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Transcript: The Foundations of a Libertarian Foreign Policy

Posted by M. C. on July 29, 2025

Transcript: The Foundations of a Libertarian Foreign Policy

By The Savvy Street Show

July 18, 2025

Controversies in Libertarianism, Podcast 3

Date of recording: June 3, 2025, The Savvy Street Show

Host: Roger Bissell. Guests: Walter Block, Vinay Kolhatkar

For those who prefer to watch the video, it is here.

Editor’s Note: The Savvy Street Show’s AI-generated transcripts are edited for removal of repetitions and pause terms, and for grammar and clarity. Explanatory references are added in parentheses. Material edits are advised to the reader as edits [in square brackets].

Roger Bissell

Good evening, everyone, and welcome to The Savvy Street Show. My name is Roger Bissell, and I’m your host for this third installment of our series on controversies in libertarianism. Tonight’s topic is libertarian foreign policy. Is there even such a thing? And if there is more than one candidate, are any of them correct in their basics or, if not, can they be fixed? So again, here to explore this topic are my two guests, the eminent economist and libertarian theorist and author of the series, Defending the Undefendable, Walter Block. Welcome to the show, Walter.

Walter Block

Thanks for having me. It’s always a pleasure.

Roger Bissell

Pleasure for us, too, Walter, good to have you. And second, we have my friend and frequent co-host, a novelist and screenwriter, chief editor of The Savvy Street, and co-author with me of Modernizing Aristotle’s Ethics, Vinay Kolhatkar. Welcome to the show, Vinay.

Vinay Kolhatkar

Thank you for having me.

Roger Bissell

Well, we’re going to just plunge right in. The first question is rather open-ended, just to kind of warm up with. Does a nation-state, such as the United States, have rights or obligations or any kind of moral principles that it needs to act according to? Walter, let’s have you begin, if you would.

Walter Block

On the one hand, I wear an anarcho-capitalist hat. And on the other hand, I wear a moderate libertarian hat; call it classical liberalism.

I guess I’m torn on this because I wear two hats. On the one hand, I wear an anarcho-capitalist hat. And on the other hand, I wear a moderate libertarian hat; call it minarchism or classical liberalism or something like that. Now, with the anarcho-capitalist hat, paradoxically, we’re not against government. We just want everyone to have one. So, from the anarcho-capitalist point of view, the optimal number of governments is about 8 billion, because there are 8 billion people here, and everyone should have one. You know, be the first on your block to have a government, and everyone should get one. And then my government should be nice to your government, Roger, and nice to your government, Vinay, and we should all follow the non-aggression principle, and we should all cooperate with each other. We don’t have to like each other, but we’ve got to keep our mitts off each other—unless we agree to put our mitts on each other, like in a voluntary boxing match or something like that. So, the foreign policy of me should be the same as the foreign policy of you guys, and that is to adhere to the non-aggression principle and uphold private property rights based on homesteading—and as Robert Nozick would then say, on anything subsequent like voluntary trade. So, if I homestead some land and you homestead a cow, and I produce corn and you produce milk, and now we trade, I now have the righteous ownership of the milk even though I didn’t produce it, because I can trace it back to homestead and voluntary trade.

Now for the tough part. Now we’re minarchists for the moment, or classical liberals, and what should the government do? Well, it’s going to collect taxes, which is a no-no, but now I’m not an anarcho-capitalist anymore. I’m schizophrenic. I’m now a limited-government libertarian. And yes, we’re going to have taxes, and the taxes are mainly for armies to protect us from foreign invaders; police to protect us from local invaders, rapists, murderers; and courts to determine, what should be the statutory rape age, or is my music too loud at three in the morning? Things like that. Or Vinay and I had a contract, and I say he broke it, he says he didn’t, so I’ll appoint you, Roger, as the court. You would decide, based on the evidence that Vinay and I give to you.

I don’t see anything in the bowels of libertarianism that says you can’t have any allies.

So, what should the foreign policy be? The foreign policy should be to protect the country. Don’t let any invaders come in and get us. Now, this leads to an issue. Should we have allies? Well, I don’t see why we shouldn’t have allies. I don’t favor an alliance with everybody from our country, let’s say that our country is the United States, but I don’t see anything in the bowels of libertarianism that says you can’t have any allies. So, I would say that if we’re the ally of Israel, and Israel is under attack, we help them; and on the other hand, if we’re under attack, we would expect Israel to help us. This leads to a whole can of worms. Who should be our allies? NATO? How about China? Better yet, Taiwan. Should the Taiwanese be our allies? That would be my opening answer to the question.

Roger Bissell

Okay. Well, Vinay, do you see it that way or do you have a different slant on it?

Vinay Kolhatkar

Governments only have rights that are delegated to them by their citizens.

Well, a little different slant. First of all, I’ve held this view, I think, for many decades, which is a view that we do have allies [naturally]. So, for instance, if the three of us are walking down Central Park, let’s say somebody attacks Walter Block. He doesn’t have a gun, he doesn’t have a knife, and Roger being a big strong guy, I’m going to encourage him to intervene. [Laughter]. I will intervene as well, especially if it’s a physical fight, and poor Walter could be beaten to death, but three against one, we might have a better chance. And it’s an implicit contract because we’re friends or colleagues, we help each other out. But the critical question was, do nation-states have rights and obligations? And I found out that my answer is identical to [Ayn] Rand’s. She explores that in an essay called “Collectivized Rights” in the book The Virtue of Selfishness. She divides the world into black and white, no gray in that hypothetical, which is typical of Rand. So, let’s say there are nations that are fundamentally secular, democratic, and respect the rule of law, have a wall between religion and the state, and, most importantly, they respect the rights of their citizens. Now, she’s a little bit uncertain where to draw the line, and she’s drawn the line where the US, the UK, in her time—the 60s, would clearly fall on the good side. And her favorite villain, Soviet Russia, would fall on the bad side, as would Cuba, because they’re completely communist, and they respected no rights, it was a kangaroo court system out there. So, in those, she says firstly, that the governments only have rights that are delegated to them by their citizens. So, the right to protect them from internal strife [requires that] we have the police, the courts. But in this situation, [the government also has] the right, clearly, and an obligation to protect the citizens from outside threats.

But what if the threat isn’t imminent to the United States itself, taking the US as an example? And this is a statement I completely agree with. Then the government has the right to intervene, but not an obligation. That’s a statement that is absolutely right in one sense. If you’re going by the beach and you see somebody drowning, [and] it’s a complete stranger, not your own son or daughter or somebody that you love, then you do have the right to jump in the water and save him or her; but you may not be so confident of your swimming, you might drift away and you might drown yourself and such things have happened, and so you don’t have the obligation. You’ve got to make a split[-second] decision, a quick decision; but in foreign policy, we don’t have to make that quick a decision.

Governments like Iran’s, that abrogate the rights of their own citizens, have no right to exist, and any country has the right (but not the obligation) to help topple that kind of government.

Essentially, these kinds of governments, like the government of Iran, that abrogate the rights of their own citizens, have no right to exist, and we, or the US or any country, according to Rand, and I agree, has the right to help topple that kind of government, especially if the end result is going to be a better one.

Even Murray Rothbard, about as anti-war [an intellectual] as you can get, said that the Indo-Pakistan War in 1971 was a just war.

Even Murray Rothbard, about as anti-war [an intellectual] as you can get, said that the Indo-Pakistan War in 1971 was a just war, because you had East Pakistan on the east of the Indian subcontinent and on the west, you had Pakistan. It was a funny kind of unified country [the old Pakistan] with a large area in the middle that belonged to India. Apparently, Pakistan was raping, pillaging, and looting out in East Pakistan, and there were refugees coming in hordes crossing over the Indian border. To cut a long story short, the Indian army went into what is now Bangladesh. They repelled the Pakistani army, freed the people, and then they just came back, and they [people there] had a new election and called it a new state: Bangladesh. That was, even according to Rothbard, a just cause. Now, I don’t know how many Indian soldiers died in that, and somebody might argue, wait a minute, you’re still using taxpayers’ money to intervene, and even if one soldier died, what right did you have to put him into an external conflict? But there was a danger in the future to the Indian subcontinent from Pakistan winning against East Pakistan. So, I rest my case there. The principle is there. The particulars get very complicated.

Roger Bissell

They sure do. I like your example of our pal Walter [being] out there in Central Park, and he’s being set upon by some violent person. Now, let’s expand it a little bit to a situation where the guy has not attacked Walter yet, but we’re strolling along, the two of us, and we know Walter is not far away. Maybe he’s over at the food wagon getting a hot dog or something, and we hear this guy over in the bushes, and he says, “I’m going to get that blasted Walter Block,” and he’s loading up his pistol. Now, by the NAP [non-aggression principle] and the right to self-defense and the right to help your friend by defending them—this gets into preemptive stuff, right? —if there’s no policeman nearby, and our phones don’t have any charge in the batteries, then it’s up to us. Do we have the right to apprehend, subdue, disarm this guy, to initiate force against him? Or, in fact, is he initiating force already, even though he hasn’t laid a hand on Walter yet? He’s planning, and he’s loading up his gun. Maybe he’s mentally deranged, and he’s not really going to do anything, he’s just hallucinating. But what kind of chance do you take in a situation like that? Do you go after the crazy person? Vinay, go ahead and comment.

Vinay Kolhatkar

If the threat is absolutely imminent, we do have the right to intervene.

If the threat is absolutely imminent, we do have the right to intervene. I’ll give you a couple of other examples. Even in a libertarian society, you would probably take away the firearms from a person who is a paranoid schizophrenic, has a history of violence, has been in and out of jail, has been warned plenty of times but can’t help himself, and has already shot at a few people. He’s not in jail because fortunately his aim was pretty bad, and he ended up injuring people in the leg or the arm, hasn’t killed anyone simply because he’s not as good a shot, but he keeps doing this, and even a libertarian society would take away his firearms. And in cases otherwise, even this person may have made many threats to Walter, he has mailed him [threats], has shouted from his soapbox that “I don’t like Walter’s existence, he should be eradicated from the earth.” And suppose in this case, Roger and I are policemen, so it makes it a little bit easier than us unarmed taking on an armed, deranged person. We are policemen, we sight him, and he is right behind Walter, about to draw his gun. Yes, we have every right at least to use the taser guns on him to disarm him and disable him. And if nothing succeeds, and he lunges at Walter with a knife, and there’s only five feet between them, at that stage we have the right to shoot [the assailant] in the chest or the head area.

Roger Bissell

So, you’re going to wait till you see the whites of his eyes or something? You wouldn’t preempt him if he’s just off in the bushes loading his gun and muttering ominously?

See the rest here

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TGIF: Democracy as Religion

Posted by M. C. on August 7, 2024

First, classical liberalism, or what we moderns call libertarianism, is not mainly about believing; it’s about respecting each individual’s person, property, and liberty, and particularly about the government’s respecting those things. It’s also about understanding that freedom leads to social cooperation (the division of labor and trade), peace, and prosperity. Economic theory and history show it.

Second, it’s democracy, not freedom, that requires faith in the absence of evidence. It’s a religion that holds that If we believe hard enough, tens of millions of us going to the temple polls to vote will make the right decisions. No one explains why it should work out that way. And it doesn’t. It’s a faith in magic, and magic is not real.

https://libertarianinstitute.org/articles/tgif-democracy-as-religion/

by Sheldon Richman

ballot

During a conversation with someone who loves representative democracy but hates America’s current political situation, I pointed out a problem with his view. The current situation, I said, is a product of representative democracy. So you can’t have the system without the lamented consequences.

Why is that? People like free benefits for themselves and society, and politicians prosper by promising and delivering apparently free benefits to enough voters. Individuals and interest groups see the government as a bazaar open for business 24/7.

The problem, of course, is that there are no free benefits. The government, which does not produce anything, can’t give away anything it hasn’t first taken from someone else. The system’s inherent perverse incentives deliver big spending, high taxes, and growing budget deficits (when raising taxes is unfeasible) financed through massive borrowing. This process eventually leads to central-bank monetary inflation, rising prices, and shrinking purchasing power. The transfer of purchasing power from regular people to politicians is a form of taxation.

I proposed to my interlocutor that a better way to go would be to move the government’s few legitimate functions to the free, competitive market, which aligns incentives more consistently with individual rights and general prosperity. The government’s illegitimate functions should be abolished.

He mocked my position by holding his hand in the praying position and looking toward heaven as he said, “If only we all believe.” I responded that it’s no article of faith that freedom and free markets—classical liberalism—have eradicated most extreme poverty and created unmatched living standards worldwide. You can easily look up the graphs that show this astounding progress. The still-lagging areas lack freedom.

For roughly 200,000 years human beings lived short lives with virtually no material progress. Then a few hundred years ago things changed dramatically thanks to liberalism, the Enlightenment, and the Industrial Revolution. That was no coincidence, and understanding what economic historian Deirdre McCloskey calls the “Great Enrichment” requires no faith.

I could have said much more to my interlocutor, and I’ll say it here.

See the rest here

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To Fight the State, Build Alternatives to the State | The Libertarian Institute

Posted by M. C. on March 30, 2023

The effort to neutralize nonstate institutions has been enormously successful. Institutional obstacles to state power are shadows of their former selves. Long gone are the independent communes, the free towns, the local militias, and the independent monasteries and churches. In more recent history, even fraternal organizations and local charities have become increasingly invisible, and ever more dependent on the central government’s tax dollars. Religious observance is in deep decline. Church organizations such as schools and parishes are consequently much reduced. Families are in decline as well.

https://libertarianinstitute.org/articles/to-fight-the-state-build-alternatives-to-the-state/

by Ryan McMaken

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Throughout its history, liberalism—the ideology today called “classical liberalism” or “libertarianism”—has suffered from the impression that it is primarily against things. This is not entirely wrong. Historically, liberalism coalesced as a recognizable and coherent ideology in opposition largely to mercantilism and absolutism throughout Western Europe. Over time, this opposition extended to socialism, protectionism, imperialism, aggressive warfare, and slavery as well. In this regard, liberals have for centuries fought against a wide array of moral and economic evils that spread poverty, injustice, and misery.

Being “against” things, however, has never been sufficient in itself, and liberals have never contented themselves with being so. Liberalism, of course, has long been closely associated with so-called “bourgeois” values, private property, local self-determination, and—in spite of claims to the contrary—religious institutions. Today, however, these institutions that have long undergirded liberalism and the free society are in an advanced state of decay. These are the institutions that have made society and civic life possible without state control.

The decline of these institutions did not happen by accident. The power of the modern state is the result of long wars by the state against independent churches, against family ties, and against local self-determination and self-government. The state has never suffered rivals, so any organization that competes for the “hearts and minds” of the population must be made impotent.

So, we find that the challenge at hand is more than simply opposing the state. Rather, it is necessary to build up, reinforce, and sustain institutions that can offer alternatives to the state in terms of organizing and supporting human society. Without these institutions, liberalism’s job is much more difficult—or even impossible.

Societies Are Composed of Institutions

As libertarian historian Ralph Raico notes, liberals make a key distinction between the state and “society.” Society is simply those institutions that are not the state. Or as David Gordon puts it, “Liberals believe that the main institutions of society can function in entire independence of the state.”

The idea that the institutions of society can function without a state is an established historical fact. Since the beginnings of human civilization, even in the absence of states, people have built up institutions and relationships designed to provide order, security, and social safety nets. As described by historian Paul Freedman, many societies have been held together by something other than “government in the sense that we understand it.” Rather, they can be held together with “informal social networks and ties.” These include “kinship, family, private vengeance, religion.”

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TGIF: Why Freedom Is the Goal | The Libertarian Institute

Posted by M. C. on December 12, 2022

The point is that any enlargement [of state authority], good or bad, reduces the scope of individual responsibility, and thus retards and cripples the education which can be a product of nothing but the free exercise of moral judgment…. The profound instinct against being “done for our own good” … is wholly sound. Men are aware of the need of this moral experience as a condition of growth, and they are aware, too, that anything tending to ease it off from them, even for their own good, is to be profoundly distrusted. The practical reason for freedom, then, is that freedom seems to be the only condition under which any kind of substantial moral fibre can be developed. [Emphasis added.]

https://libertarianinstitute.org/articles/tgif-why-freedom/

by Sheldon Richman

In online interviews and conversations I’m hearing intellectuals in the national conservative movement say that the liberal Enlightenment “project” has mostly failed because people need more in their lives than freedom. I’ve also heard this from a few people who have lately become disillusioned with leftism but yet are uneasy about libertarianism.

My first response is to wonder whom these critics of classical liberalism, or libertarianism, its modern-day form, have in mind. Which important and widely influential liberal political, economic, or, social thinker even implied that freedom is the only thing worth valuing? Let’s name names, please. I can’t think of one, but perhaps I’m overlooking someone.

Those conservatives will also insist that freedom without virtue is not just worthless but a clear and present danger. But again, which past and present of genuine liberal stalwarts would disagree? I’ve always understood liberalism to be distinct from libertinism. I see no grounds for confusing the two.

Classical liberalism, in its consequentialist, deontological, and eudaemonist forms, has been concerned with what makes for a proper society by some articulated standard or other, starting with the most fundamental unit of analysis, the individual. The literature is saturated with positive observations about society, the division of labor, association, and rich communities — in a word, cooperation.

One way or another, all of that is related to values in addition to freedom; it all is related to virtue. Far from embodying an atomistic, licentious, to-hell-with-everyone-else (pseudo)individualism, libertarianism extols what I call Adamistic (Smith, that is) individualism, in which human beings “selfishly” flourish through mutually rewarding relationships of all kinds. I’ve also dubbed this “molecular individualism. Of course, some people will engage in vice and aggression (those aren’t the same things), but as long as the state is unavailable for social engineering, free individuals using private property in association with others can peacefully protect themselves and their children from what they find abhorrent. Live and let live is the rule.

For liberals, freedom was never just an end in itself. Freedom means freedom from aggression, whatever the source, but at least implicit in the liberal vision — and indispensable to truly understanding it — is the freedom to produce material and nonmaterial values in a social context. We want freedom so we may live fully as human beings and enjoy fruitful lives among other people. Successful long-term participation in the market and society more widely encourages honesty, justice, and conscientiousness — virtues by any reckoning. To understand the value of society is to understand the need for — yes — order, but it is specifically the bottom-up, emergent, spontaneous order that F. A. Hayek and other liberals have emphasized. (You find this in Adam Smith, Thomas Paine, Herbert Spencer, Carl Menger, Ludwig von Mises, and countless others.)

The critics of liberalism are right of course when they say that freedom is not enough to properly address the social problems we observe today. But again, which libertarian ever said it was? The libertarian point is that freedom is the condition in which people have the best chance of dealing with problems. Liberalism doesn’t promise a rose garden; it’s not utopian. In fact, freedom is not the answer to any problem. Rather, it — along with the resulting decentralization and competition — is essential to the discovery process that enables people to deal with problems as best they can. Since no one is omniscient, that discovery process is indispensable both for the good life and the good society.

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“Classical Liberalism” Will Never Satisfy the Left | Mises Wire

Posted by M. C. on December 7, 2022

Mises and Hayek used “classical liberal” to distinguish themselves from the Left. Today the term is used primarily to appease the Left. Self-proclaimed classical liberals today mostly seek to distance themselves from MAGA Trumpism and the hated Deplorables, to convince progressives they are not like those awful right-wingers! 

https://mises.org/wire/classical-liberalism-will-never-satisfy-left

Jeff Deist

“Today the tenets of this nineteenth-century philosophy of liberalism are almost forgotten. In the United States “liberal” means today a set of ideas and political postulates that in every regard are the opposite of all that liberalism meant to the preceding generations.”

—Ludwig von Mises, 1962 (emphasis added)

F.A. Hayek is back in the public eye, thanks to a promising and weighty new biography from Professors Bruce Caldwell and Hansjörg Klausinger. Predictably, the book has brought Hayek’s critics out of the woodwork. Consider the recent backhand in The Spectator by Lord Robert Skidelsky, titled “Friedrich Hayek: A Great Political Thinker Rather than a Great Economist.” Readers quickly understand the author actually thinks Hayek was neither. This is perhaps not a surprise coming from Skidelsky, the fulsome biographer of John Maynard Keynes who clearly imagines that his subject “won” the debate against Hayek over planning versus markets (“He more or less gave up technical economics after his battles with Keynes and the Keynesians”).

But the ongoing criticisms of Hayek’s “neoliberalism”—i.e., his supposed political program1—ring very hollow even in hopeless outlets like Jacobin. Hayek and his mentor Ludwig von Mises were old liberals of the nineteenth-century variety. Neoliberalism, by contrast, is a derogatory catchall term used by the Left today to police what it sees as undue respect for markets and private capital among the Clintonite and Blairite factions pushing global social democracy.

But fundamentally there is only liberalism and illiberalism. Hayek and Mises steadfastly called themselves “classical liberals” out of necessity—to distinguish themselves from the modern liberal program.

Twentieth-century liberalism, the bad kind, had its roots in the Progressive Era. It manifested in Wilsonian expansionism and Franklin Roosevelt’s criminal New Deal, both deeply illiberal developments opposed by the two Austrians-cum-Americans. “Liberal” had morphed into a proxy term for individuals advocating left-wing economic and social programs rather than markets and laissez-faire. So regardless of the earlier strands of classical liberalism flowing from Adam Smith, John Locke, David Hume, or even Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Mises and Hayek used the term expressly in the context of midcentury Western politics.

After the Great Depression and two world wars, the old nineteenth-century liberalism was under open attack. But Mises and Hayek still advanced a liberalism of economic freedom and peace, in stark contrast to the central planning, interventionism, and positive rights (entitlements) promoted as scientific by Marxists and Keynesians. The quote at the top of this article, from the 1962 preface to the English translation of Mises’s foundational 1927 book, Liberalismus, demonstrates the critical distinction. The shift in the meaning of “liberal” over the thirty-five years between editions was clear and convincing. And it compelled the great economist to retitle the book The Free and Prosperous Commonwealth: An Exposition of the Ideas of Classical Liberalism to make sure Anglo-American audiences knew exactly which version of liberalism the book explained.

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The French Must Rediscover the Taste for Individual Freedom: An Interview with Professor Pascal Salin

Posted by M. C. on October 19, 2022

PS: It is true that we can consider this situation as surprising and regrettable. But it seems obvious that this is so because classical liberalism is not an objective for most French people, who, therefore, have no particular interest in classical liberal policies applied in other countries.

The same applies for US.

https://mises.org/wire/french-must-rediscover-taste-individual-freedom-interview-professor-pascal-salin

Matthieu Creson

Pascal Salin is an economist, professor emeritus at the University of Paris-Dauphine, and was president of the Mont-Pelerin Society from 1994 to 1996. Among the extensive list of books Professor Salin has published, mention can be made of the following titles: La vérité sur la monnaie (Paris: Odile Jacob, 1990), Libéralisme (Paris: Odile Jacob, 2000), Français, n’ayez pas peur du libéralisme (Paris: Odile Jacob, 2007), Revenir au capitalisme pour éviter les crises (Paris: Odile Jacob, 2010), La tyrannie fiscale (Paris: Odile Jacob, 2014; translated into English as Tax Tyranny [Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar Publishing Ltd, 2020]), Le vrai libéralisme: droite et gauche unies dans l’erreur (Paris: Odile Jacob, 2019).

Matthieu Creson (MC): How do you judge Emmanuel Macron’s first five-year term economically and socially? You said in an interview with Le Figaro magazine, at the time of the 2017 presidential campaign, that Emmanuel Macron was not a classical liberal, and you wrote in 2018 that his tax policy was fiscal tinkering. Is this still the case in your opinion?

Pascal Salin (PS): Indeed, I published an article in Le Figaro-Magazine in 2017 entitled No, Emmanuel Macron is not a classical liberal (contrary to what was then the case of François Fillon—who was then also running for president). France had experienced low growth in previous years because the policies that had been implemented, far from being inspired by classical liberalism, were on the contrary based on the growth of taxation and regulations. Emmanuel Macron was appointed in 2014 Minister of the Economy by President François Hollande. It then seemed obvious to me that he was not a real classical liberal, contrary to what was sometimes claimed. Public spending represented 59 percent of GDP in 2021 (and 63 percent in 2020), a slightly higher amount than in all previous years; and public deficit has also become more significant. It is obvious that one cannot consider as a classical liberal a president who increases public activities in relation to private ones. For example, health insurance expenses are public rather than private and the choice of retirement age is the result of a public decision and not a private choice.

MC: What do you think of the assumption (from which most of the media seem to start in their coverage of current political divisions) according to which there would be on one side the “globalists” and the “liberals,” and on the other the “populists”? For a long time, the main political and ideological dividing line was that between classical liberals, supporters of economic freedom and globalization through the market, and socialists, favorable to redistribution and state interventionism. Doesn’t the current cleavage which seems to serve, particularly in the media, as the one and only interpretative framework of today’s political world, mask the real cleavage, that is to say that which opposes the authentic classical liberals on one side, and the collectivists on the other?

PS: It is true—and regrettable—that the opposition between classical liberals and socialists is generally not highlighted in today’s world by politicians and by all citizens. Thus, it is not appropriate to consider that the political parties of the Left are socialist and the parties of the Right classical liberal. Both have more or less the same ideas and tend to make the same decisions. This is also why a book I published in 2019 is titled True Classical Liberalism—Right and Left United in Error (in French: Le vrai libéralisme: droite et gauche unies dans l’erreur). The examples in this book prove that equivalent (nonclassical liberal) policies have been taken over the past decades regardless of the parties in power.

MC: I’m going back to Emmanuel Macron and his economic policy. Do you think he has a chance (and already a real will) to lead, since the start of his second presidential term, some of the structural reforms that France has actually needed for at least forty years? Or is it more likely for you that other so-called “reforms” (in the continuity of those carried out by Chirac, Sarkozy, or Hollande) will see the light of day in the years to come, against a probable background of presidential and governmental communication centered on necessary “transformation” and “modernization” of France—a transformation and modernization which should indeed be a priority for our country?

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The Backstory of the Great Reset, or How to Destroy Classical Liberalism

Posted by M. C. on June 1, 2022

To understand the Great Reset, then, we must recognize that the project represents the completion of a centuries-long and ongoing attempt to destroy classical liberalism (the free market, free speech, and liberal democracy), American constitutionalism, and national sovereignty. The idea of resetting capitalism suggests that capitalism had previously been pure. But the Great Reset is the culmination of a much longer collectivization process and democratic socialist project, with their corresponding growth of the state. 

https://mises.org/wire/backstory-great-reset-or-how-destroy-classical-liberalism

Michael Rectenwald

As should be clear by now, Francis Fukuyama’s declaration in The End of History: The Last Man (1992) that we had arrived at “the end of history” did not mean that classical liberalism, or laissez-faire economics, had emerged victorious over communism and fascism, or that the final ideological hegemony signaled the end of socialism. In fact, for Fukuyama, the terminus of history was always democratic socialism or social democracy. As Hans-Hermann Hoppe noted in Democracy: The God That Failed, “the Last Man” standing was not a capitalist homo economicus but rather a “homo socio-democraticus” (222). The end of history, with all its Hegelian pretenses, did not entail the defeat of socialism-communism but rather of classical liberalism. Evidently, the big state and big capital were supposed to have reached an inevitable and final détente. The Great Reset is the consummation of this final détente.

The elite subversion of the free-market system and republican democracy had already been underway for many decades before “the end of history.” According to Cleon W. Skousen in The Naked Capitalist, elites positioned within major banks, large corporations, leading think tanks, influential publishing companies, the media, tax-exempt foundations, the educational system, and the US government sought to remake the US in the image of its (former) collectivist archrival since at least the early 1930s (57-68). As Carrol Quigley noted in Tragedy and Hope: A History of the World in Our Time (1966), elites propagated socialist, communist, and other collectivist ideologies at home, while funding and arming the Bolsheviks in Russia and the communists in Vietnam and promoting international policies that led to the deliberate abandonment of eastern Europe and Southeast Asia to the communist scourge.

For many, the goal of advancing socialism has been most evident in the alacrity with which the institutions of higher education have absorbed and circulated Marxist, neo-Marxist, and post-Marxist collectivist ideologies in their various guises at least since the early 1930s—including Soviet propaganda, critical theory, postmodern theory, and the most recent variants, critical race theory, critical whiteness studies, and LGBTQIA+ ideology. The dreaded “long march through the institutions” was never a bottom-up, grassroots project. Rather, it was an inside job undertaken by elites in positions of power and influence. When the philosophers, sociologists, and psychologists of the Frankfurt school of critical theory emigrated to the US in 1933—armed with the Marxist theory of revolution and Antonio Gramsci’s model for socialist cultural hegemony—they hardly inaugurated this march. Rather, they were welcomed by elites and funded by tax-exempt foundations whose work was already well underway.1 The so-called long march through the institutions was a stampede within them.

To understand the Great Reset, then, we must recognize that the project represents the completion of a centuries-long and ongoing attempt to destroy classical liberalism (the free market, free speech, and liberal democracy), American constitutionalism, and national sovereignty. The idea of resetting capitalism suggests that capitalism had previously been pure. But the Great Reset is the culmination of a much longer collectivization process and democratic socialist project, with their corresponding growth of the state. Despite being pitched as the antidote to the supposed weaknesses of the free market, which World Economic Forum founder and chairman Klaus Schwab and company equate with “neoliberalism,” the Great Reset is meant to intensify and complete an already prevalent economic interventionism, and to use US-led military power to complete this process where economic intervention proves unsuccessful. This explains, in part, the West’s arming and funding of Ukraine against its Russian attacker.

I do not mean to suggest that the Great Reset’s global neo-Marxist economics, and its international rather than national economic fascism, are not new. They are new, as are the means by which they are to be brought about. But we must not be so confused as to think that the Great Reset project was born ab nihilo—it’s the culmination of decades of elite thinking and activism.

  • 1.The Frankfurt school theorist Herbert Marcuse, for example, was funded by the American Council of Learned Societies, the Louis M. Rabinowitz Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the Social Science Research Council. See Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man (1964; repr., London: Routledge, 2002), p. iv, where Marcuse acknowledges such funding.

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Contact Michael Rectenwald

Michael Rectenwald is the author of eleven books, including Thought Criminal, Beyond Woke, Google Archipelago, and Springtime for Snowflakes.

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TGIF: Racial Polarization Is Poison | The Libertarian Institute

Posted by M. C. on November 28, 2021

When social distrust is sown among groups, particularly on the basis of spurious identity considerations, a great deal of what we value but take for granted is put at risk. This doesn’t mean that America’s history of slavery, Jim Crow, and less formal forms of racism can’t be taught and discussed frankly. They must be.

https://libertarianinstitute.org/articles/tgif-racial-polarization-is-poison/

by Sheldon Richman

Be they “left” or “right,” those who agitate for racial polarization seem to have no sense of the harm they could do to everyone in our society. As the wise Glenn Loury would say, they are playing with fire. By polarization, of any kind, I mean more than merely a vigorous disagreement over issues or even basic principles. That’s fine. Rather, I mean something dogmatic, obsessive, and fanatical, in which virtually everything in the world is seen through a single lens and everyone is expected to act and speak in a certain way, with stern consequences for the noncompliant.

It can happen in politics, but it is becoming especially common with race, where some would have us interpret virtually everything through a racial prism. This is more than simply unfortunate; it threatens what the ancient Greek philosophers and later philosophers such as Spinoza — whose 389th birthday (Nov. 24, 1632) we marked this week — held to be the good life for human beings; it’s the conception of life in which being virtuous is seen as constitutive of happiness, or better: eudaimonia, and not separate from happiness or merely means to it.

Racial polarization threatens this not just in the obvious way, namely, with the potential holds for violence. I’m thinking of the more subtle way: through the narrowing and undermining of all sorts of social cooperation.

Formulators of the original (classical) liberalism, which has been refined into the libertarian political philosophy, took to heart what the Greeks and their intellectual descendants emphasized, namely, that we human beings are inherently social animals. Some went even further to note that, as reason- and language-bearing creatures, we thrive best when surrounded by people who exhibit their rationality in the fullest sense, not only as a tool to judge means but ends as well. Only in such a milieu can we live in ways most proper to rational animals, that is, with reason always in the driver’s seat. This entails, among other things, dealing with people through argument, persuasion, and consent rather than command, manipulation, and force.

A key way that social existence promotes individual flourishing is cooperation, which augments our otherwise weak individual capacities. While no collective brain exists, liberal society creates something analogous to it. As a result, we each gain access to an incredible volume of knowledge — moral and otherwise — any morsel of which we might never have thought up or encountered while living alone or in small groups during our limited lifespans. The marketplace of ideas is an example of this process that benefits us all beyond measure. In this day when free speech and free inquiry are increasingly under assault from reckless elements left and right, this would be good to remember.

The benefits of the broadest possible social cooperation are also abundant in the material realm. The early liberal political-economic thought demonstrated that living in isolation was to live in abject poverty. No one was better at pointing this out than Frédéric Bastiat, the 19th-century French liberal. In the opening chapter of his unfinished magnum opus, Economic Harmonies, he wrote:

It is impossible not to be struck by the disproportion, truly incommensurable, that exists between the satisfactions [any] man derives from society and the satisfactions that he could provide for himself if he were reduced to his own resources. I make bold to say that in one day he consumes more things than he could produce himself in ten centuries.

What makes the phenomenon stranger still is that the same thing holds true for all other men. Every one of the members of society has consumed a million times more than he could have produced; yet no one has robbed anyone else….

We should be shutting our eyes to the facts if we refused to recognize that society cannot present such complicated combinations in which civil and criminal law play so little part without being subject to a prodigiously ingenious mechanism. This mechanism is the object of study of political economy.

If this was true in 1850, what would Bastiat say about our time? Think of all the things we have access to in the developed world, even those of modest means. (The people of the developing world want the same, which shows the cruelty of so-called climate policy, which would raise the price and reliability of energy.) The point which shouts from Bastiat’s passages is that we have much to lose if social cooperation were to break down or even narrowed. Society is exchange, as the liberals hammered home on many occasions. “Society is concerted action, cooperation,” Ludwig von Mises wrote in his grand treatise, Human Action, which he was tempted to call Social Cooperation, another name for specialization through the division of labor and knowledge.

Need more be said about the threat from racial and other deep polarization? To invoke another original liberal, Adam Smith famously wrote that the division of labor is limited by the extent of the market. The fewer the people with whom to cooperate, the more primitive the division of labor. And the more primitive the division of labor, the poorer we are. That should require no elaboration.

When social distrust is sown among groups, particularly on the basis of spurious identity considerations, a great deal of what we value but take for granted is put at risk. This doesn’t mean that America’s history of slavery, Jim Crow, and less formal forms of racism can’t be taught and discussed frankly. They must be. But the cost will be unspeakably severe if frank conversation about the past and even aspects of the present transmogrify into polarization, hatred, and distrust.

Good people everywhere should speak out against polarization. Think about what we all have to lose. And once it’s lost, there may be no getting it back.

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A Brief History of Secession Referenda in Europe | Mises Wire

Posted by M. C. on June 16, 2021

But in all cases, plebiscites were employed to determine a question of secession, whether or not the end goal was ultimately full independence. In this, they have worked relatively well. In many cases, these plebiscites have helped to peacefully settle disputes and to send a message to central regimes about the prudence of granting independence to separatist regions that vote overwhelmingly for independence. 

Given all this it would be odd to regard a vote on independence in Scotland—or anywhere else—as some sort of outlandish or radical political strategy. 

https://mises.org/wire/brief-history-secession-referenda-europe

Ryan McMaken

Scotland still hasn’t given up on holding another independence referendum within the next several years. Although London opposes the measure, it is notable that the debate over Scottish secession is not over whether or not a secession vote is moral or legal. Rather, the question is over whether or not such a vote is prudent at this time.

This is quite a departure from American politics, in which any suggestion of independence for any region of the US—a country that is not even as old as the three hundred–year union between England and Scotland—is considered obviously illegal and beyond the pale of serious political discussion.

Moreover, in spite of the US’s (rather unwarranted) reputation for expansive local autonomy, we can find many cases in which European regimes were far more willing to compromise on local assertions of autonomy and independence than is the case in the United States.

Although fully or partially successful secession movements are not frequent occurrences in Europe, we can nonetheless look to a number of cases in which regions successfully carried forward independence movements at least to the point that a referendum was held. In some of these cases, independence won voter approval and was enacted.

Let’s look at some of these cases to learn more.

Local Autonomy and Plebiscites as a Component of Classical Liberalism

In his 1919 book, Nation, State, and Economy, Ludwig von Mises concludes that local independence is an assumed characteristic within a liberal (i.e., a “classically liberal” of “libertarian”) polity. He writes:

When a part of the people of the state wants to drop out of the union, liberalism does not hinder it from doing so. Colonies that want to become independent need only do so…. no people and no part of a people shall be held against its will in a political association that it does not want.

Moreover, in his 1927 book, Liberalism: In the Classical Tradition, Mises encourages the use of plebiscites in carrying this out. Mises writes:

[W]henever the inhabitants of a particular territory, whether it be a single village, a whole district, or a series of adjacent districts, make it known, by a freely conducted plebiscite, that they no longer wish to remain united to the state to which they belong at the time, but wish either to form an independent state or to attach themselves to some other state, their wishes are to be respected and complied with.

To some readers, this might seem a very radical position that Mises is taking. But, writing in the late teens and 1920s, Mises was working from what was becoming an established—albeit infrequently used—strategy for maintaining or increasing local autonomy within European states.

European Independence Plebiscites: A Quick History

Perhaps the earliest uses of plebiscites to win local support for secession movements occurred in the late eighteenth century during the French Revolution. In an effort to enlarge the French state, plebiscites were used in the Papal States enclaves of Avignon and Comtat Venaissin in 1791, in Savoy in 1792, and in the Belgian Communes, Nice, and the Rhine Valley in 1793.1

In none of these cases was full independence contemplated, and these plebiscites only gave the voters a choice between the status quo and joining the French Republic. Nonetheless, pro-French sentiment was high in many of these areas and voters did indeed in many cases chose to secede from their status quo polities (i.e., the Papal States, Belgium, Sardinia) and join the French state.

By the nineteenth century, plebiscites were being increasingly used as part of the political process of changing which regime controlled certain districts and regions:

[Plebiscites] were held in the transfer of control of Rome from the Papal State to Italy in 1870, in Denmark’s sale of St Thomas and St John to the United States in 1868, and in Sweden’s cession of St. Bartholomew to France in 1877.2

The Ionian Islands were transferred to Greece by Great Britain after the move was approved by voters in an 1863 plebiscite.

Plebiscites were also used—beginning with the aftermath of the Treaty of Prague in 1866—in attempts to settle the so-called Schleswig question over the borderlands between Denmark and the German Confederation.

Secession in the Twentieth Century

By the beginning of the twentieth century, the idea of holding local elections to settle border disputes or the inclusion of a region within a certain polity was anything but novel.

In a 1905 plebiscite, nearly 100 percent of Norwegian voters approved dissolving Norway’s union with Sweden. Norway became a fully independent state three months later.

In a 1918 plebiscite, Iceland’s voters approved independence for the country in a personal union with Denmark under the Danish king. (The king would remain the head of state; Iceland became a republic after another plebiscite in 1944.)

In 1919, the Austrian region of Vorarlberg held a plebiscite to determine if the region should secede from Austria and join Switzerland as a new canton. Eighty-one percent of Vorarlberg voters approved the measure, but the movement failed due to opposition from the Swiss and Austrian governments, among others.

A plebiscite was held in Carinthia in October 1920 to resolve an ongoing border dispute between Yugoslavia and the new Austrian republic. Fifty-nine percent voted to attach Carinthia to Austria. In spite of opposition from Yugoslavian forces, the region ultimately became Austrian.

After World War I, several plebiscites were held as a means of implementing the Treaty of Versailles. These plebiscites, unlike locally driven plebiscites in, say, Vorarlberg and Iceland, were conducted under significant pressure from outside great powers—namely, the victorious Entente powers. Where plebiscites were actually held in German territory—such as in East Prussia—the results favored the Germans, but the Entente powers also simply transferred some areas of Germany to Poland and Czechoslovakia. (The Third Reich would later employ plebiscites in Austria and the Sudetenland as retribution for these territorial transfers.)

In 1946, a plebiscite was held to determine if the Faroe Islands should secede from Denmark. It narrowly failed.

In 1955, voters in the Saar, a French protectorate, voted to join Germany.

In 1964, Maltese voters approved independence from the United Kingdom in a plebiscite.

In 1990, Slovenia declared independence from Yugoslavia via plebiscite. The new Slovenian republic ultimately won independence after the nearly bloodless Ten-Day War. 

In the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union, plebiscites were held in several Soviet republics including Ukraine and the Baltic states. 

(Outside Europe, of course, many more secession plebiscites were held throughout the twentieth century as part of the process of decolonization in Africa and Asia.)

Plebiscites in Perspective

As we can see from these examples, Mises’s position in favor of plebiscites to implement self-determination plans through secession were not especially radical in the context of the late 1920s. After all, by the early twentieth century, they had come to be used a tool for settling border disputes and as a means of allowing for local vetoes on international agreements involving attempts at changing which state controlled certain regions. In many cases, plebiscites did not offer the option of total independence, but provided an option to attach the region in question to a different sovereign state. But in some cases, plebiscites were used to establish the creation of new sovereign states such as Slovenia, Estonia, Iceland, and Norway. In many cases, the results of plebiscites were not carried out or were short lived even when implemented. For example, the Ionian Islands changed hands more than once after the 1863 vote.

But in all cases, plebiscites were employed to determine a question of secession, whether or not the end goal was ultimately full independence. In this, they have worked relatively well. In many cases, these plebiscites have helped to peacefully settle disputes and to send a message to central regimes about the prudence of granting independence to separatist regions that vote overwhelmingly for independence. 

Given all this it would be odd to regard a vote on independence in Scotland—or anywhere else—as some sort of outlandish or radical political strategy. 

  • 1. For an extensive description of nineteenth-century plebiscites, see Sarah Wambaugh, A Monograph on Plebiscites: With a Collection of Official Documents (New York: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 1920).
  • 2. Michael Hechter and Elizabeth Borland, “National Self-Determination: The Emergence of an International Norm,” in Social Norms, ed. Michael Hechter and Karl-Dieter Opp (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2001), p. 193.

Author:

Contact Ryan McMaken

Ryan McMaken (@ryanmcmaken) is a senior editor at the Mises Institute. Send him your article submissions for the Mises Wire and Power&Market, but read article guidelines first. Ryan has degrees in economics and political science from the University of Colorado and was a housing economist for the State of Colorado. He is the author of Commie Cowboys: The Bourgeoisie and the Nation-State in the Western Genre.

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An American Classical Liberalism | Mises Wire

Posted by M. C. on May 8, 2021

Goethe’s Prometheus cries:

Do you fancy that I should hate life,
Should flee to the wilderness,
Because not all my budding dreams have blossomed?

And Faust answers with his “last word of wisdom”:

No man deserves his freedom or his life
Who does not daily win them anew.

https://mises.org/wire/american-classical-liberalism

Llewellyn H. Rockwell Jr.

Every four years, as the November presidential election draws near, I have the same daydream: that I don’t know or care who the president of the United States is. More importantly, I don’t need to know or care. I don’t have to vote or even pay attention to debates. I can ignore all campaign commercials. There are no high stakes for my family or my country. My liberty and property are so secure that, frankly, it doesn’t matter who wins. I don’t even need to know his name.

In my daydream, the president is mostly a figurehead and a symbol, almost invisible to myself and my community. He has no public wealth at his disposal. He administers no regulatory departments. He cannot tax us, send our children into foreign wars, pass out welfare to the rich or the poor, appoint judges to take away our rights of self government, control a central bank that inflates the money supply and brings on the business cycle, or change the laws willy-nilly according to the special interests he likes or seeks to punish.

The President’s Job

His job is simply to oversee a tiny government with virtually no power except to arbitrate disputes among the states, which are the primary governmental units. He is head of state, though never head of government. His position, in fact, is one of constant subordination to the office holders around him and the thousands of statesmen on the state and local level. He adheres to a strict rule of law and is always aware that anytime he transgresses by trying to expand his power, he will be impeached as a criminal.

But impeachment is not likely, because the mere threat reminds him of his place. This president is also a man of outstanding character, well respected by the natural elites in society, a person whose integrity is trusted by all who know him, who represents the best of what an American is.

The president can be a wealthy heir, a successful businessmen, a highly educated intellectual, or a prominent farmer. Regardless, his powers are minimal. He has a tiny staff, which is mostly consumed with ceremonial matters like signing proclamations and scheduling meetings with visiting heads of state.

The presidency is not a position to be avidly sought but almost granted as honorary and temporary. To make sure that is the case, the person chosen as vice president is the president’s chief political adversary. The vice president therefore serves as a constant reminder that the president is eminently replaceable. In this way, the vice presidential office is very powerful, not with regard to the people, but in keeping the executive in check.

But as for people like me who have concerns besides politics, it matters little who the president is. He doesn’t affect my life one way or the other. Neither does anyone under his control. His authority is mainly social, and derived from how much the natural elites in society respect him. This authority is lost as easily as it is gained, so it is unlikely to be abused.

This man is elected indirectly, with the electors chosen as the states direct, with only one proviso: no elector may be a federal official. In the states that choose their electors by majority vote, not every citizen or resident can participate. The people who do vote, a small percentage of the population, are those who have the best interests of society at heart. They are those who own property, who head households, and have been educated. These voters choose a man whose job it is to think only of the security, stability, and liberty of his country.

The Invisible Government

For those who do not vote and do not care about politics, their liberty is secure. They have no access to special rights, yet their rights to person, property, and self government are never in doubt. For that reason and for all practical purposes, they can forget about the president and, for that matter, the rest of the federal government. It might as well not exist. People do not pay direct taxes to it. It doesn’t tell them how to conduct their lives. It doesn’t send them to foreign wars, regulate their schools, pay for their retirement, much less employ them to spy on their fellow citizens. The government is almost invisible.

See the rest here

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Contact Llewellyn H. Rockwell Jr.

Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr., is founder and chairman of the Mises Institute in Auburn, Alabama, and editor of LewRockwell.com.

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