One reason the federal government is unable to provide adequate aid to those impacted by Helene (and now Milton) is the government is sending military aid worth billions of dollars to Ukraine and Israel. In fact, over 700 members of the Tennessee National Guard are deploying to the Middle East as people in the state deal with damage from Hurricane Helene!
Contrary to the lies spread by authoritarians, libertarianism does not require selfishness. Libertarians welcome voluntary action to help those in need. Libertarians object to government assistance because it is based on force. Authoritarianism leads to poverty, war, chaos in the streets, and a lack of compassion for the less fortunate. Liberty leads to prosperity, peace, and a flourishing of private charities.
Following Hurricane Helene, many private helicopter pilots launched their own search and rescue missions. One would think government officials would welcome the help of these volunteers, but instead they harassed them and even threatened to arrest them!
For example, one private helicopter pilot rescued an individual stranded by Helene. Unfortunately, he was threatened with arrest if he flew his helicopter back into the impacted area to save someone left behind on the earlier flight.
In a video shared by comedian and political commentator Jimmy Dore, Jonathan Howard, a member of the Florida State Guard and volunteer for the nonprofit group Aerial Recovery, discussed how the government took credit for the rescue of an 11-day-old baby even though the rescue was done totally by volunteers. Mr. Howard stated that when he goes on a search and rescue mission he sees around forty other private helicopters and just two military helicopters.
One reason the federal government is unable to provide adequate aid to those impacted by Helene (and now Milton) is the government is sending military aid worth billions of dollars to Ukraine and Israel. In fact, over 700 members of the Tennessee National Guard are deploying to the Middle East as people in the state deal with damage from Hurricane Helene!
When questioned on Fox News about Helene’s impact, South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham made an impassioned plea …. for more aid to Israel. Senator Graham is far from the only member of Congress to put the needs of foreign countries and the military-industrial complex ahead of Americans.
Congress will likely consider a multi-billion-dollar disaster relief bill in the post-election “lame duck” session. Conservative Republicans will (properly) demand the spending be offset by cuts in other spending. The problem is most of these “fiscal conservatives” will vote to increase the national debt to fund the military-industrial-complex.
When I served in Congress, I voted against federal disaster aid even when the disaster impacted my district. Inevitably my office would receive complaints from outraged constituents. After a few months of jumping through the federal government’s bureaucratic hoops in seeking to recover from the disaster, many constituents would call my office to say that they now agree that they would be better off if the government would stop trying to “help” the victims of natural disasters.
One of the helicopter pilots who voluntarily flew into the areas impacted by Helene was Curves fitness chain founder Gary Heavin. Mr. Heavin, in addition to being a successful businessman, is a passionate advocate for liberty who serves on the advisory board of my Institute for Peace and Prosperity. It is not surprising that someone who believes in liberty would be willing to help those in need rather than rely on the government to provide assistance.
Contrary to the lies spread by authoritarians, libertarianism does not require selfishness. Libertarians welcome voluntary action to help those in need. Libertarians object to government assistance because it is based on force. Authoritarianism leads to poverty, war, chaos in the streets, and a lack of compassion for the less fortunate. Liberty leads to prosperity, peace, and a flourishing of private charities.
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.
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.
The biggest infringements on freedom are the welfare-state and the national-security-state way of life under which we live.
But such reform efforts have never been about advancing liberty. That’s because liberty requires the removal of infringements on liberty, not the modification, improvement, or reform of infringements on liberty.
When I discovered libertarianism more than 40 years ago, the revelation that shocked me the most was that I wasn’t living in a free society. All my life, especially since the first grade in the public schools to which my parents were forced to send me, I had been inculcated with the belief that I lived in a free country. And here I was — in my late 20s — breaking through the inches-thick indoctrination that encased my mind and realizing that it was all a lie.
It’s got to be an exhilarating and exciting feeling when one is living in a genuinely free society. When I discovered the truth more than 40 years ago, I decided right then and there that I wanted to live a life of freedom before I passed from this life.
The biggest infringements on freedom are the welfare-state and the national-security-state way of life under which we live. In order to achieve a genuinely free society, it is necessary to dismantle these two massive governmental structures and replace them with a structure that is based on the principles of the free market, voluntary charity, and a limited-government republic.
Unfortunately, long ago some libertarians threw in the towel and gave up on achieving freedom. They convinced themselves that the welfare-warfare state way of life was simply too big, too powerful, and too deeply engrained in the United States and, therefore, that it would be futile to try to eradicate it.
Therefore, they resigned themselves to coming up with reforms that were designed to improve, fix, reform, or modify the welfare-warfare-state infringements on liberty under which we live. Oftentimes, such libertarians described these reform efforts as “advancing liberty.”
But such reform efforts have never been about advancing liberty. That’s because liberty requires the removal of infringements on liberty, not the modification, improvement, or reform of infringements on liberty.
Let’s take a step back and examine what the value of inclusion means. If inclusion were our prime value, then we would affirm collective property as the necessary precondition of the world. Everyone has a right to everything and cannot be rightfully excluded from anything; however, we know this is both an economically and ethically untenable approach. Economically, it would create a tragedy of the commons. Ethically, it competes with the principle of first use that Rothbard and Hans-Hermann Hoppe have already established.
White and red No Entry sign on a pole in a close up cropped view against a sunny blue sky
This Pride Month, like many before it, some libertarians are sharing the slogan “Liberty is Inclusive.” The slogan is meant to affirm the idea of equality, not only in the law, but also in how people treat one another outside of legal arrangements. Is this consistent with libertarian ethics?
No. Liberty is inherently exclusive, not inclusive.
The most consistent brand of libertarianism, Rothbardianism, holds that homesteading is the ultimate criterion for justice. Murray Rothbard comes to the conclusion that we own ourselves and any resources we first use or acquire voluntarily by virtue of homesteading. He expands on this theory of social ethics in his book Ethics of Liberty. Where does inclusion come into play? It doesn’t.
The principle of homesteading or first use establishes private property in oneself and property. This is an exclusive. Libertarianism thus starts from the premise of exclusion, not inclusion. Others can be legitimately included in the ownership of the resource after it is first used, but the first user must consent. If not, then the first user retains a full, exclusive right to said resource. We thus have a right to arbitrarily discriminate as to who is allowed to use our property, patron our business, and utilize our labor. We are free people, and what that means is that we are free from having our rights encroached on by others.
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.
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.”
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.]
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.
Supporters of the NAP often appeal to it in order to argue for the immorality of theft, vandalism, assault, and fraud. Compared to nonviolence, the non-aggression principle does not preclude violence used in self-defense or defense of others.[71] Many supporters argue that NAP opposes such policies as victimless crime laws, taxation, and military drafts. NAP is the foundation of libertarian philosophy
A preliminary list of books and articles that may be of interest to libertarian and classical liberal humanists (last updated 6/21/22)
I am grateful to the friends and colleagues who helped me compose this list. If you have additions or edits, please email me at jac3@columbia.edu (providing full references as well as links if online versions are available). Foreign language publications are listed separately at the bottom. I’m especially interested in including critical studies of literature and film that use Austrian economics and/or libertarian philosophy. Thank you!
Jo Ann Cavallo, Professor of Italian, Columbia University
Adamo, Stefano. “Animal Spirits in Designer Suits. The Representation of Finance in Walter Siti’s Resistere non serve a niente.” Rivista di storia economica 3 (2016): 351–80. https://doi.org/10.1410/85082.
—. “The Crisis of the Prato Industrial District in the Works of Edoardo Nesi: A Blend of Nostalgia and Self-Complacency.” Modern Italy 21.3 (August 2016): 245–59. https://doi.org/10.1017/mit.2016.30.
—. “The Italian ‘Economic Miracle’ in Coeval Cinema: A Case Study on the Intellectual Reaction to Italy’s Social and Economic Change.” Italian Quarterly 50 (2013): 46–64.
—. “The Italian Financial Novel: Finance As Told By Financial Professionals.” Estudios Libertarios 3 (2020): 49-73.
—. “‘The Libertarian Minimal State?’ A critique of the views of Nozick, Levin and Rand.” Journal of Ayn Rand Studies, Vol. 4, No. 1, 2002, pp. 141-60; reprinted in Younkins, Ed, ed., Philosophers of Capitalism: Menger, Mises, Rand and Beyond, 2004; http://www.walterblock.com/publications/minimal_state.pdf
—. “On Ayn Rand, Murray Rothbard and Thick Libertarianism” June 1, 2014;
Cavallo, Jo Ann. “Contracts, Surveillance, and Censure of State Power in Arienti’s Triunfo da Camarino novella (Le porretane 1.1).” In Cavallo and Lottieri, 141-62. http://dx.doi.org/10.7916/D8XS5VRF
—. “The Ideological Battle of Roncevaux: The Critique of Political Power from Pulci’s Morgante to Sicilian Puppet Theatre Today.” In Luigi Pulci in Renaissance Florence and Beyond. Eds. James K. Coleman and Andrea Moudarres. Turnhout: Brepols, 2017. 209-32.
—. “National Political Ideologies and Local Maggio Traditions of the Reggio Emilia Apennines: Roncisvalle vs. Rodomonte.” Conquistare la montagna: la storia di un’idea. Conquering Mountains: The History of an Idea. Eds. Carlo Baja Guarienti and Matteo Al Kalak. Milan: Mondadori, 2016. 121-134. http://dx.doi.org/10.7916/D8P84C8N
—. “On Political Power and Personal Liberty” in The Prince and The Discourses.” Machiavelli’s The Prince at 500. Ed. John McCormick. Social Research: An International Quarterly 81:1 (Spring 2014): 107-32.
—. “Purgatory 17: On Revenge.” Purgatory: Lectura Dantis. Eds. A. Mandelbaum, A. Oldcorn, C. Ross. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2008. 178-90.
—. The Romance Epics of Boiardo, Ariosto, and Tasso: From Public Duty to Private Pleasure. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004.
Cavallo, Jo Ann, and Carlo Lottieri, editors. Speaking Truth to Power from Medieval to Modern Italy. Annali d’italianistica 34 (2016).
Cox, Stephen. “Adventures of ‘A Little Boy Lost’: Blake and the Process of Interpretation.” Criticism 23 (1981): 301-316.
—. “The Art of Fiction.” The Journal of Ayn Rand Studies 1 (2000) 313-31.
—. “Ayn Rand.” American Philosophers, 1950-2000. Ed. Philip B. Dematteis and Leemon B. McHenry. Detroit: Gale – Bruccoli Clark Layman, 2003. 255-72.
—. “Ayn Rand: Theory versus Creative Life.” The Journal of Libertarian Studies 8 (1986): 19-29.
—. “The Cather Correspondence.” American Literary History 26 (Summer 2014) 418-29.
—. “Completing Rand’s Literary Theory.” The Journal of Ayn Rand Studies 6 (2004): 67-89.
—. Culture and Liberty: Writings of Isabel Paterson. New Brunswick NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2015.
—. “Devices of Deconstruction.” Critical Review 3 (Winter 1989) 56-76.
—. “The Devil’s Reading List.” Raritan 16 (Fall 1996) 97-111.
—. “Having Your Say.” The Journal of Ayn Rand Studies (2002) 339-47.
—. “‘It Couldn’t Be Made Into a Really Good Movie’: The Films of Ayn Rand.” Liberty 1 (August 1987): 5-10.
—. “Literary Theory: Liberal and Otherwise.” Humane Studies Review 5 (Fall 1987) 1, 5-7, 12-14.
—. Love and Logic: The Evolution of Blake’s Thought. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992.
—. “Merely Metaphorical?: Ayn Rand, Isabel Paterson, and the Language of Theory.” The Journal of Ayn Rand Studies 8 (Spring 2007) 237-60.
—. “Methods and Limitations.” Critical Paths: Blake and the Argument of Method. Ed. Dan Miller, Mark Bracher, and Donald Ault. Durham NC: Duke University Press, 1987. Pp. 19-40, 331-34.
—. “Nathaniel Branden in the Writer’s Workshop.” The Journal of Ayn Rand Studies 16 (December 2016) 245-60.
—. The New Testament and Literature: A Guide to Literary Patterns. Chicago: Open Court, 2006.
—. “Public Virtue and Private Vitality in Shadwell’s Comedies.” Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Theatre Research 16 (1977): 11-22.
—. “Representing Isabel Paterson.” American Literary History 17.2 (2005): 244-58.
—. “Sensibility as Argument.” Sensibility in Transformation: Creative Resistance to Sentiment from the Augustans to the Romantics. Ed. Syndy McMillen Conger. Rutherford NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1990. Pp. 63-82.
—. “The Significance of Isabel Paterson.” Liberty 7 (October 1993) 30-41.
—. “The Stranger Within Thee”: Concepts of the Self in Late-Eighteenth-Century Literature. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1980.
—. “The Titanic and the Art of Myth.” Critical Review 15 (2003) 403-34.
—. “Willa Cather.” Literary Genius, ed. Joseph Epstein. Philadelphia: Paul Dry Books, 2007. Pp. 192-98.
—. The Woman and the Dynamo: Isabel Paterson and the Idea of America. New Brunswick NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2004.
Fernandez-Morera, Dario. American Academia and the Survival of Marxist Ideas. Praeger, 1996.
Giménez Cavallo, Maria. “Elsa Morante’s La storia: A Posthumanist, Feminist, Anarchist Response to Power.” In Cavallo and Lottieri, pp. 425-47.
Hazlitt, Henry. The Anatomy of Criticism: A Trialogue. Simon & Schuster, 1933.
Long, Roderick T. Rituals of Freedom: Libertarian Themes in Early Confucianism. The Molinari Institute, 2016. Expanded version of his essay “Austro-Libertarian Themes in Early Confucianism” Journal of Libertarian Studies, 17, no. 3 (Summer 2003): 35-62.
McCloskey, Deirdre. “Economics With a Human Face: Adam Smith did not believe people are merely economic maximizers. Instead, we balance self- interest with humane sympathy for others. Deirdre N. McCloskey reviews Cents and Sensibility by Gary Saul Morson and Morton Schapiro.” Wall Street Journal, September 13, 2017. https://www.wsj.com/articles/economics-with-a-human-face-1505343242
McMaken, Ryan. Commie Cowboys: The Bourgeoisie and the Nation-State in the Western Genre. 2012.
Mendenhall, Allen. Literature and Liberty: Essays in Libertarian Literary Criticism. Lexington Books, 2014.
—. Shouting Softly: Lines on Law, Literature, and Culture. St. Augustine Press, 2021.
—. “Manzoni’s unfulfilled legacy. On the economic lessons of Alessandro Manzoni’s The Betrothed.” The New Criterion 36.6 (2018): 35-38. ISSN:0734-0222.
Nock, Albert J. Francis Rabelais the Man and his Work. Harper & brothers, 1929.
Perdices de Blas, Luis, and John Reeder. “Quixotes, Don Juans, rogues and arbitristas in seventeenth century Castile. Oeconomia. Editions NecPlus, vol. 3-4 (2013): 561-91. https://journals.openedition.org/oeconomia/702
Pinker, Steven. The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined. Penguin, 2011.
—. Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress. Viking, 2018.
Rand, Ayn. The Romantic Manifesto: A Philosophy of Literature. Signet; Revised edition, 1971.
Rothbard, Murray. “Movie Reviews.” The Rothbard Reader, edited by Joseph T. Salerno and Matthew McCaffrey. The Mises Institute, 2016. 293-303. https://cdn.mises.org/The%20Rothbard%20Reader.pdf. Many other reviews can be found dispersed throughout The Complete Libertarian Forum 1969-1984 under the rubric “Mr First Nighter.”
Skwire, Sarah “Curse, Interrupted: Richard III, Jacob and Esau, and the Elizabethan Succession Crisis” in a special issue of Religions on Shakespeare and Religion, 2019.
—. “History through a Classical Liberal Feminist Lens” in What is Classical Liberal History? Ed. Michael J. Douma and Phillip W. Magness. Lexington Books, 2018.
—. “Edna Ferber’s Business Stories” in Capitalism and Commerce in Imaginative Literature, Lexington Press 2016.
—. “Without Respect of Persons: Gender Equality, Theology, and the Law in the Writing of Margaret Fell” Social Philosophy and Policy, 2015.
—. “Take Physic, Pomp’: King Lear Learns Sympathy” in Sympathy: The History of a Concept, Ed. Eric Schliesser, Oxford University Press, 2015.
—. “Eating Brains and Breaking Windows” (with Steven Horwitz), in Economics of the Undead, Glen Whitman and James Dow, Eds. Rowman and Littlefield, 2014.
—. “Not-So-Bleak House” in New Developments in Economic Education, Eds. Franklin G Mixon and Richard J. Cebula, Edward Elgar, 2014.
Spivey, Matt. Re-Reading Economics in Literature: A Capitalist Critical Perspective. Lexington Books, 2020.
Sunderland, Luke. Rebel Barons: Resisting Royal Power in Medieval Culture. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017.
Thomas, William, ed. The Literary Art of Ayn Rand. Poughkeepsie NY: Objectivist Center, 2005.
Torres Louis, and Michelle Marder Kamhi. What Art Is: The Esthetic Theory of Ayn Rand. Open Court, 2000
Turner, Frederick. The Culture of Hope. Free Press, 1995.
—. Shakespeare’s Twenty-first Century Economics. Oxford University Press, 1999.
Van Es, Bart. Shakespeare in Company. Oxford UP, 2015.
Watts, Michael. The Literary Book of Economics: Including Readings from Literature and Drama on Economic Concepts, Issues, and Themes. Intercollegiate Studies, 2003.
Wright, Robert. Nonzero:The Logic of Human Destiny. Pantheon, 2000.
Younkins, Edward W., ed. Ayn Rand’s “Atlas Shrugged”: A Philosophical and Literary Companion. Aldershot, Hampshire: Ashgate, 2007.
—, ed. Capitalism and Commerce in Imaginative Literature: Perspectives on Business from Novels and Plays. Lanham MD: Lexington Books, 2015.
Many, including this author, pine after a day when a society that is not controlled by a monopoly on force and violence is realized. What we have to accept is we’re not even close to that actualization.
They’re usually very similar. There may be hills in one place, or flat terrain in others. It could be seventy-degrees in January, or minus-twenty. With all of their aesthetic differences, these locales usually have one thing in common: the spirit of libertarianism permeates the culture.
A gentleman who resides in Alaska was asked: “why did you move to Alaska from Washington State?” The interviewer pointed out that some of the weather was similar but it was so much colder in the 49th state which makes life a bit harder. The interviewee pointed out that Washington State, for the most part, had a culture of “just leave people alone.” But he lamented the power that the big cities had and how they had a tendency to dominate the culture. And that culture doesn’t have a “leave people be” attitude. The man feels that Alaska has a culture of rugged individualism that suits him better. Rest assured, someone reading this who currently resides in Alaska will probably find room to disagree with the man who is only being used as one data point.
Anyone living in, or around, a big city notices that the further they get away from the metropolis, the more there is a spirit of independence. Sure, someone may retort that those places tend to be more pro-police, as an example. Does it have to be pointed out that police in a smaller town tend to do less? Or that if you’re a resident of that town the local officer may be a friend from high school. The world is not all black and white. There are shades of gray and many tend to be fixated on the black/white model because it makes it easier to judge the world. It also allows one to sit atop a higher horse. When one’s thinking only functions in the black/white paradigm they, unfortunately, sound as if they live in the world they want and not the world they’ve got.
In a town like the one this author spent a few days in recently, COVID-tyranny doesn’t exist.
The Marxist suggestion that proletarians possess exceptional moral qualities which oppose nationalism and bigotry and exhibit an unconditional love for all people is empirically unwarranted, and there is no historical evidence to support it. It was, instead, a necessary condition in order for the Marxist theory to be logically consistent; that is, the world socialist revolution against the world bourgeoisie could not take place without a united front of proletarians. Marxism consolidated and expanded internationalism as an integral feature of the workers’ and socialist movements, placing itself in opposition to the contrived nationalism of capitalist society. It was an act of intellectual dishonesty that is still difficult to eradicate.
There are two main philosophical and ideological schools of thought that include the problem of internationalism in their principles. The first is liberal internationalism, which developed within the framework of classical liberalism. The second is orthodox Marxism and its various derivatives that entertain the idea of proletarian internationalism. The concept of internationalism has different origins, meanings, and practical implementations in the two schools of thought.
Because the term “liberal” in a politico-philosophical sense was highjacked by the Left and changed its meaning in people’s perception, it is better to use the term “libertarian internationalism” for the purpose of this discussion.
As a component of political doctrine, libertarian internationalism is based on the concept of laissez-faire, which implies, among other things, free trade and free movement of capital. The main goal of libertarian internationalism is to ensure economic and individual freedom on a global scale that would lead to the prosperity of individual, family, community, and country, and ensure a peaceful world order. From an economic and philosophical point of view, libertarian internationalism is a logical continuation and generalization of the concept of division and cooperation of labor. Division and cooperation of labor are the result of the societal development process that obeys the objective economic laws.
Division of labor results from an interplay between the evolutional forces of natural selection and market forces, and has influenced the development of human society from prehistoric times to this day. It is clear that specialized labor achieves better productivity and quality of the end product or service. Specialization was a manifestation of natural selection based on specific individual skills. At the same time, specialization suggests that an individual voluntarily gives up the production of a commodity that he is less qualified to manufacture but whose consumption is still essential to him. He relies on acquiring these lacking goods and services in the market. Basically, he trusts that some others will supply him needed things that he does not produce anymore. That someone is supposed to know better than everybody else how to produce his specialty commodity or service and, in turn, relies on others to produce something else for him, and so on. In other words, a high degree of division of labor brought members of society together as one, relying on each other. However, it is not collectivism but a voluntary cooperation of individuals who respect each other’s property rights. Division of labor creates atomic, independent producers and consumers, and cooperation brings them together in production and in a marketplace. In other words, division of labor induces cooperation.
The whole of humanity has found this mode of operation more advanced and gradually intensified the division of labor and reciprocal and beneficial trade. It is not done by someone’s order; it simply reflects behavioral changes that humans experience under an influence of selective pressure and the unrestrained laws of the market economy. The domestic mode of production gradually drifts from “production for use” to “production for exchange.” The scale of exchange has steadily increased, crossing the boundaries of the individual household over time and eventually reaching a global level. The entrepreneurial class has taken on many risks to enter manufacturing, service delivery, and trade to meet consumer demand. Under developed capitalism, national borders are crossed not only by goods and services but also by capital.
Libertarian internationalism is constructive and peaceful in nature and is possible due to the entrepreneurial qualities of individuals and a universal consensus on respecting property rights. Thus, libertarian internationalism is essentially entrepreneurial internationalism. Conversely, the idea of globalization, in which the world political bureaucracy interferes with the economic issues of sovereign enterprises or entire countries, is alien to entrepreneurial internationalism. Libertarian internationalism is the ideal that the world community should strive for, but unfortunately, the continuing interference of politics in the economy and worldwide collectivist trends are alienating humanity from a natural and more just order.
Proletarian internationalism arose in the minds of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels as they developed their materialist conception of history. Marxism is a deterministic catastrophe theory applied to the evolution of human society. Using the Hegelian method of dialectics, the founders of Marxism divided capitalist society into two dichotomous classes: the proletariat and the bourgeoisie. The unsolvable conflict between the two antagonistic classes, caused, according to Marx, by the unfair appropriation of surplus value by the capitalists, had to reach a boiling point, the result of which would be a social cataclysm. Marx appointed the proletariat as the driving force, agents of the socialist revolution, designed to sweep away the liberal democratic state and establish the dictatorship of the proletariat as a transitional stage on the path to building a classless society.
Marx considered his theory to be the pinnacle of scientific research in economics and sociology, in which he uncovered the objective laws of the development of society. The objective laws of the development of society, as well as the laws of nature, have to be universal and operate independently of someone else’s will. They cannot be disabled, canceled, or changed; they are a given that affects everything and everyone.
But it was precisely with objectivity that Marx had problems. First of all, the division of society into only two classes and the appointment of the proletariat as an agent of the revolution are unwarranted. Moreover, the workers themselves have not yet realized that they are the proletariat or the role that the founder of Marxism has assigned to them. Marx understood this perfectly and proposed theoretical and practical measures for the emancipation of the proletariat, awakening their class consciousness, and preparing for the political struggle against the bourgeoisie. However, in order to meet the criterion of objectivity, the class consciousness of the proletariat would have to develop naturally and spontaneously, without the influence of anyone’s will. Artificial and purposeful incitement to revolutionary sentiments and instigation to overthrow the existing system do not meet the criterion of objectivity and instead completely falsify it. Indeed, a scientific theory of the development of society is not needed to prepare for a coup.
Moreover, as objective laws must be universal, the same societal developments must occur in other countries. Marxism argued that the socialist revolution must have a universal character, that is, take place on a global scale, or at least in the most industrialized countries. Marx and Engels well understood that entrepreneurs were genuinely international, as capital does not have borders and the economies of different countries are interconnected. At the same time, labor was mostly local, lacking international organizations and representations. Therefore, Marxism invented proletarian internationalism in order to accommodate Marx and Engels’s teaching to these socioeconomic realities and attempt to mobilize the world proletariat for the world socialist revolution. In The Communist Manifesto, the founders of Marxism simply postulated that the proletariat has no boundaries and called on the proletariat of all countries to unite. Marx substantiated this postulate by the fact that the capitalists themselves created the preconditions for the proletarian brotherhood that would ultimately erase the “national one-sidedness” of consciousness within the masses of the proletariat. This conclusion seems farfetched and looks more like wishful thinking.
The Marxist suggestion that proletarians possess exceptional moral qualities which oppose nationalism and bigotry and exhibit an unconditional love for all people is empirically unwarranted, and there is no historical evidence to support it. It was, instead, a necessary condition in order for the Marxist theory to be logically consistent; that is, the world socialist revolution against the world bourgeoisie could not take place without a united front of proletarians. Marxism consolidated and expanded internationalism as an integral feature of the workers’ and socialist movements, placing itself in opposition to the contrived nationalism of capitalist society. It was an act of intellectual dishonesty that is still difficult to eradicate.
Thus, internationalism in the interpretation of libertarian philosophy and Marxist doctrine are completely different concepts. Proletarian internationalism is a political myth postulated by the founders of Marxism and used as a propaganda tool then and now. It is characterized by extreme aggressiveness, since it was invented as a weapon for the political fight against world capital. Libertarian internationalism, in contrast, is peaceful and constructive. It follows naturally from the logical and consistent development of human society in terms of the division and cooperation of labor and is based on respect for private property rights. Author:
Allen Gindler is a scholar from the former U.S.S.R., specializing in Political Economy, Econometrics, and Industrial Engineering. He taught Economic Cybernetics, Standard Data Systems, and Computer-Aided Work Design in the Khmelnytskyi National University, Ukraine. He is currently a private consultant to IT industry on Database Administration and Cryptography. As a hobby, he is interested in political philosophy, history, population genetics, and Biblical archaeology. He has published articles and opinion pieces in Mises Wire, American Thinker, Foundation for Economic Education, and Biblical Archaeology Review.
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