I was recently forwarded this 2-year-old Non Sequitur as part of an email "memorial chain" for the victims of the Holocaust. My suspicion is that this is an exercise in preaching to the choir: the recipients of this email memorial will probably say "Amen," but think nothing new and do nothing new because of it.

Maybe this blog is a similar exercise in choir preaching, but it continues to bother me that history's atrocities are blamed on "extremists."

Extremism is just a dirty word for logical consistency. Don't blame Nazism on logical consistency. Blame it on the root philosophy — a philosophy of government and economy that very few in the choir understand beyond the central emphasis that the Nazis hated Jews and murdered millions.

Here's what I wrote about all this 2 years ago:

I, extremist

Today's Non-Sequitur is upsetting on several levels.

Seeing Danae in a concentration camp had the effect on me I'm sure Wiley sought. And I'm the last person to claim that there's anything inherently wrong with references to Hitler or the Holocaust (see "In Defense of Referencing Hitler") but when you make such comparisons, you'd better be clear on the parallel, and you'd better be right.

Having learned where and why the old man involuntarily received his numerical tattoo, Danae wonders why he hasn't had it removed...

I don't know whether Wiley meant to be targeting neocon war hawks, the Religious Right, the Bush administration, or extremists in general, but the words he chose explicitly target all political extremists, which would include me.

As Karl Hess wrote for Barry Goldwater,

...extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice. And let me remind you also that moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue."

Every attack on political extremism is an attack on principle. The consistent application of principle is by definition extremist (so long as we're actually defining terms and using them consistently, rather than appealing always and only to emotional reflexes). It should be clear to anyone who can keep his knee from jerking for 30 seconds, that the problem isn't extremism per se, but rather which ideology is being applied in the extreme. Extreme pacifists will tend to behave quite differently from extreme nationalists. Extreme libertarians (i.e., liberal anarchists) will not lock people up just because of their background, whereas extreme egalitarians already have.

The standard attack on extremism is not an appeal to reason, but its opposite: the conflation of ideologies and the decrying of principle.

So according to Wiley, extremism in the defense of liberty can lead to another Holocaust. Try to figure that one out!

The problem isn't only with confusion on the words principle and extremism; there's also the standard problem that comes from the leftist map of politics. The Left and Right dichotomy may have started with 18th and 19th-century French republicans, but it has been applied throughout the world (especially the West) by 20th-century socialists.

First the Left is defined as progress, as it was for the French (and for classical liberals in general, back when progressives were the people who opposed the Ancien Regime). But now "progress" is linked to the State as egalitarian regulator, social safety net, etc. Thus "Progressives" are always calling for bigger and ever more pervasive government.

The Right, in contrast, is anyone opposed to the Left, anyone opposed to their vision of progress. We are the reactionaries, again by definition. For the socialists who controlled and continue to control the political language of Establishment intellectuals, all opponents of socialism are rightwing -- to varying degrees. So the classical liberals were rightwing, but then so were the fascists.

You might object, isn't fascism just nationalist socialism? Didn't the national socialists oppose liberal capitalism just as much as they opposed illiberal Communism? Sure, but to the left-socialists, any non-egalitarian socialists weren't real socialists. Since the fascists claimed to be defending the bourgeoisie and were, in fact, the dominant opposition to the Communists in many parts of the world, they were really the Right. Maybe these rightwingers said they opposed free-market capitalism, but any good socialist could see right through that: fascism was clearly the epitome of capitalism! (I'm not making this up.)

It didn't matter that classical liberalism and fascism are completely at odds, ideologically -- that one is based on individualism and laissez-faire, while the other is based on national collectivism and economic corpratism -- the Left just asserted that one led inexorably to the other, and we've been lumped together as rightwing extremists ever since.

I have no emotional attachment to the word extremist. I'm not trying to hold onto it the way I'm trying to hold on to the word liberal. I just don't like it when people throw more mud into already muddy waters.

• See Rothbard on moderation.
• See BK on moderation.
• See BlackCrayon.com on centrism.

Postscript to anyone who says that this is "just semantics": if you care about justice, if you care about meaning, then a just semantics is exactly what you care about.

PPS: If the leftwing scare-tactic smear term is "extremist" then the rightwing scare-tactic smear term is "radical". They're not equivalent terms, since radicalism is about perceiving both the problem and the solution as being at the "root" or foundation of the status quo, whereas extremism can designate any position, pro- or anti-radical, taken to the extreme. I am a radical extremist in the Rothbardian tradition, which is neither violent nor revolutionary. (Unfortunately, Murray Rothbard himself was responsible for some confusion on this point back in the 1960s.) Not all extremism is violent, just as not all radicalism is red.

Jeffrey Tucker writes:

The phrase "Merchants of Death" takes center stage in the movie Iron Man, which is a spectacular exposé of a subject that dominates the American economic landscape but about which Americans have very little knowledge. The phrase and the movie deal with the odd juxtaposition of capitalism and war as found in the weapons industry. Here we have innovations and efficiency of the type we associate with the private commercial sector but serving ends that are the very opposite of capitalism. The industry serves war, not peace, depends on coercion, not human volition, and profits from destruction, not creation.…

The existence of such an industry scandalized Americans in the interwar period, and there was one treatise that led the way in helping to foment the outrage. In fact, it was a bestselling book in 1934 with the title Merchants of Death. This book is not a typical left-wing style attacks on commerce as the essence of war. In fact, it argues the opposite:

"The arms industry did not create the war system.
On the contrary, the war system created the arms industry."

FULL ARTICLE

I'm a big fan of highbrow Cliff Notes. For example, Kant's famous metaphysical treatise is called
Critique of Pure Reason; I eventually had to read it for an upper-level course on Kant, but in 101, we read his much shorter Prolegomena to any Future Metaphysics, which was, our intro professor explained to us, Kant's own summary presentation of his longer work.

These days, I'm reading H.G. Wells's A Short History of the World, which is the summary version of his two-volume Outline of History.

In both cases, the author wrote his own summary. I couldn't hope for an equivalent with the Bible — which I've started several times but never made it out of Genesis — so instead I'm reading and enjoying David Plotz's "Blogging the Bible," from Slate.com.

As they come up, I'm also keeping track of famous saying I didn't realize were biblical in origin, some of which have been reworded in their popular form, such as, "Can the Cushite change his skin or the leopard his spots?" (Jeremiah 13:23). I guess the Bible isn't very politically correct.

Here's Plotz's introductory comment to Jeremiah chapters 14–16:

Anyone who's ever been in a bad relationship knows the Doctrine of Pre-Emptive Cruelty: Before you go through the torture of dumping a boyfriend, you act meaner than you feel toward him. (This usually goes on at an unconscious level.) Boyfriend understandably bristles and retaliates. This makes the actual leave-taking much easier. You get to lighten your own guilt by blaming the dumpee for being such a jerk.

This appears to be God's strategy.

My father used to lament the lack of biblical literacy in my so-called education. For most of my life, I haven't shared his regret. But that concept alone — the doctrine of preemptive cruelty (which yes, I suppose might be more Plotz's than God's) — would have been well worth knowing in my formative years. My teens and 20's would have looked very different if I'd known it.

My father, who in one of his professional incarnations was a college English instructor specializing in Shakespeare, is currently reading Conn Iggulden's Emperor series, historical fiction based on the life of Julius Caesar. He's also watching the HBO/BBC series Rome, at our enthusiastic recommendation.

He wrote me today about the complexities of emotionally allying with different "sides" in historical struggles, and how much our allegiance is affected by already knowing the winners and losers.

I replied with a very different perspective on what affects the sides we take and who we root for:

This is something I've been meaning to ask you about, and to research more generally.

Do you think of Shakespeare's play as pro-Caesar? That's certainly the impression I remember.

For most of my life, I've sensed from our culture an approval of Julius Caesar and a disapproval (or hatred) for Brutus. But the more history I learn, the less sense this makes. Or rather, the more Anglo-American republican history I learn, the greater is my sense that American admiration of Caesar is a 20th-century phenomenon.

The Lockean liberals in England, the American revolutionaries, and the founding fathers wrote and published under not just Roman names but Roman republican names — the names of the opponents of Caesar, the allies of Brutus. The once-upon-a-time-libertarian Cato Institute is named for the 18th-century "Cato's Letters" whose English authors were taking the name of the Roman republican Cato. When the American Revolution was over and the debate was beginning for and against a centralizing constitution, the so-called anti-Federalists (the classical liberal/libertarian, decentralist, republicans) wrote under the names Cato and Brutus! (And despite the eventual victory of the Federalists, the mass of the population was on the side of the anti-Federalists.)

Eighty years later, John Wilkes Booth expressed his bafflement, after assassinating Lincoln, that he was so universally reviled when Brutus was so universally honored!

My current guess is that Shakespeare wrote a pro-Caesar play in an era of pro-monarchy, at least somewhat genuinely felt. But English and American republicans recognized that they were historically on the opposite side. In the 20th century (this theory would have it), Americans lost their classical educations and forgot their historical alliances. We knew we should admire Shakespeare, and Shakespeare seemed to admire the centralizers, therefore we abandon our decentralist history and alliances and all hail Caesar.

My father says that Shakespeare saw through Julius Caesar — but despised Brutus.

I'm still hoping someone can tell me about the evolution of Anglo-American attitudes toward Caesar and Brutus. How much of this story do I have right?

As neural told me,

"I have concluded that history in my own public school education was little more than a chronological sequence of political campaign slogans, punctuated by the odd war."

– David Bratton

Ludwig von Mises wrote,

The system of free enterprise has been dubbed capitalism in order to deprecate and to smear it. However, this term can be considered very pertinent. It refers to the most characteristic feature of the system, its main eminence, viz., the role the notion of capital plays in its conduct.

That's from chapter 13 of Human Action.

I think Robert Murphy's summary is even better:

Capitalism was originally a smear term for the system of free enterprise, meant to imply that this system only serves the narrow interests of the capitalists. However, the term is a good one, for the very notion of capital — of summing the market prices of the resources available for a project — is inextricably linked to monetary calculation, which itself can only occur in a capitalist society.

I was a free-market advocate before I became an advocate of capitalism. The free market is an ethical concept, not an economic one; it is merely the recognition that nonaggression needs to apply to exchange as much as it applies to anything else. (Robert Nozick summarized this idea as "capitalist acts between consenting adults.")

Capitalism is a separate issue and a separate agenda — a positive agenda, in contradistinction to the negative agenda of nonaggression, a utilitarian concept rather than an ethical one — but the more I learned of economics, capital theory, and economic history, the less I could understand the left-libertarian position of embracing the free market while rejecting capitalism.

The free-market anticapitalists define capitalism as any system of political privilege for current capitalists, especially as it suppresses bottom-up competition, entry-level entrepreneurship, and the rights of labor. But we already have plenty of other terms to cover that idea — mercantilism, corporatism, even fascism — but what alternative is there to indicate the universal benefits of capital accumulation, capital structure, and capital calculation — all of which result from the private ownership of the means of production?

In fact, private ownership of the means of production (that is, of capital) was the technical definition of capitalism, even among the anticapitalists who coined the term! The idea of political privilege for capital owners was just an assumed consequence, a conflation of definition and theory.

The only advantage I see to accepting this linguistic conflation is to conciliate the heirs of the New Left, to tease out of them a more consistent individualism without tripping their anticommercial reflexes. But aside from what I consider its intellectual dishonesty, this strategy, it seems to me, does more than postpone anti-economic prejudices; it implicitly promotes them.

Faced with these same prejudices, many anti-anti-capitalists adopted the label of "free enterprise," but that term, taken literally, tells us nothing more than "free market" does. It certainly indicates nothing about the structure of ownership or of the means of production.

Until a free-market anticapitalist can offer me a useful alternative label for the utilitarian economic concept Mises called "capitalism," I'll stick with his reclaimed word.

When the great truths of Political Economy shall become generally known—when men shall be convinced that each person will sell with greater facility the more others gain; that they can only gain by means of labour, capital, or land; that the greater the number of producers the greater the number of consumers; that unproductive consumers are mere representatives of others, and can only consume by means of what others produce; that all nations are interested in the prosperity of each other, and in facilitating the means of communication; that capital or land, and even labour, can only be productive while it is respected as property, and that the poor but industrious man is interested in the defence of the property of the rich, and in maintaining good order, because their subversion may deprive him of the means of subsistence:—when these truths shall be generally known, it will be almost impossible to stir up nations or bodies of men against each other. This science therefore is eminently social, and by teaching that no men can injure others without injuring themselves, and that the advantages gained by others are productive of advantages to themselves, will probably effect what a less interested doctrine has not yet accomplished.

– Translator's preface to Letters to Mr. Malthus (1821) by Jean-Baptiste Say, pp. vi–vii

(The Mises Insitute has also made available J-B Say's Treatise on Political Economy.)

About this post, Jeremy left this comment: "Sorry, this is bugging me to no end... what is the pernicious myth about Hamilton vs. Jefferson to which you refer?"

If I took the time to research a reply, I'd probably never respond, and it's a fair question he asks, so here's my off-the-cuff response:

When I was in 3rd grade, we were taught that Jefferson and Hamilton were not only political rivals, but that they represented opposite tendencies in the early American republic: Hamilton representing strong central authority and Jefferson representing decentralization.

So far so good, and even at age 8, I sided with Jefferson.

But since then I've heard other claims from modern Hamiltonians (e.g., Ric Burns, brother of Ken, in his documentary series about the history of New York): that Jefferson was for aristocracy while Hamilton favored meritocracy, that Jefferson was opposed to capitalism and opposed to industry — a sort of primitivist agriculturalist, where Hamilton was all about the power of the market and promoting commerce. These claims are misleading to say the least. A free-market Jeffersonian might even insist that they are backwards.

Then, just recently, Stephan Kinsella posted "Catoites on Hamilton v. Jefferson," which tells us of claims that "Jefferson was also a slaveholding racist — in contrast to Hamilton, whom Wilkinson says 'was against slavery'."

Tom DiLorenzo replies:

Hamilton was not the moral role model that Wilkerson apparently believes he was. He owned "house slaves," returned several runaway slaves to their owners, and once purchased six slaves at a slave auction (biographer Ron Chernow says they were for his brother-in-law). He never advocated abolition per se. He was also a notorious adulterer.

Anthony Gregory will tell you that Thomas Jefferson was not the great libertarian hero some of us sometimes make him out to be. He was especially bad in office. But I think Anthony would agree that in the context of his ideological battles with Hamilton, Jefferson was heroic, and (out of office) he was good on theory and principle as well. He wasn't against industrial capitalism; he was against corporate welfare. There's nothing incompatible with a hard-money free-market advocate having a fondness for farming and a suspicion of Anglo-American capitalists, who were already hand-in-glove with the State before, during, and after the War of Independence.

Hamilton, in contrast, was not in favor of capitalism (not in any free-market sense), but rather the very mercantilism that Adam Smith was denouncing in The Wealth of Nations. He was friendly to big business and industry, not the market. And Hamiltonian meritocracy resembles the Mandarin variety, whereby merit can advance you within a centralized system of privilege. It isn't something that should be confused with individualism or liberty.

There are many pernicious myths of modern history — about the Industrial Revolution versus the working poor, about Jefferson versus Hamilton, about Lincoln versus slavery, about robber barons, railroads, trusts, imperialism, central banking, labor unions, and on and on — but in our current situation, the most dangerous of all these myths is probably the old canard that Hoover's laissez-faire policies got us into the Great Depression and that FDR's New Deal got us out. The first piece to take apart is the claim that Hoover's policies were laissez-faire. Yes we should blame him for the severity and length of the early Depression, but to portray him as a president who was unwilling to intervene in the economy is to get his legacy exactly backwards. See chapter 7 of Murray Rothbard's America's Great Depression:

Postscript: Paul Marks, in a comment at the Mises Blog, calls this chapter "A good section of a good book," but does see a couple of weak spots. Here's one:

I am not sure that the oft repeated claim that Hoover supported laissez-faire is an "ironic twist of fate" - after all this claim was first made by people who knew perfectly well that Hoover was an ardent interventionist.

So "bare faced lie" would be more accurate than "ironic twist of fate".

Of course, now several generations have passed, people (such as media types) who make the "Hoover was a free market person" assumption are NOT telling lies - they are simply comming out with the nonsense they were taught at school and college.

Here is William F. Buckley, Jr.'s "editorial obituary" for Murray Rothbard.

And here is Lew Rockwell's reply.

(PDF available here, thanks to Stephan Kinsella.)

Not only is my article featured at Mises.org today, but it's one of the first daily articles to be made into an audio article:

Senator Joe McCarthy, covering the microphones as he listens to his aid Roy Cohen in 1954

While his claim of ideological steadfastness on his "basic political views" may have been correct, Rothbard did change his mind on questions of strategy and alliance, most significantly on the question of "McCarthyism" and the broader anti-Communist movement of the American Right, which he eventually rejected in favor of a more nuanced (and largely misunderstood) anti-anti-Communism.

FULL ARTICLE

An MP3 audio file of this article, read by Dr. Floy Lilley, is available for download, or you can listen to it within this page:

From qotd:

Moshe ben Maimon was born at Cordoba, Spain on this day in 1135, at a time when that portion of Spain was under Moorish rule. The family fled to Morocco after Cordoba was captured by a far less tolerant Islamic dynasty, and Moshe studied at the university at Fez. He was free to write and study because his younger brother was a gem merchant, but after the brother was lost at sea Moshe became a physician. After living briefly in Israel, he settled at Cairo and became the physician to the Sultan Saladin. He was a Jewish rabbi who lived almost his entire life in Muslim communities, wrote philosophy and medical treatises in Arabic, and is best known by a Greek name, Maimonides.

Do not consider it proof just because it is written in books, for a liar who will deceive with his tongue will not hesitate to do the same with his pen.

Truth does not become more true by virtue of the fact that the entire world agrees with it, nor less so even if the whole world disagrees with it.

Be convinced that, if man were able to reach the end without preparatory studies, such studies would not be preparatory but tiresome and utterly superfluous.

Consequently he who wishes to attain to human perfection, must therefore first study Logic, next the various branches of Mathematics in their proper order, then Physics, and lastly Metaphysics.

Further, there are things of which the mind understands one part, but remains ignorant of the other; and when man is able to comprehend certain things, it does not follow that he must be able to comprehend everything.

The soul is subject to health and disease, just as is the body. The health and disease of both ... undoubtedly depend upon beliefs and customs, which are peculiar to mankind.

– Moshe ben Maimon (Maimonides), 1135–1204

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maimonides

[This article by Murray N. Rothbard follows "The Road to Civil War," and is excerpted from the same unpublished report to the Volker Fund, 1961.]

The Civil War was one of the most momentous events in American history, not only for its inherent drama and destruction, but because of the fateful consequences for America that flowed from it.

We have said above that the War of 1812 had devastating consequences for the libertarian movement; indeed, it might be said that it took twenty years of devotion and hard work for the Jacksonian movement to undo the étatist consequences of that utter failure of a war. It is the measure of the statist consequences of the Civil War that America never recovered from it: never again was the libertarian movement to have a party of its own, or as close a chance at success. Hamiltonian neo-Federalism beyond the wildest dreams of even a J.Q. Adams had either been foisted permanently on America, or had been inaugurated, to be later fulfilled.

Let us trace the leading consequences of the War Against the South: there is, first, the enormous toll of death, injury, and destruction. There is the complete setting aside of the civilized "rules of war" that Western civilization had laboriously been erecting for centuries: instead, a total war against the civilian population was launched against the South. The symbol of this barbaric and savage oppression was, of course, Sherman's march through Georgia and the rest of the South, the burning of Atlanta, etc. (For the military significance of this reversion to barbarism, see F.J.P. Veale, Advance to Barbarism). Another consequence, of course, was the ending of effective states' rights, and of the perfectly logical and reasonable right of secession—or, for that matter, nullification. From now on, the Union was a strictly compulsory entity.

[Read the rest »]