( Part I not relevant to the issue of libertarian origins, etc )
Daily Kos
Tues. Feb 27, 2007
_Ask a Libertarian, Part II: _
(http://www.dailykos.com/story/2007/02/27/306327/-Ask-a-Libertarian,-Part-II:-The-Constitution-as-Libertarian-Myth)
The Constitution as Libertarian Myth
by _LoganFerree_ (http://www.dailykos.com/user/LoganFerree)
One of the core suggestions by _Chris Clarke_
(http://pandagon.net/2007/02/23/how-to-explain-things-to-libertarians/) [at
the website Pendagon ] on
how to make a libertarian's head explode is to confront them with the "true
history" of their ideology. What is ironic is that most libertarians
already understand their history better than Clarke does, and those that would
be
surprised by Clarke's statement hardly hold a consistent libertarian
ideology. Clarke's claim:
Most American Libertarians have precious little grasp of the history of
their political philosophy. They seem to think that the Libertarian school of
thought sprang fully formed like Athena from Ayn Rand’s beetled brow, with
Robert Heinlein as attending midwife. Libertarianism’s true origins,
however, unsettle most Libertarians to the point where the mere acceptance of
that history often starts those rusty old mental gears grinding again. To
wit, and here is tactical nuclear sentence number one:
"Libertarianism originated in the philosophy of a left-wing French
political philosopher who also influenced Karl Marx."
The French Philosopher in question is, as some of you have guessed (and
with whose description a few of you are no doubt ready to quibble),
Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, who famously penned the Libertarians’ Sekrit Motto,
"Property is Theft." Of course unlike modern Libertarians, Proudhon meant that
as a
condemnation. Among the pre-Marxist political thinkers strongly influenced
by Proudhon was Johann Kaspar Schmidt, who under the pen name Max Stirner
wrote one of the first true capital-L Libertarian texts, Der Einzige und
sein Eigentum, which can be translated either as "The Ego and Its Own" or,
more literally and more tellingly, "The Individual And His Property." Stirner
became a nucleus of a nascent school of political thought then called
"individualist anarchism,"*** whose inheritance-tax-free heirs include Ludwig
Von Mises, The Austrian and Chicago Schools, Murray Rothbard, Alan
Greenspan, and so on.
No, Ayn Rand is not the mother of libertarianism, her ideology is
Objectivism and many of her most loyal followers look down on libertarianism.
More
than anything else, one of my primary goals with this series is to hammer
home the point that Ayn Rand's movement is Objectivism, not libertarianism,
and the two are not one in the same. Objectivists believe that they have
a comprehensive philosophy that guides all of their actions, including
their political views. To them, libertarianism is just a set of opinions and
beliefs about government. Many, if not most, libertarians find Ayn Rand's
ideas interesting and believe that she got some things right. Occasionally
similar ideas and conclusions does not mean that they are the same. Al
Gore and Jerry Falwell are both Christian but they are not identical.
Alternatively, some liberals and progressives may agree with some of the
critiques
of capitalism by Karl Marx without being full fledged supporters of the
Communist Revolution. Ayn Rand remains a controversial figure within
libertarianism as her outlook focused on the ends, not so much the means. As
such, Objectivists at times end up supporting government as a means to an end,
while libertarians are fundamentally distrustful of government as a means,
regardless of the end. Objectivists, far more than libertarians, are
supportive of the War in Iraq as a way of spreading "liberty" and "democracy."
Clarke is right to point out the influence that Proudhon had on Von Mises,
Rothbard, the Austrian and Chicago schools, and others who have built
American libertarianism. This is not news to libertarians. But I think that
Clarke is right in that some libertarians do need to be criticized for their
view of history. There is a constant claim within libertarianism that the
movement is nothing more than the classical liberalism of the Founding
Fathers still alive in today's modern world. Not all libertarians make this
claim, but enough do for it to warrant deeper discussion.
Find yourself a copy of the United States Constitution. Perhaps you have
a copy handy on your bookshelf, otherwise you can just _look it up online_
(http://www.usconstitution.net/const.html) . A lot of Libertarians will hold
up the Constitution as a great and sacred document, a kind of a political
Garden of Eden that we have fallen from. Michael Badnarik, 2004
Libertarian Presidential nominee, styles himself _a constitutional scholar for
the
masses_ (http://www.constitutionpreservation.org/) ; 1988 Libertarian
Presidential nominee _Ron Paul votes no on anything that isn't specifically
enumerated in the Constitution_
(http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1571/is_33_17/ai_78127745) . Even
without directly mentioning the Constitution,
_the right-libertarian Cato Institute talks about_
(http://www.cato.org/about/about.html) "the principles of the American
Revolution--individual
liberty, limited government, the free market, and the rule of law." Over and
over again, the modern day libertarian movement turns to our founding
document as a patriotic reassurance that they are in the right. Yet they are
unable to overcome a simple problem: the Constitution is not a libertarian
document.
To equate libertarianism with the classical liberalism that influenced our
Founding Fathers is a philosophical error. While no doubt many classical
liberals call themselves libertarians today, the modern movement has been
heavily influenced by Austrian economics and Murray Rothard and takes a far
more negative view of the state than the old men with wigs who wrote the
Constitution. Even the minarchists (libertarians who believe that society
needs a state, in contrast to anarchists who believe that society doesn't
need a state) who stop short of outright anarchism and the abolition of the
state would have been seen as the most radical of radicals in the early
Republic; they would have made the Locofocos look mainstream. John Locke, Adam
Smith and the rest of the classical liberal gang did express a mistrust of
state power and its granting of monopolistic privilege, but they also
supported a state for the maintenance of law and order in the face of natural
anarchy. A quick glance at the Constitution reveals that the Founding
Fathers, far from consistently favoring a system that viewed the state as a
necessary evil, saw a role for government to "establish Justice, insure
domestic
Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare,
and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity."
The minarchist may still argue that these broad general principles are
fully compatible with a limited government favored by modern day libertarians.
But the Constitution is also the source for Congress's power to lay
excises (the ancestor to our modern day sin taxes, which libertarians often
criticize), to lay tariffs and regulate commerce (protectionism, a huge no-no
to libertarianism), to borrow money and therefore establish a national debt
(say goodbye to balanced budgets, another libertarian ideal), to establish
post offices and post roads (see _my previous complaints_
(http://freedomdemocrats.org/node/1247) about this monopolistic agency), and
to grant
patents and copyrights (which is a contentious subject within libertarianism,
some favoring it and some opposing it). Even a strict interpretation of the
Constitution would grant the government powers that libertarians today
complain about.
General welfare, that loosely defined term that continues to drive
libertarians crazy in discussing constitutional interpretations, was a very
real
concept to these classical liberals. The patent system is one example of
how government intervention in creating monopolistic privilege was justified
because of its positive impact on the general welfare. "To promote the
Progress of Science and useful Arts," Congress was granted the ability to
grant
patents and copyrights. While this was undoubtedly an intrusion into the
free market as understood at the time (patents in British law were
specifically treated as a form of monopoly), it was seen as a proper role of
government in promoting the general welfare through encouraging science.
Overtime, of course, the argument would develop that inventors had some type
of
"intellectual property right" to a patent, but that was hardly the focus of
the Founding Fathers. Far from being a political Garden of Eden, the
original Constitution was itself a fall from libertarian utopia. While L.
Neil
Smith sees the Constitution itself as the original sin with the Articles of
Confederation the libertarian Garden of Eden, it is more realistic to
accept that the Founding Fathers and the newly independent states that they
represented were not libertarian.
Other libertarians try to place the fall from grace at the Civil War, when
President Lincoln and his Radical Republican Congress implemented a host
of statist policies ranging from protectionism to massive transportation
subsidies to well connected businessmen. See _here_
(http://www.lewrockwell.com/dilorenzo/dilorenzo112.html) for an example of
libertarianism criticism
of Lincoln Yet one can hardly defend the antebellum republic as
libertarian given the system of slavery. The Constitution did nothing to
change this,
it in fact solidified by including Article 4, Section 2, Clause 3: "No
Person held to Service or Labour in one State, under the Laws thereof,
escaping into another, shall, in Consequence of any Law or Regulation therein,
be
discharged from such Service or Labour, But shall be delivered up on Claim
of the Party to whom such Service or Labour may be due." And how do we
view the track record of expansionism? President Madison started an avoidable
war in an attempt to seize control of Canada, while President Polk
provoked war with Mexico to fulfill Manifest Destiny. Part of the fame of
Andrew
Jackson was his role in seizing control of Florida as General, without
Congressional approval it should be noted. John Anthony Quitman and William
Walker were less successful in their own filibustering expeditions.
Interventionism seems to have a long history in American history, and I can
only
guess how liberventionists (people who claim to be libertarians yet have an
approach far closer to Objectivism, with its support of state intervention
for the cause of liberty--this is one form of vulgar libertarianism) who
today cheer on the Iraq War in the name of "liberty" would react to my
criticisms of the expansion of our republic.
The United States of America has never had a libertarian government,
assuming there can be such a thing. The existence of legal slavery ought to
rule out the antebellum republic, regardless of how limited its financial
resources were compared to the nation as a whole. It seems to me that only
the
critics of libertarianism and vulgar corporate apologists who like the
idea of monopolies running the economy attempt to argue that the Gilded Age
was libertarian. And once you get up into the Progressive Era, no one, not
even critics of libertarianism will make such a claim, although I do think
we somehow always end up getting blamed for the Great Depression. Of
course, other critics (or even the very same that will in another breath point
out that we've tried libertarianism) will also say that libertarianism is a
utopian scheme because it's never been done before. I've never seen someone
eat their cake and have it too, but it seems like people keep trying
anyway. It is no fault of libertarianism and the strength of its ideas that
it
hasn't been tried before.
Libertarianism is something new, there is nothing classical about it. As I
illustrated above, the classically liberal constitution granted Congress
the explicit ability to grant patents and lay tariffs, two of the four
cornerstones of privilege and statism according to Benjamin Tucker (a very
influential American anarchist). And it left unchallenged the system of
privilege in the land and money monopolies, although the period of free
banking in
the antebellum republic probably did come close to breaking the latter.
By opposing the statist status quo, the libertarian movement no doubt
appeals to those that still have a classically liberal view of politics. But
the
libertarian movement is larger than just that, it holds a radically
skeptical view of government's ability to promote the general welfare without
creating privilege and inequality. Following through this critique of
government to its natural ends arguable will result in anarchist conclusions,
but
libertarianism still has the perception of being minarchist. I don't think
it matters if libertarianism advertises itself as explicitly minarchist or
anarchist, the critique of government is the founding principle and it is
what distinguishes it from classical liberalism.
Much as modern day Christianity and Rabbinical Judaism developed out of
radically different Temple Judaism over two millennium ago, modern day
liberalism and libertarianism share a similar ancestry. This is something
that
is disputed by some activists on both sides of the debate. But ancestry does
not mean that they are one and the same, libertarianism has expanded on
classical liberalism's critique of government while modern liberalism has
instead focused on classical liberalism's belief in democracy and the ability
to govern with a mind toward the common good. Classical liberalism held
both of these seemingly paradoxical principles, with some followers leaning
more toward one or the other. Following the abortive attempt by Hamilton and
the Federalists to establish a truly conservative society in the Americas,
most of our political debate has been within the range of liberalism.
While adopting some of the programs of Hamilton, the American System of Clay
was designed to encourage broad economic growth and intensification, not a
new aristocratic elite. This is illustrated by Clay and the Whigs favoring
high tarrifs, which would have a widespread impact in benefiting all
domestic manufacturers of the protected good, in contrast to Hamilton's
support
for subsidies and bounties that, like today's agricultural subsidies, would
benefit larger producers at the expense of the small independent artisan.
Libertarianism is not a fetish worship of liberty, nor is it clinging to
our Constitution as an ideal document. It is intellectually dishonest to
claim classical liberalism as our own and modern liberalism as some form of a
bastard son; both movement can claim classical liberalism as an influence.
Focusing on rolling back the clock to 1859 or 1800 is not libertarian, it
is both radical and conservative in clinging to the past as better than
our present condition.
You may ask though, just how has libertarianism gotten itself caught up
with Objectivists and corporate apologists. In this _political typology by
David Bruhn_ (http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2005/7/7/281/05051) , he attempts
to distinguish between ends and means. Libertarianism is ultimately an
ideology focused on means, it is critical of government as a means to any end.
However, political activists in the past have influenced the conventional
wisdom of what a society without a government, or with little government
intervention, would look like. During the fusionism of the 1950s, it was
argued that social conservatives should be libertarians because without a
strong government to influence society and culture, family and church would be
the two primary institutions to impact morality. Decades later, social
conservatives have jumped off the libertarian bandwagon and are now pushing
for a large degree of government intervention in society to enforce their
own moral code.
So you can see, libertarianism can attract two types of people:
1- Those that are libertarian because they agree with the libertarian
means of minimal government.
2- Those that are libertarian because they believe that libertarian means
will produce the end result that they desire.
As conventional wisdom changes, so does this second group. The biggest
problem for overcoming stereotypical views of libertarianism comes from this
second group. They are the individuals who are first drawn to
libertarianism because they think it will give them what they want, and
overtime they
identify libertarianism not with the means, but the end result they desire.
And soon you have the corporate apologists, the vulgar libertarians, who
believe that libertarianism means taking the side of corporations in any
political dispute. This is in contrast to the authentic libertarian position,
which is critical of corporations because of their manipulation of the
political process in an attempt to distort the free market. As
anarcho-capitalist David Friedman says, "The capitalist system of coordination
by trade
seems to be largely populated by indigestible lumps of socialism called
corporations." Libertarianism is not simply an ideology that believes that
those poor old bosses need all the help they can get.
--
Centroids: The Center of the Radical Centrist Community
<[email protected]>
Google Group: http://groups.google.com/group/RadicalCentrism
Radical Centrism website and blog: http://RadicalCentrism.org
