Anti-Human

One wise Randian once implored me to closely examine the word “environment.”  What does it refer to, he asked? …What it really means, he said, is: “anything but man.”  He was right.  A perfect environment would be a world without people.

When it comes to the modern left, one can consider virtually all of their views on all issues to mean “anything but man.”  Certainly “man” as a human being, as created, as a being with a purpose.

Against the Left: A Rothbardian Libertarianism, Lew Rockwell

Rockwell points out that the Randians are the only ones who continue to hold to what was the Christian position on the environment until only a few short decades ago:  man occupies the highest spot on the totem pole of being.  He cites St. Augustine accordingly: if “thou shalt not kill” extends to animals, why not plants and bugs?  Further, it would be good to see human habitation spread to all parts of the world.

Global warming – one of many inventions designed to strip us of our liberty – is on the skids.  First, it is getting cooler, not warmer; second, there is the falsity of the science – highlighted, but not limited to, the email scandal from ten years ago – that demonstrates the lie.

The left has thrown so much into this issue, all-the-while watching the world become “Nazified.”  Even the continuous wars could not move the left from its focus on its environmental crusade.  Where has the left been?  “Worrying about my barbecue grill out back.”

What of the drive toward economic egalitarianism?  Once again, nothing more than an agenda for control – stripping man of what it means to be human.  Such an idea as equality didn’t exist before the mid-eighteenth century, according to Rothbard – corresponding to the emergence of Enlightenment thought (I say).

To achieve such a state of egalitarianism, one would have to start at the root – the family.  Children are born into unequal conditions, receiving an unequal upbringing – “privilege” is the word thrown at those who have worked hard to create a healthy environment for their family.  When Hillary Clinton writes “It Takes a Village,” keep this in mind – it will be the village raising your children, not you, ensuring that your children are no better off than the lowest common denominator.

Let me repeat: the only “privilege” that matters to a libertarian qua libertarian is the kind that comes from the barrel of the state’s gun.

And what is equality?  It is as equally undefinable as it is unachievable.  It is, instead, a recipe for permanent revolution – as there will always be something “unequal” to complain about and try to correct.  One can only consider such a concept under totalitarianism.  I think about the pigs: when someone says “all are created equal,” just remember that he is thinking that he is more equal than you are.

Rockwell closes with a chapter entitled Left Libertarianism.  Libertarianism, despite the wishes of many, concerns itself with one thing and one thing only: the proper use of physical force.  It is not concerned with all forms of (so-called) oppression, hierarchies, toleration (in the worst sense of the word), and the like.

All of these additional claims are a distraction from the central principle: if you oppose the initiation of physical force, you are a libertarian.  Period.  Now how hard was that?

This, of course, does not preclude a libertarian from holding to other values; it is just that these additional values are grounded in something beyond or outside of the non-aggression principle.  Further, as I have written often, it does not preclude introducing some common sense when it comes to understanding what makes for a society approaching liberty.  And, as Rothbard has noted, sadly too many libertarians are devoid of such common sense.

Conclusion

Rockwell closes with a look at a possible objection to his book: you are writing against the left and left-libertarians, why not utilize equal fervor against the right?  But this objection misses the point:

We are not trying to add to libertarianism. …We are defending libertarianism as intended by Mises and Rothbard from those who want to undermine it.

Rockwell is not at all suggesting that the state be used to enforce anti-egalitarian positions, anymore than he has written against state enforcement of egalitarian positions.  However, he does understand what will come if people are left free to define and establish their own cultural norms: 

Our contention is that, left alone, people will naturally be pro-family, devoted to Western culture, and unequal in all significant respects.

In sum, you don’t have to accept conservative values to be a libertarian, but it helps.

I agree with this, but will humbly take it a step further (and ask Rockwell’s forgiveness at the same time): while this is true for libertarianism, I don’t see that it is sufficient for liberty.  If one is after liberty, a conservative tradition built on the best of Western culture is necessary.

But this is not the point of Rockwell’s book.  He is after defending proper libertarianism, and proper libertarianism has a substantial role to play if we are after liberty.  For this reason, it must be defended.

Tradition, Egalitarianism, and Immigration

Against the Left: A Rothbardian Libertarianism, Lew Rockwell

Rockwell offers six chapters, expanding on the damage to liberty being done by the left.  He opens with The Assault on the Family; by “family, the assault is on the traditional family – “the hallmark of civilization.”

In order to maintain a free society, it is essential that the traditional family, i.e. the union of one man and one woman in marriage, in most cases to raise a family, be preserved.

Consider how that one sentence runs completely contrary not only to the objectives of the left, but also places a dent in the application of the thinnest of thin libertarianism – where “liberty” is defined as “anything peaceful.”  Anything peaceful is libertarianism for juveniles; if you want liberty, you have to consider society, culture, secondary consequences and the like.

I recall the joy many left-libertarians expressed when the state made gay marriage “legal.”  Rockwell is suggesting that there is nothing at all “libertarian” about such events.  “How can this be?” you might ask.  Rockwell answers the question:

Libertarianism is the theory of what people’s rights should be.  It rules out the state; and, to the unfortunate extent the state exists, libertarians hold that the state should, to the greatest extent possible, refrain from violating people’s rights.  Beyond this, libertarianism mandates nothing to the state.  Libertarians don’t have to hold that the state must grant marriage licenses to couples of the same sex.

Rockwell cites Rothbard, furthering this point:

Since, according to libertarian theory, there should be no government property since it is all derived from coercion, how does any principle whatever of government property use follow from libertarian theory?  The answer is, it doesn’t.  on the question of what to do with government property, libertarians, apart from calling for privatization, are set adrift, I short, with nothing but their common sense and their attunement to the real world, of which libertarians have always been in notoriously short supply.

I have written about a million words trying to make the same point (especially that last part about most libertarians lacking common sense and an attunement to the real world), and here Rothbard makes the point in eighty words. 

Following this are sections devoted to feminism, anti-Semitism, so-called Civil Rights, racism, discrimination, and equality.  The state uses all such distinctions to further state power, yet many libertarians either praise such movements as “liberating,” or defend the libertarian position by suggesting that we all have the liberty to “be a jerk.”  Rockwell calls such views “extremely short-sighted and most unfortunate.”

If we want to be free, therefore, we must shun the State, its methods, and its language.

Rockwell devotes a chapter to Immigration.  He calls out those who believe that the only correct libertarian position on immigration must be open borders.  He offers the concept of freedom of speech to help make the point: there is no freedom of speech to be derived from the non-aggression principle; one can manage or control speech on his property.  In other words, libertarianism grounds this issue of speech in property rights.

The same holds for freedom of movement.  There is no such concept – all movement is managed by the property owner.  If all property was privately owned, the answer to this question of immigration (we wouldn’t even call it such) would be self-evident: there would be no such thing as free movement.  Every movement would be controlled or managed by the property owner.  This is the exact opposite of open borders.

But we do not live in a world of 100% private property – we have significant state property, we have significant regulation by the state on private property, and – of course – we have state borders.  Hence, every decision about immigration, movement, and access is a state decision – managed and controlled by the state.  There is no libertarian answer in a world of states.  Period.

But what of the government-controlled land: surely immigrants – or anyone – would be free under libertarian theory to move onto government-controlled land.  But this also represents an invalid assumption: while government might control the land, we must ask: who is the owner? 

And the answer here is obviously simple: the taxpayers own it, as it is taxpayer funds that have been used to acquire, manage, secure, regulate, and improve such land.  In other words, there is no such thing as open, virgin, un-owned territory – at least not in the regions where virtually everyone would choose to live.

Like all state action, this topic is one that the state will always use to the advantage of the state – to change demographics and voting, to allow labor movement in support of state-favored industry, etc. 

Conclusion

Citing Rothbard on what drives the left:

…the hallmark and the fanatical drive of the left for these past centuries has been in devoting tireless energy to bringing about, as rapidly as they can, their own egalitarian, collectivist version of a Kingdom of God on Earth.

Utopians of the world, unite!  Paul VanderKlay has offered: when you try to bring heaven down to earth, you bring hell up with it.  The leftists might be wishing for heaven, but we are seeing the hell.

This should be concerning, especially for libertarians.  As Rockwell notes, however (and as Rothbard made clear), when it comes to having common sense and an attunement to the real world, libertarians have always held a notoriously short supply.  I will cover more of Rockwell’s views along these lines in a subsequent post.

Liberty’s Obstacle

The greatest obstacle to the spread of the philosophy of freedom described in Against the State is the ideology of the left.  The left wants to destroy the traditional institutions of civil society, especially the family.  It wants to wipe out all differences between people and make us “equal” slaves of the all-powerful state.

This is the opening quote in Lew Rockwell’s book, Against the Left: A Rothbardian Libertarianism.  In just short of 150 pages, Rockwell delivers a thorough critique of the damage done by the left to the cause of liberty due to the left’s purposeful destruction of intermediating institutions that provided space for liberty to flourish.

Rockwell covers the assault on the family, immigration, and left-libertarianism, among other topics.  I will review each of these over the course of a couple of posts, but first I will begin with the preface by Hans-Hermann Hoppe:

Every person, including identical twins, is unique, different from and unequal to all other persons.

It is this reality that the left fights, a “relentless revolt against human nature,” according to Hoppe; therefore, it is a fight that the left will ultimately lose – albeit after taking many of us down with them.

Hoppe offers a historical perspective – how we came to this.  All ideological movements – to include the classical liberals – have slowly (or rapidly) drifted to the left.  Incomes would be equalized, then opportunity.  Unfortunately for the left, the workers of the (developed) western world didn’t unite.  Even worse, the blue-collar base that they counted on slowly declined in proportion to the population.

Hoppe makes an interesting connection here – an insight, at least to me: to make up for the decline in the blue-collar base, the left greatly expanded the “tax-funded ‘public sector’ workers, i.e. of State-dependents, and in particular of workers in the so-called ‘social services’ industry.”  Further, they would take over the entire system of public education – from universities down to elementary schools.

They would not only make peace with the imperial state, they would utilize empire to bring their leftist ideology to the world – a welfare state at home and imperialism abroad.  This combination would make for a healthy environment for free immigration, with all of its negative consequences for liberty (not for the liberty of the immigrants, of course, but the liberty of those previously in the polity).

Through such a policy, “increasing social fragmentation would result.”

…affiliations to one’s own nation, ethnicity, religion, town, community, or family, would be systematically weakened…

Thus leaving only the state to bind society.

Rockwell in his introduction identifies the thinness of libertarianism: “If we get rid of the State – and that is a big if – we have accomplished our goal as libertarians.”

There is no libertarian goal to mold people to some ideology; it does not view the family as an enemy – in fact, it finds in the family the foundation for a decent society.  “Unfortunately, a number of so-called libertarians ignore these essential points.”

Left-libertarians want to combine libertarianism with some version of egalitarianism – ignoring the reality identified by Hoppe: every person is unique.  Therefore, not every person will conform to your definition of liberty.

Rockwell, through this book, confronts some of the main issues in this ideological battle, closing with a chapter directly confronting the “left-libertarian imposters who want to take libertarianism away from us.”

Through an additional post or two, I will offer some further highlights from the book.  In the meantime, I return to a thought from the opening quote:

The left wants to destroy the traditional institutions of civil society, especially the family.

Rockwell’s book is entitled “Against the Left,” hence against the destruction of such institutions.  In fact, such institutions are necessary if one is after liberty.  Such institutions do not fit neatly via application of the thinnest of thin libertarianism (which, after all, offers comment only on the appropriate use of violence), yet it is precisely such institutions that make liberty possible; it is precisely such institutions that answer many of the questions left unanswerable via a strict application of the non-aggression principle.

We find defense of such institutions in the writing of Rothbard and Hoppe, for example.  Further such defense will be offered here by Rockwell.