The
Future of Freedom Foundation| The
Future of Freedom Foundation |
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January
28, 2008 Yes, the time for this debate is long overdue. Unfortunately, the quality of the debate on the other side is pathetic. Proponents of America-as-world-policeman think they can get away with sneers and slogans — and they may be right. The media stars who seem so incredulous and amused when interviewing a noninterventionist such as Representative Paul are like putty in the hands of American imperialists such as John McCain, Rudy Giuliani, Mitt Romney, Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and John Edwards. To say the imperialists miss the point would be a gross understatement. McCain, for example, says he would have no problem keeping troops in Iraq for a hundred years or more. What matters to Americans, he says, is not how long the troops are away, but whether they are taking casualties. How about what matters to the Iraqis or other people forced to host a foreign army? And perhaps Americans too will mind if “blowback” occurs and resentful Iraqis engage in terrorism in the United States. Bret Stephens of the Wall Street Journal, in criticizing Representative Paul’s call for a full U.S. withdrawal from the Middle East, writes, “Liberal societies are built on the belief in (and defense of) individual rights, but also on the overawing power of government to transform natural rights into civil ones. In the same way, trade between nations is only possible in the absence of robbers, pirates and other rogues. Whose job is it to get rid of them?” It is the mark of a devout statist to attribute all good things to the state. In fact, civil societies, as Thomas Paine pointed out long ago, evolve on their own. Occasionally government has protected rights, but far more often it has usurped them. As for protecting international trade, why assume only a government can do that? Stephens makes a peculiar argument: “A strict libertarian might offer that mercenaries could be authorized to build aircraft carriers, Aegis cruisers and nuclear submarines to keep the freedom of the seas in the Straits of Hormuz and Malacca. But what happens when the pecuniary interests of mercenaries collide with the political interests of the U.S. or some other government?” That argument cuts both ways. What happens when the interests of a government that has assumed the role as protector of world trade collide with the interests of the people in whose name it acts or some other people? That is not a hypothetical question. It happens every day. Governments seize their revenue by force and are essentially unaccountable. Any resemblance between their interests and the interests of ordinary people is largely coincidental. The trade issue is a distraction, actually. George Bush did not go to war against Iraq and hasn’t thought about going to war against Iran to protect world commerce. Stephens writes, “Mankind is not comprised solely of profit- and pleasure-seekers; the quest for prestige and dominance and an instinct for nihilism are also inscribed in human nature, nowhere more so than in the Middle East. Libertarianism makes no accounting for this. It assumes the relatively tame aspirations of modern American life are a baseline for human nature, not an achievement of civilization.” Is he serious? Libertarians make no accounting for people motivated by the desire to dominate? If that were true we wouldn’t work so hard to minimize government power. When will interventionists realize that their plans for protecting us from bad guys abroad require the placement of awesome corrupting power in the hands of politicians here? “There is a not-incidental connection here between libertarianism and pacifism,” he writes. Leave it to an interventionist to think that the opposite of imperialism is pacifism.
Gary D. Barnett is a Policy Advisor at The Future of Freedom Foundation (www.fff.org) and President of Barnett Financial Services, Inc., in Lewistown, Montana. Tibor Machan is a Hoover research fellow, Professor Emeritus, Department of Philosophy, Auburn University, Alabama, holds the R.C. Hoiles Chair in Business Ethics and Free Enterprise at Chapman University’s Argyros School of B and E and is a research fellow at the Pacific Research Institute and Hoover Institution (Stanford). He is an advisor to Freedom Communications. His most recent book is Libertarianism Defended, (Ashgate, 2006).
Sheldon Richman is senior fellow at The Future of Freedom Foundation in Fairfax, Va., author of Tethered Citizens: Time to Repeal the Welfare State, and editor of The Freeman magazine. Visit his blog “Free Association."
Scott McPherson is a policy advisor at The Future of Freedom Foundation.
Samuel Bostaph is head of the economics department at the University of Dallas and an academic advisor to The Future of Freedom Foundation
Anthony Gregory is a policy advisor at The Future of Freedom Foundation
James Bovard is the author of Attention Deficit Democracy (Palgrave, January 2006) and Terrorism & Tyranny (Palgrave, 2003), and is policy advisor at The Future of Freedom Foundation
Benedict LaRosa is a historian and writer and serves as a policy advisor to The Future of Freedom Foundation
Bart Frazier is program director at The Future of Freedom Foundation.
Mr. Hornberger is founder and president of The Future of Freedom Foundation. Send him email. |
A Bogus Libertarian Defense of War Do Americans Owe Service to the Nation? Are Presidents Entitled to Kill Foreigners? The Failed Legacy of Interventionism America's Anti-Militarist Tradition The FBI's Right to Threaten Torture Busy Bush Has Time to Run the World Woodstock May Have Saved Sen. McCain's Life A Day in the Life of an Unwilling "Federal Agent" Should the State License Human Beings? Torturing the Language of Torture Are Conservatives (Undocumented) Aliens? More Victims of Immigration Control Complete Archives for The Future of Freedom Foundation  |
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