islands for half a century. Riggenbach goes into this as does Howard Zinn in A People’s History Of
The United States. The US iron hand in Cuba eventually lead
to Castro and Puerto Rico is still a colony to this day.
Murray Rothbard’s 1965 essay Left and Right:The Prospects
For Liberty is one of the more original works of thought ever
done in purely political philosophy. Rand may have been a greater philosopher qua philosopher but she was a dunce in
both history and political theory. People like Tripp are emblematic of the mentalities that call into rightist trash shows like Miller, Limbaugh, Savage, Hannity, O’Reilly
and a few mislabeled “libertarians” of the JohnBoy Hospers
variety. Hospers was a cold warrior and anti-Arab and anti-libertarian and anti-Objectivist to the core. He unbelievably
endorsed the Cheney ticket in 04. Tripp, go to ihr.org and
download the Revisionist Bibliography. Start reading James J.
Martin, Harry Elmer Barnes, Murray Rothbard, John T. Flynn,
D.F. Fleming. The radical right neoconman, David Horowitz,
actually wrote a great book, The Free World Colossus, in 1965. He boiled down the essence of Fleming’s massive two volume work with full credit to Fleming. If it hadn’t been for the Vietnam War protesters and the revisionist historians we never would have rid ourselves of the draft, the most heinous invasion of individual rights. Yes, Tripp, that was worse than
seatbelt regulations or welfare checks. Rand finally came out
against the draft BUT never mentioned the four million Indochinese victims of US Imperialism. We have a very bloody statist history and it’s high time that the Tripps of the
world wake up and start educating their narrow minds.
Calling me ignorant- guess that’s the new catchphrase of old right revisionists or whatever. These revisionists are just as “narrow minded” as I am if we’re going to use such a paradigm. What I have read from history is the impact of culture and its development in international relations- some on the “old-right” forgo what I think is a wonderfully applicable reasoning behind diplomacy that is realism and default straight to complete, unabashed isolationism. You give me a list of books to read about revisionist history, and yet all these people can bring to the forefront of the debate is what went wrong with the implementation of policy or in the case of Murray Rothbard his continuous thesis that liberty morally should be pursued at all ends, even at the point of the death of the state completely, almost using a linear cross supplying of Kant’s deontology. While this is fine in civilized discourse about the philosophy of liberty, and even of “rightist” thinking, it has little practical implications considering the rather “narrow minded” view it takes of human nature, particularly its affects on state actors. You confuse me for being some sort of an imperialist post-refined neo-conservative, and yet what I really am is a libertarian realist. I’m not a fan of what we did in the Philippine Insurrection, nor in the Korean or Vietnam wars. In bringing up the “unecessary war” thesis, revisionists including most recently Pat Buchanan don’t take in to account the inevitable danger of fascist and especially rabid nationalist movements in Germany that had been in formulation for a century prior to Roosevelt “baiting” Japan into bombing Pearl Harbor. I am even more inclined to think that the Pacific theatre was a little less necessary in the long run for the national interest than combatting Nazism’s control over the entire European continent. Such a thing could never have been abided with- I would dismiss you as a nut to say that Europe controlled by the Third Reich or the USSR would be preferable to the one we have today, imperfect as it may be. Isolationists don’t seem to take ideology into account either in surveying the dangerous capabilities of certain regimes when compounded with sophisticated technology, munitions, and soldiers. Seperation by the Atlantic ocean can only get you so far. How do I justify this with being a libertarian? Think about this- I’m not an advocate of anarcho-capitalism, necessarily, because I don’t think our natural rights can be accessed without some sort of a social contract to protect the rule of law. In order to protect such a contract, and thereby to protect our rights, we need a military capable of protecting the citizens from having their rights taken away by an outside actor. For example, it is reasonable to think that just as one can theorize that if we had let Germany take Poland and fight Russia, there would have been no war, so too can I think that if Germany had won the Battle of Britain, an eventual attack on the United States mainland would have been in order. Fascist regimes on the magnitude of Nazi Germany could not have lived in diplomatic peace with the United States because it is antithetical to the nature of such regimes to do so. Furthermore, don’t tell me what I can’t call myself just because I’m not a devout follower of isolationism- I’m probably a bigger believer in unrestrained free markets and personal liberty than a lot of these Burkean whigs. How that fits is simply that we can disagree about history and theorize different directions events could have gone in from the Texan War of Independence onwards- but as of this moment, I think it’s safe to say that we need a re-invigorated Kissingerian realism in foreign policy, and liberty at home. Forget even the Iraq War- when have I ever called for invasion of Iran, or even a continued presence in Iraq? Not once. You need to learn the difference between realists and neo-cons, evidently. Kissinger’s Diplomacy would be a good start.
You take up much space to say very little. Your verbiage is the hallmark of a bad writer.
Where did you get this stupid idea that anarcho-capitalism
1) The Nazis were only all over western Europe in response to the UK-Franco declaration of war against them for their
invasion of the German areas of Poland. The US was behind the worthless UK-Franco “guarantee” of Poland. See The Forced War by David L. Hoggan, Back Door To War by Charles Callan Tansill, Perpetual War For Perpetual Peace
by Harry Elmer Barnes (Ed.), The Unnecessary War:Churchill, Hitler and WW2 by Patrick J. Buchanan,
The Origins Of The Second World War by A.J.P. Taylor
and Getting Us Into War by Porter Sargent plus The New Dealers War by Thomas Fleming. Germany simply beat the Brits to the punch in taking over Norway and other states.
There was no master plan for world conquest nor even for general European conquest. FDR wanted the war because
by 1939 the New Deal had failed and his only chance of historical glory was to be a war President. David Irving’s
two volume (to date) Churchill’s War is also very useful in this regard. FDR had tried to bait the Germans into war in
the North Atlantic but they weren’t falling for it, hence the
back door in the Pacific. Tansill’s book is superb in this
regard as is George Morgenstern’s Pearl Harbor. There
is no doubt that FDR and Marshall set up Pearl Harbor
for the attack that they knew would bring about their much
desired war. Hitler stupidly thought his alliance with Japan
obliged him to declare war while Japan felt no such obligation
in regards to the Soviets, Germany’s main enemy.
2) Eastern & Central WAS controlled by the Soviets for half
a century PRECISELY AS A ENTIRELY PREDICTABLE
RESULT OF THE US-UK SPONSORED SECOND WORLD
WAR. And no that was not better than the German control,
it was much, much worse. In fact today the whole continent
is rapidly evolving into a police state where you can to prison
for “racism” or challenging the “holocaust.” No, that’s not an
improvement. As well as attempts by the EU to regulate
every aspect of economic and social life, another USSR.
3) NATO was never justified as Senator Taft said because there was never any Russian military threat to western Europe. They supported the Communist Parties in the west but they had no military ambitions, they were more than tied down in eastern-central Europe. NATO should have been abolished when the Warsaw Pact was. Twenty years ago.
4) Separation by the Atlantic and Pacific absolutely precluded
any military invasions or foreign takeovers. Missiles, yes,
but who started that with the utterly unjustified atomic bombings in Japan ? See Hiroshima:Assault On A Beaten
Foe by Harry Elmer Barnes in the May 10, 1958 issue of
National Review. Also Gar Alperowitz’s two huge works
on this subject. Japan had been trying to surrender for almost
a year, no US invasion was ever necessary as MacArthur,
Eisenhower and others noted. And in the end Japan did not
surrender unconditionally, they kept the Emperor.
Furthermore the US, typically, started the process by encircling the USSR with nuclear missiles and bases in Iran,
Turkey, Italy, etc. See The Cold War And Its Origins by D.F.
Fleming, particularly volume two, also The Free World Colosuss by David Horowitz (1965.)
5) There were no dangerous fascist movements in either Japan or Germany “a century” (!) before 1939. Where in the
hell do you get your “history” ????? And their nationalist
movements were no more dangerous than Chinese or Italian
nationalist movements in the century before WW2. France
actually started the 1870 war with Germany and lost.
These movements were of absolutely no danger to the US
BUT ever since the Monroe Doctrine the US has been very
dangerous to all of Latin America. As Noam Chomsky well
put it, if we were serious about a war on terror the first two
capitals to be bombed are Washington and Tel Aviv.
6) Germany let the Brits escape at Dunkirk as a face saving measure because Hitler was a notorious Anglophile and admirer of the British Empire. Even IF he had conquered
the UK THERE IS NO EVIDENCE WHATSOEVER HE
WOULD HAVE ATTACKED THE USA. What for ? He had
no interest in a war with the UK or France. THEY wanted
war as did FDR. Again if you would just read what I have taken the trouble to recommend to you instead of recycling
endless war stupidities you might actually learn something.
7) Kissinger is a major war criminal. He is responsible for
hundreds of thousands of deaths in East Timor alone by giving aid to Indonesia and encouraging their invasion in
which they killed a third of the population. Kissinger is
responsible for thousands of deaths in Chile by backing
the fascist coup. Kissinger is responsible for half a million
deaths in Cambodia because of his and Nixon’s 1970
invasion which later brought the Khmer Rouge into power.
Kissinger is responsible for millions of deaths in Vietnam
by prolonging that war for seven more years. Kissinger is
responsible for the stupid US rule against talking to the PLO
which blighted our diplomacy for 15 years. No, that’s not
realism, that’s criminality.
is opposed to voluntary social contracts ? Read For A New
Liberty and The Ethics Of Liberty by Rothbard. Rothbard
never posited liberty in isolation from peace, justice and
other worthwhile goals. A very limited government would
be nice if we could ever find one but no such animal has
ever existed, not for very long anyway.
9) As far as taking ideology into account the so-called free
market democratic ideology of the UK and the US has never stopped them from being the world’s greatest military aggressors and imperialists since Rome and Genghis Khan.
Mao murdered 100 million Chinese but he was not a military
aggressor.
On my point two I left out “Europe” after Eastern and Central.” I apologize for the formatting problems. It
all looks ok when I post it. Anyway it’s very legible.
You take up much space to spout a lot of conspiracy theories and half- factual conjecture. These historians are sidelined for a reason- revisionism is all about theories and putting certain facts together to create a thesis that promotes their viewpoint- now that you brought him up, Noam Choamsky is a great example. Check out him getting pwned by WFB Jr on youtube.
1) Conspiracy does exist, most criminal law is based on conspiracy, an illicit action involving two or more people.
If the Government can use this concept to go after you,
why can’t you use it to go after them ?
So conspiracy is a fact recognized in law, not merely
a theory.
2) Most of what I have referred to you and unlike you,
I have provided copious references, has little to do with
conspiracy since the criminal actions of the US State
are open and well documented.
3) I saw Master Booeyfuckley’s 1969 interview with
Chomsky wherein Master Booeyfuckley threatened
to punch Chomsky in the mouth ! Guess what,
I wasn’t impressed and that was just the beginning
of Chomsky’s public political career. You can’t
even spell Chomsky’s name. Have you any of
his 20 plus books on US foreign policy ?
4) Since you haven’t read any of the revisionist
authors that I have cited, how would you know
that they were half-factual ??????????????????
That would still make them 50% more factual
than YOU.
You are a rightwing Know-Nothing.
5) You are PATHETIC.
Left out “read” in my final sentence in Point Three,
after “Have you” it should have been there.
The point’s pretty obvious though.
Well, that was a pleasure to read! Thank you gentlemen