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For it is not the function of any state, including the United States, to right the sins of the Decalogue, to spread fire and devastation in order to bring freedom around the globe—as we murdered countless Vietnamese in the name of their “freedom.” And, above all, we must realize that nuclear war is a far bigger threat to liberty than Communism. How’s that for libertarian “realism”?

In short, libertarians must realize that just as, for them, liberty must be the highest political end, in the same way, peace and the avoidance of mass murder must be the highest end of foreign policy.

https://mises.org/wire/no-state-morally-fit-spread-global-freedom

Murray N. Rothbard

[Philosopher] Eric Mack [in his article “Permissible Defense”] uses a device employed by all too many libertarians—of holding the ideal free-market anarchist system or a limited government as virtually equivalent to the current State-ridden system. Thus, he points out quite correctly that isolationism makes no sense as a principle for a free-market protective agency; he leaps from there to the conclusion that, at least for an anarchist, it cannot be a binding principle for the State either. But for an anarchist, the existing State is not a benign if a bit overly cumbersome surrogate for a free-market protection agency. The State is organized crime, murder, theft, and enslavement incarnate. And even for laissez-faire liberals the existing State should be tarred with the same dire labels.

Isolationism is not a principle for free-market defense agencies because there would be no nation-state and therefore no foreign policy for anyone to worry about. But we live, unfortunately, in a world of nation-states, in which each State has arrogated to itself a monopoly of the use of violence over its assumed territorial area. Therefore, to limit the aggressive use of the State, to limit State violence over innocent people as much as possible, the libertarian, be he an anarchist or a laissez-faire liberal, necessarily arrives at the view that at least each State should confine its operations to that area where it has a monopoly of violence, so that no interstate clashes, or, more importantly, injuries wreaked by State A on the population of State B, will be able to occur. The latter point is particularly important in the days of modern technology when it is virtually impossible for State A to fight State B without gravely injuring or murdering large numbers of civilian innocents on both sides.

Therefore, “isolationism”—the confinement of State violence to its own territory—is an important libertarian precept, whether for an anarchist or not. Limiting government to its own territory is the foreign-policy analogue of the domestic injunction of the laissez-faire liberal that the State not interfere with the lives of its own subjects. And isolationism becomes all the more important in our modern age of advanced technological weaponry.

There is an important philosophical error that Mack makes about free-market defense agencies that is quite relevant to our concerns. He maintains that if A uses B as an innocent shield to aggress against C, it is perfectly legitimate for C to shoot B. The problem here is that Mack forgets about the rights of B. Suppose, after all, that B has hired his own defense agency sworn to defend his life and property, and that, for some empirical reason, the agency can’t get to A; would it not then be perfectly legitimate for B or his agent to shoot C in self-defense? The answer, of course, is yes. The error committed by Mack is to concentrate on one person, C, and to worry about what C’s moral course of action may be, while forgetting about B. On a deeper level, Mack’s error—also engaged in by many others, of course—is to confuse morality and rights, that is, to be concerned about what actions of C may or may not be moral while ignoring what the rights are of the various parties in the given situation. To put it succinctly, it may well be that in the shield situation, it is moral for C to shoot B in order to save his own life; but even though moral, it is also murder, and a violation of B’s rights. This error stems from Mack’s unfortunate view that rights as such all disappear in emergency, “lifeboat” situations.

Thus, the political philosopher should not be concerned with morality per se; he should be concerned with that subset of morality dealing with rights.

See the rest here

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