“Statism”
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Will sticks up for it, and good for him: I deserve to stand accused as often as anyone else, but it’s a largely contentless epithet that serves to do little more than generate bad feelings. And at the end of the day everyone (well, almost everyone) is a statist, and the focus of our disputes is really the question of what kind of state that state should be.
Or is that too quick? There’s a temptation, I think, to make all of this into nothing more than an issue of engineering, as if once the economics are in place people will have no choice but to fall in line. But as we’ve seen before that just ain’t so: our disputes have to do with more than just the empirical questions of how the welfare state is most effectively administered, and all the empirical data in the world aren’t going to resolve things on their own. The case of just war theory can be instructive, I think: as Daniel has observed, the just war tradition can be utilized quite differently depending on whether your starting point presumes in favor of “loopholes” or of “barriers”; if the former, then you’ll tend to find that the just war criteria make your war of choice look a-okay, and if the latter, then you won’t. So maybe progressives are like knee-jerk interventionists in this regard, always ready to pounce on the evidence that supports the case for shiny new domestic programs but much, much harder to persuade when the available evidence seems to point the other way. That’s not at all to say that the project of liberaltarian dialogue can be fruitful in the long term, but only that, well, it looks like that term will be pretty darn long.
While we’re on the subject of war, though, isn’t that the elephant in the room here? I mean, I’m not a tenth the social liberal that Will is, nor am I an open borders devotee, etc. etc., but the fact remains that I wouldn’t think of supporting the GOP so long as it remains the party of bloated defense budgets, unapologetic support for the Iraq war, and bomb bomb bomb, bomb bomb Iran, not to mention freedom fries, FISA, the PATRIOT Act, torture, and the rest. That’s statism, my friends, and if Jonah Goldberg really can’t see why a committed libertarian might regard such a party as a lost cause to be jettisoned in favor of an admittedly unattractive other, then he clearly needs to think things through again.
Filed under: government/law, libertarianism, war
I think your last point on foreign policy often gets lost in these discussion. Goldberg goes to great lengths to distinguish between Republicans and Democrats on economic policy. And fair enough – there are a few real differences between the two parties on fiscal policy. But someone ought to tell him that libertarians also care about civil liberties, foreign policy, and (to varying degrees) social egalitarianism, and on these issues, it’s much easier to distinguish between Democrats and Republicans.
Let’s try this one more time in the right thread:
Will’s definition of Statist is pretty broad. Any non anarchist qualifies. I suppose I’m a statist too. I want my State to have more freedom. But once we’ve erased the difference between Federalists and anti-Federalists, there’s not much left to argue about.
One of my main problems with Will’s position, is a porous border. If the State is nothing more than an imaginary line on a map is it still a state? Amazingly, I think that securing the borders and instituting an intelligent immigration policy like Canada’s is necessary for many of the social goods we seek, from labor to schools.
[...] John Schwenkler: While we’re on the subject of war, though, isn’t that the elephant in the room here? I mean, I’m not a tenth the social liberal that Will is, nor am I an open borders devotee, etc. etc., but the fact remains that I wouldn’t think of supporting the GOP so long as it remains the party of bloated defense budgets, unapologetic support for the Iraq war, and bomb bomb bomb, bomb bomb Iran, not to mention freedom fries, FISA, the PATRIOT Act, torture, and the rest. That’s statism, my friends, and if Jonah Goldberg really can’t see why a committed libertarian might regard such a party as a lost cause to be jettisoned in favor of an admittedly unattractive other, then he clearly needs to think things through again. [...]
[...] Wilkinson and John Schwenkler respond, arguing that at the end of the day, anyone other than an anarchist is a [...]
Trying to get a bead on your idea of appropriate military expenditure. Sounds as if you think the early 20th century isolationists had it about right. If not, if you are down with Wilson/FDR/Nixon interventionism, the gripe about our bloated defense budget (voted for my members of both parties) rings a little hollow to me.
Yep. At least about right.
“Sounds as if you think the early 20th century isolationists had it about right.
Yep. At least about right.”
I’ll second that. Have you seen Larison’s post?
Yep – never miss ‘em.
Most people who use “statism” as an indictment of central control go by the definition of –
The practice or doctrine of giving a centralized government control over economic planning and policy.
This seems pretty useful to justify the term — by any other name it would be the same. And killing the term by stretching it to those who propose a minimal state is misleading — a reaction to the term that hits a nerve.
But if that’s what’s at stake, then no one (by which I mean: no one in the US with any real political influence) is a statist, and so the GOP’s legendary “anti-statism” simply amounts to their ability to fight a powerless and largely mythical bogeyman.