"It is no crime to be ignorant of economics, which is, after all, a specialized discipline and one that most people consider to be a 'dismal science.' But it is totally irresponsible to have a loud and vociferous opinion on economic subjects while remaining in this state of ignorance."
Ludwig von Mises: "Mans striving after an improvement of the conditions of his existence impels him to action. Action requires planning and the decision which of various plans is the most advantageous." - The Ultimate Foundation of Economic Science
[T]he term "equilibrium" has emotional connotations, and so it was only a brief step to the further mischief of holding up equilibrium as not only possible, but as the ideal by which to gauge all existing institutions. But since man, by his very nature, must keep acting, he cannot be in equilibrium while he lives, and therefore the ideal, being impossible, is also inappropriate.
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."
[This article by Murray N. Rothbard follows "The Road to Civil War," and is excerpted from the same unpublished report to the Volker Fund, 1961.]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.
[This article by Murray N. Rothbard is excerpted from a 30,000-word report to the Volker Fund, written in September 1961, giving a very detailed description of everything wrong with A History of the American Republic by George B. DeHuszar. The full memo will be included in the forthcoming collection Renaissance Man, edited by David Gordon.]
The road to Civil War must be divided into two parts:
the causes of the controversy over slavery leading to secession, and
the immediate causes of the war itself.
The reason for such split is that secession need not have led to Civil War, despite the assumption to the contrary by most historians.
The basic root of the controversy over slavery to secession, in my opinion, was the aggressive, expansionist aims of the Southern "slavocracy." Very few Northerners proposed to abolish slavery in the Southern states by aggressive war; the objection — and certainly a proper one — was to the attempt of the Southern slavocracy to extend the slave system to the Western territories. The apologia that the Southerners feared that eventually they might be outnumbered and that federal abolition might ensue is no excuse; it is the age-old alibi for "preventive war." Not only did the expansionist aim of the slavocracy to protect slavery by federal fiat in the territories as "property" aim to foist the immoral system of slavery on Western territories; it even violated the principles of states' rights to which the South was supposedly devoted — and which would logically have led to a "popular sovereignty" doctrine.
I don't think the concept of "disproportionality" enters into it. If you punch me in the shoulder, it would be (very) disproportionate for me to shoot you in the head. It would not be disproportionate, exactly, for me to respond by shooting an innocent bystander — that's not "disproportionate"; it's simply aggression. If I steal resources from a third party to help in my response to your aggression, that also is not "disproportionate," but rather aggression too.
If two governments are at war with each other, they are both capable of committing aggression against individual property rights. In fact, it's hard to think of many wars where this isn't the case. Even in a "defensive" war, a government typically taxes and even enslaves "its" own people, and thus even when one government is much less guilty than another, its war power is not a libertarian program — at least no more so than, say, welfare, which is no more reliant on the aggression of taxation than government war.
But in discussing a modern war like World War II, the aggression on all sides is even worse. The crimes of a regime cannot possibly justify dropping bombs on innocent children, for example, since those children have an inalienable right to life that is not conditional upon the crimes committed by the state they happen to have the misfortune to live under. It is this principle that allows us to conclude, unqualifiedly, that terrorism is always evil and wrong. Just because the US government has engaged in aggression in the Middle East over the years (and I think this cannot be seriously denied) does not in any respect exculpate the terrorists who target innocent American civilians. Similarly, just because people live under an aggressive foreign government, doesn't give any one on earth a right to kill them.
Our rights not to be bombed — not to be bombed by anybody — are not sacrificed by the mere fact that we live under governments that commit aggression.
War is not a conflict of rights between nations. Nations don't have rights. Individuals do. War is a class conflict of states against individuals. During war, all civilians killed and taxed and enslaved are victims, and, typically, the states involved are all, to varying degrees, aggressors, not just against foreign subjects but also against "their" own subjects as well.
Whereas historians obsessively trace every event's causal lineage further and further into the past, nonhistorians tend toward the opposite extreme: they assume in effect that the world began immediately before the event they have in mind. I call this unfortunate tendency "truncating the antecedents." Among the general public, it has given rise to mistaken interpretations of historical causation in cases too numerous to mention, and mistakes of this sort continue to occur frequently, in part because politicians and other conniving parties have an interest in propagating them.
could help the world to understand that there is no Just War, there is just war — and that wars are not caused by isolationists and peaceniks but by the promoters of warfare.
I find it very encouraging that World War II revisionism is becoming an open topic in our culture. I hope that in the next few decades, it loses its unique status as the one historical war we're not supposed to scrutinize too closely. This review and book help me in that hope.
This is especially timely with the deadly Keynesian religion on the rise. High priest Paul Krugman recently resurrected this coprocephalic canard:
The fact is that war is, in general, expansionary for the economy, at least in the short run. World War II, remember, ended the Great Depression. The $10 billion or so we're spending each month in Iraq mainly goes to US-produced goods and services, which means that the war is actually supporting demand. Yes, there would be infinitely better ways to spend the money. But at a time when a shortfall of demand is the problem, the Iraq war nonetheless acts as a sort of WPA, supporting employment directly and indirectly.
Update: How man of us had a history class that would have helped us understand this political cartoon from the 1930s?
Maybe your schooling was a lot better than mine. I remember being taught that Hoover was a do-nothing and that FDR offered the hope of a more activist government. Raimondo writes:
When Roosevelt was swept into office, Flynn welcomed him, sharing the hope that the new president would get the country moving again. Flynn supported the Democratic Party platform of 1932, which called for an end to the extravagant spending of the Republicans, a balanced budget, and the abolition of the many government bureaus and commissions.
But Flynn was soon disillusioned. In fact, the New Deal that Roosevelt sold to the American people in 1932 bore absolutely no resemblance to the one he immediately imposed on an unsuspecting nation. During the first 100 days of his administration, Roosevelt racked up a deficit larger than the one it took Hoover two years to produce. Worse, from Flynn's viewpoint, was the blizzard of new government agencies the president created — agencies that sought to regulate every aspect of economic life — and the billions in borrowed money that financed them.
"Moral courage is the rarest of all the rare things of this earth. The war has shown that millions have physical courage. Millions were willing to face rifle and cannon, bombardment, poison gas, liquid fire, and the bayonet; to trust themselves to flying machines thousands of feet in air, under the fire of anti-aircraft guns of enemy planes; to go into submarines, perhaps to meet a horrible death. But how many had the courage merely to make themselves unpopular? The bitter truth must be told: the many enlisted or submitted to the draft on both sides of the conflict not because they were convinced that they were helping to save the world, not because they had any real hatred for the enemy, not to uphold the right, but simply that they hadn't the moral courage to face the stigma of "slacker" or "conscientious objector." ... Fear of death? No; the soldiers faced death bravely. But they feared unpopularity. They dreaded the suspicion of their fellows. What was needed in war is needed no less urgently in peace. How many persons in public or even in private life have the courage to say the thing that people do not like to hear?" – Henry Hazlitt, The Way to Willpower (via blog.Mises)
Once upon a time, democracy was understood as a liberal means, not an end unto itself.
In the 18th and 19th centuries, "the masses" were far more liberal (in the libertarian sense of the word) than they became in the last century. They understood that the ruling class pursued a command economy in their own interest and to the detriment of working-class consumers. British "Radicals" such as James Mill put universal suffrage ahead of laissez faire as a political priority, not because they thought democracy was more important than economic freedom, but precisely because they believed democracy would inevitably lead to economic freedom. They failed to support the Anti–Corn Law movement because they saw it as too middle class and as a distraction from the more immediate issue (for them) of mass majoritarianism. Ironically, the masses they idolized did support the Anti–Corn Law movement. As Rothbard writes, "by rejecting this middle-class movement, [Mill, et al.] rebuffed a successful one, and this refusal to support the Anti–Corn Law League in the 1840s helped eliminate Radicalism as a powerful force in British politics" ("Concepts of the Role of Intellectuals in Social Change Toward Laissez Faire," available in PDF).
Modern libertarians, with our very different take on mass democracy ranging from ambivalence to antipathy, might have a hard time seeing how the process of electoral or legislative rules could ever be more important than freedom or peace, but classical liberals seem to have been as mixed up on this point as are our illiberal contemporaries.
Barbara Tuchman offers another example of this value reversal of means and ends, although, as she makes clear, she agrees with the fetishists:
Barbara Tuchman believed that historical facts had to precede historical theory, and that narrative was more important (or more compelling, anyway) than analysis. (She talks about historiography in her book Practicing History.) I hope to write about these points at a later date, but I mention them now to say that A Distant Mirror is far from a libertarian perspective on 14th-century history, but does contain plenty of facts of interest to "our side," e.g.,
When shortly after Easter the Duke of Lancaster left England with a large force in 200 ships to conquer the throne of Castile, the French opportunity was at hand. Information about each other's movements was known through French and English fishermen, who, ignoring hostilities, came to each other's aid at sea and exchanged catches, keeping trans-Channel communication open.
Unsuccessful war stimulated more than murmur. While Lancaster was bogged down in Brittany, English merchant ships were harassed and captured with impunity by French and Scottish pirates. When the merchants complained, the nobles and prelates of the King's Council replied only that defensive action was up to Lancaster and his fleet.
At this, a rich alderman and future Mayor of London, John Philpot, Master of the Grocers' Company, assembled a private force of ships with a thousand sailors and men-at-arms and went forth to battle the pirates, several of whom he captured together with their prize ships. When, after a triumphant welcome in London, he was summoned by the Council to answer for acting without the King's leave, his hot reply summed up the growing exasperation of the Third Estate with the less than than adequate performance of the Second. He had spent his money and risked his men, Philpot said, not to shame nobles or win knightly fame, but "in pity for the misery of the people and country which, from being a noble realm and dominion over other nations, has through your supineness been exposed to the ravages of the vilest race. Since you would not lift a hand in its defense, I exposed myself and my property for the safety and deliverance of our country." Even if Philpot and his fellow merchants were primarily concerned with the safety and deliverance of their trade, his complaint of the country's defenders was none the less valid.
Was the outcome of the war known before the United States entered it? After all, Hitler most likely would have conquered Europe without the United States' intervention.
That's certainly what we've all been taught all our lives: American entry into WWII saved Europe from fascism. But I've never heard any argument for this claim, only the claim itself, repeated endlessly.
"Your documentary justifies America's participation in the greatest military slaughter of all time. … The military commanders on all sides conscripted cameramen to risk their lives in order to document this devastating war, in which 50 to 60 million people died, mostly civilians. They did this to provide footage for the newsreel producers back home. Lowell Thomas was the apologist of his day. You have become the retroactive apologist of our day. You are the spiritual heir of the military propagandists who sent those cameramen into the valley of the shadow of death. There is nothing like royalty-free public domain film clips to get the original message across to the PBS audience."
May 5th, 2008 by 
bkmarcus
Jeffrey Tucker writes:
No Comments »
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.
The road to Civil War must be divided into two parts: 
"Moral courage is the rarest of all the rare things of this earth. The war has shown that millions have physical courage. Millions were willing to face rifle and cannon, bombardment, poison gas, liquid fire, and the bayonet; to trust themselves to flying machines thousands of feet in air, under the fire of anti-aircraft guns of enemy planes; to go into submarines, perhaps to meet a horrible death. But how many had the courage merely to make themselves unpopular? The bitter truth must be told: the many enlisted or submitted to the draft on both sides of the conflict not because they were convinced that they were helping to save the world, not because they had any real hatred for the enemy, not to uphold the right, but simply that they hadn't the moral courage to face the stigma of "slacker" or "conscientious objector." ... Fear of death? No; the soldiers faced death bravely. But they feared unpopularity. They dreaded the suspicion of their fellows. What was needed in war is needed no less urgently in peace. How many persons in public or even in private life have the courage to say the thing that people do not like to hear?" – 
Lew Rockwell does great radio. He's really at his best as a public speaker. Here's Lew talking with 
Once upon a time, democracy was understood as a liberal means, not an end unto itself. 
This one belongs in a history of private defense:
