The Enemy Is Always the State

The web loves nothing more than a good brawl, so people often write me to ask me to respond to a critic of LRC or the Mises Institute. There's certainly no shortage of them, and they come from the left, the right, and everything in between. My first thought on the request is that the archive speaks for itself, and a response would amount to little more than reprinting. And yet the criticisms in themselves are interesting because often they come from people who liked one thing we said and then felt betrayed by another thing we said, so we get praise for the first thing and attacked for the second thing.

There is a response to make that covers all these critics but first let me give you a better feel for what I'm talking about. Let's say that we run an article exposing how the corporate elites are working in league with the government to make profits from war and destruction. The left cheers. The next day we attack the idea of a new tax on corporations or some federal antitrust action, and come to the defense of big business. The left screams betrayal and announces that our side of the debate has sold out.

On a much lower level, the same happens concerning party politics. We attack Republicans and Democrats cheer. Then we attack Democrats and they scream at us for failing to back the party to the end.

The same happens on the right. One day we attack the organized victim lobby for pushing for government privileges for blacks, or gays, or women, or for using "multiculturalism" as a moral imperative to curb the right of free association. The right celebrates that we have enlisted in the culture war! The next day we attack Christians for demanding coerced prayer in coerced school or for backing surveillance in the war on drugs. Then the Christian right says that we have sold our souls to the Devil.

Another example of a more complicated topic concerns immigration. Throughout modern history, the state has used immigrants as a tool to ratchet up power for itself. This takes the form of requiring tax-funded services like public schools and medical services, or in browbeating the citizens to embrace all newcomers while enforcing anti-discrimination law. Nor are citizens under these conditions permitted to notice the rise in crime that accompanies some immigration or the demographic upheavals that people resent. The result of immigration waves is to diminish liberty for American citizens.

At the same time, anti-immigrationist sentiment can also be used by the state to expand its power. In the name of a crackdown, the state invades the rights of business and demands documentation of every employee. It sends its bureaucrats all over the country and works toward a national ID card. It makes it virtually impossible for corporations to hire people, even temporary workers, from other countries, all in the name of national security or stopping immigration. The state is happy to whip up nativist frenzy in the name of loving the homeland in order to enhance its power. This harms productivity and makes us all less free.

So you see the problem here. The state uses both pro- and anti-immigration sentiment in its favor. So to battle this problem, the libertarian will be sympathetic with one point of view in one political context and another point of view in a different context. It really depends on what kind of rhetorical apparatus the state is using at the moment. The groups that deserve support are those that are resisting the state. It is not unusual to see those very groups won over by the state at a later stage of development of statism, in which case libertarian sympathies have to change.

Murray Rothbard noted this his entire life. When he was young, the resistance league was found among the remnants of the Old Right that opposed the New Deal and wartime planning. But then the right was won over by the warfare state, and his sympathies changed to the point that he sided with the New Left against the state. But of course the left then gained power and its ideologues sold out, and the right went into resistance mode again. Murray chronicled the shifts while they took place while maintaining a hard and fast adherence to principle.

Let's look at recent political history to see how this works. In the 1990s, the right was the resistance. It battled Clintonian socialism and warfare internationalism. It resented the regime's tendency toward centralization and its relentless putting down of the cultural attachments of the American bourgeoisie. The resentment was felt intensely by the middle class, which swept George Bush into power on the promise of cutting government and a less belligerent foreign policy.

But the middle class had been bamboozled yet again, and the very cultural impulses that the Clinton regime attacked were used by the Bush regime as a means of expanding its domestic and international empire. Christianity was invoked not as a reason to resist the state, but rather to obey it in all things, since Bush claimed its wars were godly and its domestic policy was moving Christianity to the front of the political bus. The booboisie fell for it in every way, creating the scary political machine I've called Red State Fascism.

So of course the red-staters are going to feel betrayed if they expect us to be sympathetic with their political impulses regardless of whether they are fighting the state or fighting for the state. These are completely different motives with opposite results. Power corrupts anyone who gets it, whether that is the right or the left or anything else in between. And the consistent libertarian must battle power no matter what its color or variety. This is what Mises did in his life. Rothbard too. So too for the entire liberal tradition. The true liberal, in pursuit of fixed principles, must never have fixed political alliances. They must change based on the ruling rationale of the moment.

Let me state this as plainly as possible. The enemy is the state. There are other enemies too, but none so fearsome, destructive, dangerous, or culturally and economically debilitating. No matter what other proximate enemy you can name – big business, unions, victim lobbies, foreign lobbies, medical cartels, religious groups, classes, city dwellers, farmers, left-wing professors, right-wing blue-collar workers, or even bankers and arms merchants – none are as horrible as the hydra known as the leviathan state. If you understand this point – and only this point – you can understand the core of libertarian strategy.

There were tremendous advances in state theory in the twentieth century. Start with Franz Oppenheimer's The State (1908). Read A.J. Nock's Our Enemy, the State (1935). Learn from Chodorov's Rise and Fall of Society (1959). Turn to Rothbard's unsurpassed masterwork For a New Liberty (1973). To understand the historical sweep, see Martin Van Creveld's Rise and Decline of the State (1999). Then you will understand why we do what we do. Until then, our critics remain unknowing dupes of the very forces they should be fighting.

Economics focus

Malthus, the false prophet

The pessimistic parson and early political economist remains as wrong as ever

AMID an astonishing surge in food prices, which has sparked riots and unrest in many countries and is making even the relatively affluent citizens of America and Europe feel the pinch, faith in the ability of global markets to fill nearly 7 billion bellies is dwindling. Given the fear that a new era of chronic shortages may have begun, it is perhaps understandable that the name of Thomas Malthus is in the air. Yet if his views were indeed now correct, that would defy the experience of the past two centuries.

Malthus first set out his ideas in 1798 in “An Essay on the Principle of Population”. This expounded a tragic twin trajectory for the growth of human populations and the increase of food supply. Whereas the natural tendency was for populations to grow without end, food supply would run up against the limit of finite land. As a result, the “positive checks” of higher mortality caused by famine, disease and war were necessary to bring the number of people back in line with the capacity to feed them.

In a second edition published in 1803, Malthus softened his original harsh message by introducing the idea of moral restraint. Such a “preventive check”, operating through the birth rather than the death rate, could provide a way to counter the otherwise inexorable logic of too many mouths chasing too little food. If couples married late and had fewer children, population growth could be sufficiently arrested for agriculture to cope.

It was the misfortune of Malthus—but the good luck of generations born after him—that he wrote at an historical turning point. His ideas, especially his later ones, were arguably an accurate description of pre-industrial societies, which teetered on a precarious balance between empty and full stomachs. But the industrial revolution, which had already begun in Britain, was transforming the long-term outlook for economic growth. Economies were starting to expand faster than their populations, bringing about a sustained improvement in living standards.

Far from food running out, as Malthus had feared, it became abundant as trade expanded and low-cost agricultural producers like Argentina and Australia joined the world economy. Reforms based on sound political economy played a vital role, too. In particular, the abolition of the Corn Laws in 1846 paved the way for British workers to gain from cheap food imports.

Malthus got his demographic as well as his economic predictions wrong. His assumption that populations would carry on growing in times of plenty turned out to be false. Starting in Europe, one country after another underwent a “demographic transformation” as economic development brought greater prosperity. Both birth and death rates dropped and population growth eventually started to slow.

The Malthusian heresy re-emerged in the early 1970s, the last time food prices shot up. Then, at least, there appeared to be some cause for demographic alarm. Global-population growth had picked up sharply after the second world war because it took time for high birth rates in developing countries to follow down the plunge in infant-mortality rates brought about by modern medicine. But once again the worries about overpopulation proved mistaken as the “green revolution” and further advances in agricultural efficiency boosted food supply.

If the world's population growth was a false concern four decades ago, when it peaked at 2% a year, it is even less so now that it has slowed to 1.2%. But even though crude demography is not to blame, changing lifestyles arising from rapid economic growth especially in Asia are a new worry. As the Chinese have become more affluent, they have started to consume more meat, raising the underlying demand for basic food since cattle need more grain to feed than humans. Neo-Malthusians question whether the world can provide 6.7 billion people (rising to 9.2 billion by 2050) with a Western-style diet.

Once again the gloom is overdone. There may no longer be virgin lands to be settled and cultivated, as in the 19th century, but there is no reason to believe that agricultural productivity has hit a buffer. Indeed, one of the main barriers to another “green revolution” is unwarranted popular worries about genetically modified foods, which is holding back farm output not just in Europe, but in the developing countries that could use them to boost their exports.

Political folly increases in a geometrical ratio

As so often, governments are making matters worse. Food-export bans are proliferating. Although these may produce temporary relief for any one country, the more they spread the tighter global markets become. Another wrongheaded policy has been America's subsidy to domestic ethanol production in a bid to reduce dependence on imported oil. This misconceived attempt to grow more fuel rather than to curb demand is expected to gobble up a third of this year's maize (corn) crop.

Although neo-Malthusianism naturally has much to say about food scarcity, the doctrine emerges more generally as the idea of absolute limits on resources and energy, such as the notion of “peak oil”. Following the earlier scares of the 1970s, oil companies defied the pessimists by finding extra fields, not least since higher prices had spurred new exploration. But even if oil wells were to run dry, economies can still adapt by finding and exploiting other energy sources.

A new form of Malthusian limit has more recently emerged through the need to constrain greenhouse-gas emissions in order to tackle global warming. But this too can be overcome by shifting to a low-carbon economy. As with agriculture, the main difficulty in making the necessary adjustment comes from poor policies, such as governments' reluctance to impose a carbon tax. There may be curbs on traditional forms of growth, but there is no limit to human ingenuity. That is why Malthus remains as wrong today as he was two centuries ago.