Libertarians: Radicals on the right

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Mark Tier, Politics, vol. X, no. 2, November, 1975, pp. 164-68, minus references. (With thanks to Mark Tier.)

The author is publisher of an economics newsletter, Mark Tier’s Economy Report, a consulting economist, and freelance writer. He is a B.Ec. from ANU. He was one of the people responsible for forming the Workers Party; and one of the three people who wrote the platform. [For more recent biographical info see here.]

“Do you mean anarchy?” some people ask me, shuddering at the thought of leaving Big Brother The State. Well, what do you mean by “anarchy”? According to The Random House Dictionary of the English Language there is more than one meaning of the word. One: chaos. Two: without government. Three: chaos due to absence of government. Four: theory that holds coercive government as evil and advocates that all interpersonal dealings be totally voluntary.

Consider Three and Four. If there was absence of government tomorrow, chaos would certainly result. But, by definition number four, aren’t most of our lives spent anarchically? In Australia, at least, don’t most of us choose what we want to do, choose with whom we wish to associate, each making our own plans in regard to most matters — rather than having to fit all our actions to one, coercively imposted master-plan laid down by the Government?

The “anarchy of the free market” is not chaos; it is individuals making their own, individual plans. No wonder politicians don’t like “anarchy”.

This voluntarism, does not, of course, apply to all our actions. We cannot choose the government we would like to deal with, unless we are in a position to impose it on everyone else, or wish to move to another country. And all governments impose some restrictions. That after all is their function: they hold a monopoly on the moral use of force in a defined geographical area. And all of them use it. (Any government which did not use it would cease to be a government.)

Anarchy on the right? Most people think of anarchists like Kropotkin, Proudhon, Bakunin, Goldman; of anarchy as being a European-Russian-socialist tradition. Most distinctly left. One might add that anarchy-as-a-movement reached its peak in the Spanish civil war and has not looked up since.

With names like Rothbard, LeFevre, Tuccille. Liggio, Chodorov and Tannehill one might think that anarchy-on-the-right sprang from the same tradition. While it is true that there is much cross-fertilisation, anarchy-on-the-right is a distinctly American phenomenon springing from America’s individualist heritage. And as a movement, it is just beginning.

Historically, the two most important figures are Lysander Spooner and Benjamin Tucker. Spooner was one of the many people who ran a private post office (reducing the US post office to almost nothing in many areas of the US) until an act of Congress put his American Letter Mail Company (and all the others) out of business on 1 July, 1845. In 1870 he published No Treason: The Constitution of No Authority in which he argued that the US Constitution did not bind him or any other person, as it had no contractual or moral basis; and that the government it established was nothing more than a band of robbers and swindlers. In terms of political theory, Spooner’s No Treason, should be read in conjunction with Rousseau’s theory of the “social contract” — as the definitive demolition of that theory. Unlike Rousseau, Spooner has hardly dated.

From 1881 to 1907, Benjamin Tucker published a paper called Liberty. To Tucker, the state represented “the embodiment of the principle of invasion … The anarchist defines government as invasion, nothing more or less. Protection against invasion, then, is the opposite of government. Anarchists, in favouring the abolition of governments, favour the addition of protection against invasion.

Tucker, however, failed to increase the number of individualist-anarchist, losing out to Emma Goldman’s anarcho-communism.

While both anarcho-communist and anarcho-individualist are anti-statists, and propose voluntary association, they part company over the issue of properly. The anarcho-communist would abolish all private property, “establishing” a non system where each give a would give what he wanted and take what he wanted. For the anarcho-communist, the ideal is, to say the least, vague — and would of course involve the use of force (government?) against the anarcho-individualist who would wish to keep his rightfully earned property. Property, says the individualist, when created or gained through voluntary association (that is, production or trade, not theft of taxation) is to reward to oneself or from others to a person’s self generated action. The definition of property is the definition of what is mine and what is thine. That definition begins with each other person’s life is his absolute property. As property is the definition of mine and thine, is defines what I can do and what you can do without each other’s permission.

Just as not all anarchists are libertarians, not all libertarians are anarchists. There is a division between anarchist and limited statists.

All libertarians agree on a certain basics: on the place of property; that the initiation of force, fraud or coercion of any manner is evil and that the only moral form of association is consensual. They agree that government is an institution that monopolises force within any society; and that force can only be used (where it is not punished) with the permission of the government; that the government denies you the right of self-defence. For example, if the mafia has paid off the police, it has gained the implicit permission of government to use force, and you are thereby prevented from effectively protecting yourself from the mafia. And, of course, self-defence against the government is called “treason”.

The anarchist proposes that the free market can provide every service that a person might require, including the services that government provides (e.g., protection — police and armies; and arbitration of disputes — law courts) and that competition would ensure that the quality of service would be the highest possible (unlike the present situation). The limited-statist proposes that a government is necessary to provide protection and arbitration, albeit a strictly limited one that would not, for example, be able to levy any taxes (try to think up definition of taxation which is any different from a definition of robbery).

Surprising as it may seem, the person mainly responsible for the spreading of anarchism as a movement in the US today is herself a limited statist and a Russian to boot: Ayn Rand. She certainly did not intend to spread the anarchism. But most of the anarcho-libertarians in the US (and Australia) began as objectivists. (Objectivism is the name of Ayn Rand’s philosophy.)

In her novels Atlas Shrugged (primarily) and The Fountainhead and her other writings, Rand completed what Aristotle, John Locke and Adam Smith began a coherent and internally consistent philosophy of individualism. If she had done this as treatise on philosophy. She would have had little impact. As it is she is ignored by the philosophical establishment. Through her writings and the work of her protégé Nathaniel Branden, her philosophy has spread widely through mainly in the United States. Until Rand and Branden split his lecture series were being given (on tape) in over 80 cities around the world, including Melbourne and Sydney.

While all libetarians would accept all the principles of Objectivism as their philosophical basis, not all agree that Ayn Rand has been totally consistent in her application of these principles. In 1968, Roy A. Childs, a former Objectivist, wrote “An Open Letter to Ayn Rand” in which he questioned her attitude towards government.

All governments use force and whether the leaders be Gough Whitlam, Malcolm Fraser, Josef Stalin or Adolf Hitler, their moral justification is the ends justify the means. A libertarians says: the ends never justify the means. Rand says the government should be restricted to using its monopoly of force only in retaliation against those who initiate force against others. Men must have a government, she says, to bring the use of force under objective control. Although each man has the right of self defence, it cannot be left up to each individual to enforce that right on behalf of each and every man.

Child suggested that her attitude towards government was in contradiction to her basic principles. If each man’s rights are inalienable, then no institution may morally exercise any of his rights without his consent. As a coercive monopoly (an organisation which forcibly excludes competitors) is, according to Rand, a moral anathema, then so is a government — which she defines as a coercive monopoly. Rand has never answered Childs, except to make disparaging comments about “libertarians”. Since most libertarians admire her, she is denying herself some of the appreciation she undoubtedly deserves. Many people have followed Childs from Rand to anarchy, and much work has been published on just how a free market could (and has in the past) provide the functions that government supposedly serves.

Ayn Rand remains “first lady” of libertarianism. “Dean” of the anarcho-capitalists is economist Murray N. Rothbard, professor of economics at Brooklyn Polytechnic. He points out that the limited-state/anarchy controversy is really of minor importance overall. In fact being individualist, there are as many differences between libertarians as there are libertarians, even though they all subscribe to the same basic principles.

Rothbard, along with Hayek, heads the “Austrian” school of economics a brand of economics hardly known in Australia. (A better name would be “free market economics”.) Most Australian economists have a vague acquaintance with Professor Ludwig von Mises, the major figure of the “Austrian” school. As an example of the difference between “Austrian” and neo-Keynesian (i.e. Australian) economics, von Mises, in his major treatise Human Action, shows that the trade cycle is caused by government control of the money supply and the banking system. As is inflation.

Another figure is John Hospers, Professor and head of School of Philosophy at the University of Southern California. In 1972, he was Libertarian Party candidate for President and achieved one electoral college vote (a Republican defector). The Libertarian Party started in 1972 is now established in most state of the US.

When Hospers announced his candidacy, Robert LeFevre sent him a “get well” card. There is an argument in libertarian circles as to the morality of being involved in politics at all. Even if you come to government only to bury it, not to raise it, the argument goes, how can you be sure that you will not be corrupted by power? John Goodson, LP candidate for Governor of New Jersey, resolved this problem by signing a pledge which would enable any elector to remove him from office if he once wavered from his stated platform.

An example of the world-wide growth of the libertarian movement is the formation of the Workers Party in Sydney on 26 January, 1975. Its platform was partly based on the US LP’s platform. US LPers have had nothing but praise for it — and are now utilising it as the basis for re-writing their own. Other Libertarian political parties also exist in Canada and the UK: and there are now the beginnings of a movement to establish one in New Zealand. (All libertarian political parties, of course, profess the limited-statist vision of libertarianism.)

It is, of course impossible to predict the future of the movement. Although many libertarians claim that “the 21st century will be libertarians — or it won’t be!” we will just have to wait and see. There is possibility that on US campuses, the growing libertarian movement there will replace the new left in importance and significance. The advantage libertarians have is in concrete solution to everyday problems. The main trouble is that most of the answers. While agreeing in spirit in some cases with the new left, involve less government and fewer controls, not the more that everybody seems to be clamouring for. As examples:

Pollution: the solution is absolute private property. When one person pollutes another’s property the second can sue the first for the damage done (plus costs, of course). If you owned a section of a river, would you want someone else’s garbage go floating through? The present owner — the government — does not seem to mind. And try suing the present owner of the roads for damages caused by car pollution. The problem is really simple; present laws only recognise specific forms of damage — theft, arson — not damage in general.

The environment; again, absolute private property. At present, you can only be the (in Australia) nominal owner of any land. The government is the real owner and it can issue a licence to any miner to dig up your property, and there is not much you can do about it. If property rights were absolute, and for example, some group of people wished to preserve a certain section of rain forest in Queensland, all they would need to do is raise enough funds to buy it (and with no taxes potentials donors would be much richer, and therefore much more generous). Once it was theirs they could exclude anyone they wished Naturally, it works both ways. But if a property owner could make higher profits leaving land in its natural state as a tourist attraction (for conservationists and others), than in leasing it to miners, which would he choose?

Justice: some libertarians (not all) are not as much as concerned with punishing the criminal as gaining restitution for the victims. Nowadays, when a theft occurs, the police are not really concerned to serve you, the victim. In any case, there so many thefts that police would be unable to cope, assuming that was their intention. If, however you or your insurance company is paying your police to find the criminal, then it is in their interest to serve you, the customer. When he is found and brought to trial, the principle involved (as with pollution) is restitution for damage caused. The criminal should repay the victim for what he stole, the inconvenience he caused, plus the costs he inccured in finding him. Note also that many of the government-defined “crimes” are crimes without victims; that is, people can be punished for things they do to themselves, which involve no one but themselves. In a libertarian society, if you want to smoke (or grow and sell) marijuana, commit suicide, or walk naked on your own property (e.g., your front garden), then as you are causing damage to no other persons then there will be no laws in your path.

Libertarians are also rewriting history, as each generation is wont to do. Strangely, they find themselves often in agreement with many of the charges laid by the new left, especially against big business. In A New History of Leviathan, a collaboration between writers of left and right, Murray Rothbard shows that Herbert Hoover, commonly called the last laissez-faire President, in fact laid the ground work for the New Deal, and Roosevelt merely took over and continued Hoover’s programmes. And forefront of the movement for the New Deal-corporate state were heads of some of the present-day multinationals.

To summarise, as a political and personal morality, libertarianism can be summed up in five words: thou shalt not initiate force. Or, to put it another way: there are two sources of evil: that which you bring upon yourself, and that which government brings upon everybody.

(in order of appearance on Economics.org.au)

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