WEBVTT NOTE Rothbard's 'Left and Right': 40 Years Later 1 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:08.000 Thank you, Jeff, and thanks very much to Lew Rockwell and to the Mises Institute for inviting me to do this. 2 00:00:08.000 --> 00:00:13.000 What an honor and a privilege it is for me to be delivering the Rothbard Memorial Lecture 3 00:00:13.000 --> 00:00:17.000 here in the Mises Institute, the World Center of Rothbardian Thought. 4 00:00:17.000 --> 00:00:23.000 When I was first reading Murray Rothbard's Ethics of Liberty and For a New Liberty back in my college days 5 00:00:23.000 --> 00:00:28.000 and arguing the merits of Rothbard's Title Transfer Theory of Contract back with my roommates 6 00:00:28.000 --> 00:00:34.000 I certainly didn't foresee that one day I would have the opportunity to pay tribute to him in such a venue. 7 00:00:34.000 --> 00:00:43.000 But I'm also struck and a bit saddened at the thought that as far as I know I'm the first Rothbard Memorial lecturer never to have met Rothbard personally. 8 00:00:43.000 --> 00:00:51.000 That's not only a personal regret but also a somber reminder that the era when everyone in the libertarian movement knew Murray Rothbard is passing. 9 00:00:51.000 --> 00:00:56.000 Yet somber hardly seems an appropriate word to use in connection with Rothbard. 10 00:00:56.000 --> 00:01:04.000 Looking through the Rothbard archives upstairs, I came across his fourth grade teacher's report from 1936. 11 00:01:04.000 --> 00:01:06.000 His teacher wrote, 12 00:01:06.000 --> 00:01:15.000 Murray seems to be so exceedingly happy that it is sometimes difficult to control his activities in the class. 13 00:01:15.000 --> 00:01:22.000 He must develop a more controlled behavior in the group. 14 00:01:22.000 --> 00:01:25.000 By all accounts, he never changed. 15 00:01:25.000 --> 00:01:30.000 Tonight I want to talk about an essay that Rothbard wrote just over 40 years ago. 16 00:01:30.000 --> 00:01:34.000 An essay that had an enormous impact on my own intellectual development. 17 00:01:34.000 --> 00:01:39.000 In 1965, Rothbard published Left and Right, The Prospects for Liberty, 18 00:01:39.000 --> 00:01:45.000 the keynote editorial on the first issue of a magazine he had just founded, also called Left and Right, 19 00:01:45.000 --> 00:01:48.000 the forerunner of his later libertarian forum. 20 00:01:48.000 --> 00:01:53.000 By the way, the complete runs of both the Left and Right and the libertarian forum are online and available 21 00:01:53.000 --> 00:01:56.000 and all their fascinating glory on Mises.org. 22 00:01:56.000 --> 00:02:00.000 Written during the early years of the Vietnam War as the new left was emerging 23 00:02:00.000 --> 00:02:04.000 and the old coalition between libertarians and conservatives was beginning to fray, 24 00:02:04.000 --> 00:02:08.000 Rothbard's article placed the libertarian movement in a historical context, 25 00:02:08.000 --> 00:02:14.000 tracing its past and possible future and calling on libertarians to gain a better self-understanding 26 00:02:14.000 --> 00:02:19.000 and consequently to rethink their political affiliations and alliances. 27 00:02:19.000 --> 00:02:22.000 Let me begin by placing Rothbard's left and right 28 00:02:22.000 --> 00:02:30.000 in conversation with a piece published by the great classical liberal Herbert Spencer over 80 years earlier, titled The Neutrionism. 29 00:02:30.000 --> 00:02:33.000 The two articles might initially seem antithetical. 30 00:02:33.000 --> 00:02:40.000 Spencer was warning libertarians against the left and opening the door to an alliance with elements on the right. 31 00:02:40.000 --> 00:02:46.000 Rothbard was warning libertarians against the right and recommending an alliance with elements on the left. 32 00:02:46.000 --> 00:02:54.000 Moreover, in his article, Rothbard explicitly names Spencer as having contributed to the ideological confusion he's complaining about. 33 00:02:54.000 --> 00:03:02.000 But in a wider sense, we can see Rothbard's concerns in left and right as a logical development of Spencer's in the new Toryism. 34 00:03:02.000 --> 00:03:10.000 Writing in 1884, Spencer maintained that most of those who now pass as liberals are Tories of a new type. 35 00:03:10.000 --> 00:03:15.000 To defend this claim, he undertakes to remind us what the two political parties originally were. 36 00:03:15.000 --> 00:03:17.000 So here's Spencer. 37 00:03:17.000 --> 00:03:20.000 Dating back to an earlier period than their names, 38 00:03:20.000 --> 00:03:26.000 the two political parties at first stood, respectively, for two opposed types of social organization, 39 00:03:26.000 --> 00:03:30.000 broadly distinguishable as the militant and the industrial, 40 00:03:30.000 --> 00:03:36.000 types which are characterized, the one by the regime of status and the other by the regime of contract. 41 00:03:36.000 --> 00:03:42.000 These two are definable as the system of compulsory cooperation and the system of voluntary cooperation. 42 00:03:42.000 --> 00:03:46.000 The typical structure of the one we see in an army formed of conscripts, 43 00:03:46.000 --> 00:03:50.000 in which the units in their several grades have to fulfill commands under pain of death 44 00:03:50.000 --> 00:03:54.000 and receive food and clothing and pay arbitrarily apportioned. 45 00:03:54.000 --> 00:03:58.000 While the typical structure of the other we see in a body of producers or distributors 46 00:03:58.000 --> 00:04:03.000 who severally agree to specified payments in return for specified services 47 00:04:03.000 --> 00:04:18.000 The Tories, then, had traditionally been the advocates of hierarchy and compulsion, while the Liberals had traditionally championed voluntary association and free trade. 48 00:04:18.000 --> 00:04:23.000 In Left and Right, Rothbard makes the same identification. 49 00:04:23.000 --> 00:04:25.000 There's Rothbard. 50 00:04:25.000 --> 00:04:28.000 There are developed in Western Europe two great political ideologies. 51 00:04:28.000 --> 00:04:36.000 One was liberalism, the party of hope, of radicalism, of liberty, of the industrial revolution, of progress, of humanity. 52 00:04:36.000 --> 00:04:46.000 The other was conservatism, the party of reaction, the party that longed to restore the hierarchy, statism, theocracy, serfdom and class exploitation of the old order. 53 00:04:46.000 --> 00:04:56.000 Political ideologies were polarized with liberalism on the extreme left and conservatism on the extreme right of the ideological spectrum. 54 00:04:56.000 --> 00:05:03.000 And Rothbard is surely right in thinking that what we now call free market libertarianism was originally a left-wing position. 55 00:05:03.000 --> 00:05:10.000 The great liberal economist, Frederic Bastiat, sat on the left side of the French National Assembly with the anarcho-socialist Proudhon. 56 00:05:10.000 --> 00:05:18.000 Many of the causes we now think of as paradigmatically left-wing, feminism, racism, anti-racism, anti-militarism, 57 00:05:18.000 --> 00:05:22.000 the defense of laborers and consumers against big business, 58 00:05:22.000 --> 00:05:27.000 were traditionally embraced and promoted specifically by free market radicals. 59 00:05:27.000 --> 00:05:29.500 So what happened to the political spectrum? 60 00:05:29.500 --> 00:05:35.300 This is the question that Spencer and Rothbard, from their different historical vantage points, are each trying to answer. 61 00:05:35.300 --> 00:05:38.300 The version of the question that Spencer is addressing is, 62 00:05:38.300 --> 00:05:43.700 how did the left become associated with statism? 63 00:05:43.700 --> 00:05:47.800 Rothbard addresses that question as well, but his primary focus is on the question, 64 00:05:47.800 --> 00:05:51.800 How did free market libertarianism become associated with the right? 65 00:05:51.800 --> 00:05:54.800 Let's begin with Spencer's diagnosis. Here's Spencer. 66 00:05:54.800 --> 00:05:58.800 How is it that liberalism, getting more and more into power, 67 00:05:58.800 --> 00:06:01.800 has grown more and more coercive in its legislation? 68 00:06:01.800 --> 00:06:05.800 How are we to explain the spreading confusion of thought, which has led it, 69 00:06:05.800 --> 00:06:08.800 in pursuit of what appears to be public good, 70 00:06:08.800 --> 00:06:12.800 to invert the method by which in earlier days it achieved public good? 71 00:06:12.800 --> 00:06:16.800 We may understand the kind of confusion in which liberalism has lost itself, 72 00:06:16.800 --> 00:06:27.800 and the origin of those mistaken classings of political measures which have misled it, classings as we shall see by conspicuous external traits instead of by internal natures. 73 00:06:27.800 --> 00:06:36.800 For what in the popular apprehension and in the apprehension of those who affected them were the changes made by liberals in the past? 74 00:06:36.800 --> 00:06:40.800 They were abolitions of grievances suffered by the people. 75 00:06:40.800 --> 00:06:44.800 This was the common trait they had which most impressed itself on men's minds. 76 00:06:44.800 --> 00:06:53.800 The welfare of the many came to be conceived alike by liberal statesmen and liberal voters as the aim of liberalism, hence the confusion. 77 00:06:53.800 --> 00:06:59.800 The gaining of a popular good being the external conspicuous trait common to liberal measures in earlier days, 78 00:06:59.800 --> 00:07:03.800 then in each case gained by a relaxation of restraints, 79 00:07:03.800 --> 00:07:07.800 it has happened that popular good has come to be sought by liberals, 80 00:07:07.800 --> 00:07:14.800 not as an end to be indirectly gained by relaxations or restraints, but as the end to be directly gained. 81 00:07:14.800 --> 00:07:21.800 And seeking to gain it directly, they have used methods intrinsically opposed to those originally used." 82 00:07:21.800 --> 00:07:29.800 In short, Spencer's analysis is that liberals came to conceptualize liberalism in terms of its easily identifiable effects, 83 00:07:29.800 --> 00:07:35.800 benefits for the masses, rather than in terms of its essential nature, laissez-faire. 84 00:07:35.800 --> 00:07:41.800 Rothbard so began to think that any measure aimed at the end of benefits for the masses must count as liberal, 85 00:07:41.800 --> 00:07:49.800 whether pursued by the traditional liberal means of laissez-faire or by its opposite, the traditional Tory means of governmental compulsion. 86 00:07:49.800 --> 00:07:55.800 In short, liberalism became the pursuit of liberal ends by Tory means. 87 00:07:55.800 --> 00:08:00.800 In Left and Right, Rothbard offers a similar analysis of state socialism. 88 00:08:00.800 --> 00:08:07.800 Libertarians of the present day are accustomed to think of socialism as the polar opposite of the libertarian creed. 89 00:08:07.800 --> 00:08:14.800 But this is a grave mistake responsible for a severe ideological disorientation of libertarians in the present world. 90 00:08:14.800 --> 00:08:18.800 As we have seen, conservatism was the polar opposite of liberty. 91 00:08:18.800 --> 00:08:25.800 And socialism, while to the left of conservatism, was essentially a confused, middle-of-the-road movement. 92 00:08:25.800 --> 00:08:32.800 It was and still is middle of the road because it tries to achieve liberal ends by the use of conservative means. 93 00:08:32.800 --> 00:08:46.800 Socialism, like liberalism and against conservatism, accepted the industrial system and the liberal goals of freedom, reason, mobility, progress, higher living standards for the masses, and an end to theocracy and war. 94 00:08:46.800 --> 00:08:54.800 But it tried to achieve these ends by the use of incompatible conservative means, statism, central planning, communitarianism, etc. 95 00:08:54.800 --> 00:09:07.800 This idea that libertarians and state socialists disagree about means rather than ends is also advanced by Spencer's contemporary, Gustav de Molinari, the founder of free market anarchism. 96 00:09:07.800 --> 00:09:11.800 In an 1848 letter to socialists, Molinari wrote, 97 00:09:24.800 --> 00:09:30.800 The destruction of all the goods necessary to the maintenance and embellishment of life shall be as abundant as possible, 98 00:09:30.800 --> 00:09:35.800 and where the distribution of these same goods among those who have created them through their labor shall be as just as possible, 99 00:09:35.800 --> 00:09:38.800 only we approach this goal with different paths. 100 00:09:38.800 --> 00:09:42.800 Why do you refuse to follow the path of liberty alongside us? 101 00:09:42.800 --> 00:09:49.800 If you became certain that you had been mistaken as to the true cause of the evils which afflict society and the means of remedying them, 102 00:09:49.800 --> 00:09:53.800 you would come over to us." 103 00:09:53.800 --> 00:10:00.800 But what brought about, among those who sought liberal ends, this tendency to substitute conservative for liberal means? 104 00:10:01.800 --> 00:10:11.800 Is it merely, as Spencer supposes, the natural human tendency of undeveloped intellectual vision to classify phenomena according to external resemblances instead of intrinsic structures? 105 00:10:12.800 --> 00:10:18.800 Rothbard suggests an additional factor, the abandonment of natural rights and higher law theory for utilitarianism. 106 00:10:18.800 --> 00:10:38.800 and Libertarianism. Rothbard maintains that only a theory that condemns aggression as inherently unjust, as opposed to merely inexpedient, can serve to provide a radical base outside the existing system from which to challenge the status quo and provide a sense of necessary immediacy to the libertarian struggle. 107 00:10:38.800 --> 00:10:44.800 In this we might add that only a non-utilitarian theory can make a principal distinction between negative and positive rights. 108 00:10:44.800 --> 00:10:52.800 For the utilitarian, all that matters is the final result, and not what it came about through removing constraints or through adding them. 109 00:10:52.800 --> 00:10:59.800 Since Spencer was himself a utilitarian of sorts, it's no surprise that he did not identify this factor. 110 00:10:59.800 --> 00:11:20.800 A further fatal tendency within liberalism, Rothbard adds, was the conversion of Spencer and other like-minded liberals to a doctrine of evolutionary gradualism, whereby thousands of years of infinitely gradual evolution would ultimately lead to the next supposedly inevitable stage of individualism, a process which no agitation could accelerate. 111 00:11:20.800 --> 00:11:30.800 This led, says Rothbard, to the abandonment of liberalism as a fighting radical creed in favor of a weary rearguard action against the growing collectivism of the late 19th century. 112 00:11:30.800 --> 00:11:40.800 Hence those with an orientation toward activism were led to abandon the old libertarian form of liberalism for the more energetic and proactive state socialist version. 113 00:11:40.800 --> 00:11:50.800 While those liberals who resisted the slide towards state socialism found themselves drifting toward the pessimistic and reactionary outlook of traditionalist conservatism. 114 00:11:50.800 --> 00:11:56.800 A new political spectrum, or a new way of thinking about the political spectrum, was beginning to form. 115 00:11:56.800 --> 00:12:05.800 One with state socialism on the left and conservatism on the right, with former libertarians gravitating toward one side or the other according to temperament. 116 00:12:05.800 --> 00:12:18.800 For Rothbard, the things won't get better for a long while yet gradualism of the evolutionary liberals matched all too well the things keep getting worse pessimism of the conservatives. 117 00:12:18.800 --> 00:12:27.800 Part of the motivation for the liberals weary rearguard action was the conviction that the trend of history, at least for the foreseeable future, lay with state socialism. 118 00:12:27.800 --> 00:12:33.800 But Rothbard thinks such pessimism is based on a misunderstanding of economics and of history. 119 00:12:33.800 --> 00:12:37.800 State Socialism is doomed because, quote, 120 00:12:37.800 --> 00:12:42.800 everywhere the masses have opted for higher living standards and the promise of freedom, 121 00:12:42.800 --> 00:12:47.800 and everywhere the various regimes of statism and collectivism cannot fulfill these goals. 122 00:12:47.800 --> 00:12:52.800 Only liberty, only a free market, can organize and maintain an industrial system. 123 00:12:52.800 --> 00:12:59.800 And the more that population expands and explodes, the more necessary is the unfettered working of such an industrial economy. 124 00:12:59.800 --> 00:13:06.800 Laissez-faire and the free market become more and more evidently necessary as an industrial system develops. 125 00:13:06.800 --> 00:13:10.800 Radical deviations cause breakdowns in economic crises. 126 00:13:10.800 --> 00:13:15.800 This crisis of statism becomes particularly dramatic and acute in a fully socialist society. 127 00:13:15.800 --> 00:13:24.800 And hence the inevitable breakdown of statism has first become strikingly apparent in the countries of the socialist, that is, communist camp. 128 00:13:24.800 --> 00:13:41.800 For socialism confronts its inner contradiction most starkly. Desperately it tries to fulfill its proclaimed goals of industrial growth, higher standards of living for the masses, and eventual withering away of the state, and is increasingly unable to do so with its collectivist means. 129 00:13:41.800 --> 00:13:55.800 Hence the inevitable breakdown of socialism. Communist countries, therefore, are increasingly and ineradicably forced to desocialize and will therefore eventually reach the free market. 130 00:13:55.800 --> 00:14:02.800 Yes, that's Rothbard in 1965 predicting the fall of communism 25 years later. 131 00:14:02.800 --> 00:14:11.800 Spencer ends his essay on the new Toryism by expressing some uncertainty about the prospects for a libertarian conservative alliance. 132 00:14:11.800 --> 00:14:17.800 Quote, a new species of Tory may arise without disappearance of the original species. 133 00:14:17.800 --> 00:14:22.800 While liberals have taken the course of legislation, conservatives have not abandoned it. 134 00:14:22.800 --> 00:14:30.800 Nevertheless, it is true that the laws made by liberals are so greatly increasing the compulsions and restraints exercised over citizens 135 00:14:30.800 --> 00:14:35.800 That among conservatives who suffer from this aggressiveness, there's growing up a tendency to resist it. 136 00:14:35.800 --> 00:14:40.800 So that if the present drift of things continues, it may by and by really happen. 137 00:14:40.800 --> 00:14:50.800 That the Tories will be defenders of liberties, which the liberals, in pursuit of what they think popular welfare, trample underfoot." 138 00:14:50.800 --> 00:14:58.800 Spencer himself was evidently willing to give the conservatives a try, for he joined in the activities of the Liberty and Property Defense League, 139 00:14:58.800 --> 00:15:02.480 a coalition of laissez-faire liberals and traditionalist conservatives. 140 00:15:02.480 --> 00:15:10.040 This sort of fusionism foreshadowed the way pro-market thinkers would view themselves throughout much of the 20th century. 141 00:15:10.040 --> 00:15:17.040 But for Rothbard, Spencer's tired shift rightward in strategy soon became a shift rightward in theory as well. 142 00:15:17.040 --> 00:15:20.480 And many of Spencer's libertarian contemporaries agreed. 143 00:15:20.480 --> 00:15:25.040 The individualist anarchist, Benjamin Tucker, for example, wrote, quote, 144 00:15:25.040 --> 00:15:30.040 Liberty, the name of Tucker's paper, welcomes and criticizes in the same breath 145 00:15:30.040 --> 00:15:34.040 the theories of papers by Herbert Spencer on the new Toryism. 146 00:15:34.040 --> 00:15:38.040 They are very true, very important, and very misleading. 147 00:15:38.040 --> 00:15:41.040 I begin to be a little suspicious of him. 148 00:15:41.040 --> 00:15:44.040 It seems as if he had forgotten the teachings of his earlier writings 149 00:15:44.040 --> 00:15:47.040 and had become a champion of a capitalistic class. 150 00:15:47.040 --> 00:15:49.040 It will be noticed that in these later articles, 151 00:15:49.040 --> 00:15:53.040 amid his multitudinous illustrations of the evils of legislation, 152 00:15:53.040 --> 00:16:01.040 He in every instance cites some law passed, ostensibly at least, to protect labor, alleviate suffering, or promote the people's welfare. 153 00:16:01.040 --> 00:16:05.040 He demonstrates beyond dispute the lamentable failure in this direction. 154 00:16:05.040 --> 00:16:14.040 But never once does he call attention to the far more deadly and deep-seated evils growing out of the innumerable laws creating privilege and sustaining monopoly. 155 00:16:14.040 --> 00:16:21.040 You must not protect the weak against the strong, he seems to say, but freely supply all the weapons needed by the strong to oppress the weak. 156 00:16:21.040 --> 00:16:26.400 He is greatly shocked that the rich should be directly taxed to support the poor, but 157 00:16:26.400 --> 00:16:30.880 that the poor should be indirectly taxed and bled to make the rich richer does not outrage 158 00:16:30.880 --> 00:16:33.960 his delicate sensibilities in the least. 159 00:16:33.960 --> 00:16:37.120 Poverty is increased by the poor laws, says Mr. Spencer. 160 00:16:37.120 --> 00:16:38.120 Granted. 161 00:16:38.120 --> 00:16:42.160 But what about the rich laws that caused and still cause the poverty to which the poor 162 00:16:42.160 --> 00:16:45.800 laws add?" 163 00:16:45.800 --> 00:16:49.760 Here Tucker is perhaps too harsh on Spencer, who opposed pro-business legislation to the 164 00:16:49.760 --> 00:17:08.760 All the same, it is undeniably true that in his later life, Spencer focused much more of his critical ire on governmental subsidies and protections for the poor, and that the amount of attention devoted to governmental subsidies and protections for the rich became progressively de-emphasized by comparison with his earlier writings. 165 00:17:08.760 --> 00:17:20.760 Already with Spencer, it seems, the alliance of libertarians with conservatives against state socialism was beginning to distort libertarian self-understanding in a conservative direction. 166 00:17:20.760 --> 00:17:27.760 The distinction between defending property rights and defending existing property classes was beginning to blur. 167 00:17:27.760 --> 00:17:35.760 As Rothbard explains, the slippage would ultimately lead to libertarians thinking of themselves as part of the right-wing or conservative movement, 168 00:17:35.760 --> 00:17:39.760 aligned against the supposedly left-wing proponents of the welfare stake. 169 00:17:39.760 --> 00:17:45.760 Quote, the libertarians, especially in their sense of where they stood in the ideological spectrum, 170 00:17:45.760 --> 00:17:50.760 fused with the older conservatives who were forced to adopt libertarian phraseology, 171 00:17:50.760 --> 00:17:52.760 but with no real libertarian content, 172 00:17:52.760 --> 00:17:56.760 in opposing a Roosevelt administration that had become too collectivistic for them. 173 00:17:56.760 --> 00:18:03.760 By the end of World War II, it was second nature for libertarians to consider themselves at an extreme right-wing poll. 174 00:18:03.760 --> 00:18:08.760 Rothbard's concern is not merely terminological. 175 00:18:08.760 --> 00:18:11.760 Rather, he contends that the new left-right spectrum 176 00:18:11.760 --> 00:18:14.760 persistently misleads libertarian-minded thinkers 177 00:18:14.760 --> 00:18:18.760 into viewing governmental regulation as anti-big business. 178 00:18:18.760 --> 00:18:21.760 And if our opponents are anti-business, 179 00:18:21.760 --> 00:18:25.760 what must we libertarians be but pro-big business? 180 00:18:25.760 --> 00:18:29.760 Defenders of what Ayn Rand, in one of her pro-big business moods 181 00:18:29.760 --> 00:18:33.760 called America's Persecuted Minority. 182 00:18:33.760 --> 00:18:37.760 The result is that governmental intervention on behalf of big business 183 00:18:37.760 --> 00:18:41.760 tends to become invisible, or at least unimportant, because libertarians' 184 00:18:41.760 --> 00:18:45.760 ideological blinders make it hard for them to take it seriously. 185 00:18:45.760 --> 00:18:49.760 Who would want to restrict the free market on behalf of business interests? 186 00:18:49.760 --> 00:18:53.760 Not those left-wingers, because they're anti-business. 187 00:18:53.760 --> 00:18:57.760 And not us right-wingers, because we're pro-free market. 188 00:18:57.760 --> 00:19:11.760 It's hard to recognize the significance of pro-business legislation, even when one officially sees and acknowledges it, if one has internalized a worldview that excludes such legislation from the list of major dangers. 189 00:19:11.760 --> 00:19:19.760 The truth, Rothbard thinks, is quite different. The regulatory welfare state has never been fundamentally anti-business. 190 00:19:19.760 --> 00:19:49.760 Quote, Every element of the New Deal program, central planning, creation of a network of compulsory cartels for industry and agriculture, inflation and credit expansion, artificial raising of wage rates and promotion of unions within the overall monopoly structure, government regulation and ownership, all of this had been anticipated and adumbrated during the previous two decades, and this program with its privileging of various big business interests at the top of the collectivist heap was in no sense reminiscent of socialism or leftism. 191 00:19:49.760 --> 00:20:19.760 Leftism. There is nothing smacking of the egalitarian or the proletarian here. No, the kinship of this burgeoning collectivism was not at all with the socialism-communism but with fascism or socialism of the right, a kinship which many big businessmen of the 20s expressed openly in their yearning for abandonment of a quasi laissez-faire system for a collectivism which they could control. Both left and right have been persistently misled by the notion that intervention by the government is ipso facto leftist and anti-business. 192 00:20:19.760 --> 00:20:28.760 Failure to identify the true nature of programs like the New Deal is fatal, Rothbard thinks, to effective libertarian activism. 193 00:20:28.760 --> 00:20:35.760 For one takes the enemy to be anti-business when it's likely to become more susceptible to pro-business legislative proposals, 194 00:20:35.760 --> 00:20:43.760 thus inadvertently backing into one flavor of fascism in order to combat what one fails to recognize as another flavor of fascism, 195 00:20:43.760 --> 00:20:49.760 The result being what Rand called, in another context, poison as food and poison as antidote. 196 00:20:49.760 --> 00:20:55.760 Hence the tendency among some libertarians to become knee-jerk apologists for the corporate class. 197 00:20:55.760 --> 00:21:00.760 The converse holds as well. The example of Victor Yaros is an instructive one. 198 00:21:00.760 --> 00:21:07.760 Yaros had been a Spencerian anarchist, an associate of Tucker and a popularizer of Lysander Spooner. 199 00:21:07.760 --> 00:21:12.760 But by the 1930s, he had abandoned free market anarchism for social democracy. 200 00:21:12.760 --> 00:21:20.760 In part because he had become convinced that the democratic state was a useful tool in the struggle against economic privilege. 201 00:21:20.760 --> 00:21:21.760 And here's Yaros. 202 00:21:21.760 --> 00:21:29.760 Quote, whatever the origin of the state, it was absurd to assert that it was always and inevitably the instrument of privilege and monopoly 203 00:21:29.760 --> 00:21:32.760 and must remain such under all conditions. 204 00:21:32.760 --> 00:21:35.760 The evidence glaringly contradicted that conception. 205 00:21:35.760 --> 00:21:41.760 The democratic governments have increasingly yielded to the pressure of farmers, wage workers and middle class reformers. 206 00:21:41.760 --> 00:21:51.760 The hatred of our plutocrats and reactionaries for the New Deal is alone sufficient to dispose of the charge that the state is simply the tool of the economic oligarchy. 207 00:21:51.760 --> 00:21:58.760 In the past, the same interests bitterly fought against Woodrow Wilson's reform program and fought in vain." 208 00:21:58.760 --> 00:22:03.760 This is a good example of why revisionist historical work is so important. 209 00:22:03.760 --> 00:22:18.760 Thanks to the work of Kolko, Rothbard, Higgs and others, we know, as Yeros evidently did not, that the supposedly anti-business programs of the Wilson and Roosevelt administrations were corporatist, neo-mercantilist and neo-fascist to the core. 210 00:22:18.760 --> 00:22:23.760 Yeros could not have chosen examples less suited to support his case. 211 00:22:23.760 --> 00:22:29.760 Is Yeros just wrong then in claiming that business interests fought against Wilson's and Roosevelt's policies? 212 00:22:29.760 --> 00:22:38.760 What about our policies? No, not really. We might compare the alliance between government and big business to the alliance between church and state and the middle ages. 213 00:22:38.760 --> 00:22:45.760 Of course it's in the interest of both parties to maintain the alliance. But all the same, each side would like to be the dominant partner. 214 00:22:45.760 --> 00:22:54.760 So it's no surprise that the history of such alliances will often look like a history of conflict and antipathy, as each side struggles to get the upper hand. 215 00:22:54.760 --> 00:23:01.760 The struggle must be read against a common background framework of cooperation to maintain the system of control. 216 00:23:01.760 --> 00:23:10.760 If, as libertarians from John T. Flynn to Ayn Rand have argued, the dominant trend of liberal statism is closer to fascism than to state socialism, 217 00:23:10.760 --> 00:23:14.760 how should this affect our view of the political spectrum? 218 00:23:14.760 --> 00:23:22.760 If fascism belongs on the right, what is its opposite on the left? State socialism or libertarianism? 219 00:23:22.760 --> 00:23:32.760 Carl Hess, following Rothbard, would later argue that the overall characteristic of a right-wing regime is that it reflects the concentration of power in the fewest practical hands. 220 00:23:32.760 --> 00:23:40.760 This, he said, is the dominant historical characteristic of what most people in most times have considered the political and economic right-wing. 221 00:23:40.760 --> 00:23:44.760 The left, then, would logically represent the opposite tendency. 222 00:23:44.760 --> 00:24:01.760 The farthest left you can go, historically at any rate, is anarchism, the total opposition to any institutionalized power, a state of completely voluntary social organization in which people would establish their ways of life in small, consenting groups and cooperate with others as they see fit. 223 00:24:01.760 --> 00:24:11.760 The attitude on that farthest left toward law and order was summed up by an early French anarchist Proudhon, who said that order is the daughter, not the mother, of liberty. 224 00:24:11.760 --> 00:24:19.760 Let people be absolutely free, says this farthest of the far, far left, the left that communism regularly denounces as two-left. 225 00:24:19.760 --> 00:24:22.760 Lenin called it infantile left. 226 00:24:22.760 --> 00:24:27.760 Through a series of unfortunate but certainly understandable distortions of political terminology, 227 00:24:27.760 --> 00:24:31.760 the modern liberal position has come to be known as a left-wing position. 228 00:24:31.760 --> 00:24:37.760 Actually, liberals believe in concentrated power in the hands of liberals, the supposedly educated and genteel elite. 229 00:24:37.760 --> 00:24:41.760 They believe in concentrating that power as heavily and effectively as possible. 230 00:24:41.760 --> 00:24:49.760 They believe in great size and enterprise, whether corporate or political, and have a great and profound disdain for the homely and the local." 231 00:24:49.760 --> 00:24:55.760 Now, I think it's important to distinguish terminological issues from more substantive ones here. 232 00:24:55.760 --> 00:25:05.760 While it's an interesting question whether Rothbard and Hess are correct in maintaining that the terms left and right are best understood as still retaining their original 19th century meaning, 233 00:25:05.760 --> 00:25:10.760 How any particular thinker prefers using those slippery labels is not the most important issue. 234 00:25:10.760 --> 00:25:17.760 If you want to call the free market a left-wing idea, or a right-wing idea, or a neither left-wing nor right-wing idea, 235 00:25:17.760 --> 00:25:25.760 or a left-wing in cents 37 but right-wing in cents 49 idea, whatever, go for it, so long as you make clear how you're using it. 236 00:25:25.760 --> 00:25:31.760 I like calling the free market a left-wing idea. In fact, I like calling libertarianism the proletarian revolution. 237 00:25:31.760 --> 00:25:41.760 The term is not the fundamental issue. The crucial point is to track when one of these labels is being used in an authoritarian sense or an anti-authoritarian sense or a mixed sense, 238 00:25:41.760 --> 00:25:50.760 and not allow any particular preconceived stereotype of left or right to occlude one's thinking about where one's natural allies are to be found. 239 00:25:50.760 --> 00:25:57.760 While I've said I don't want to dwell on terminological issues, I can't resist making a point about capitalism and socialism. 240 00:25:57.760 --> 00:26:11.760 Rand used to identify certain terms and ideas as anti-concepts, that is, terms that actually function to obscure our understanding rather than facilitating it, making it harder for us to grasp other legitimate concepts. 241 00:26:11.760 --> 00:26:23.760 One important category of anti-concepts is what Rand called the package deal, referring to any term whose meaning conceals an implicit presupposition that certain things go together but in actuality do not. 242 00:26:23.760 --> 00:26:33.760 Although Rand would not agree with the following examples, I've become convinced that the terms capitalism and socialism are really anti-concepts of the package deal variety. 243 00:26:33.760 --> 00:26:49.760 Libertarians sometimes debate whether the real or authentic meaning of a term like capitalism is A, the free market, or B, government favoritism toward business, or C, the separation between labor and ownership and arrangement neutral between the other two. 244 00:26:49.760 --> 00:26:52.760 Austrian tend to use the term in the first sense. 245 00:26:52.760 --> 00:26:56.760 Individualist anarchists in the Tuckroyd tradition tend to use it in the second and third. 246 00:26:56.760 --> 00:27:01.760 But in ordinary usage, I fear, it actually stands for an amalgamation of incompatible meanings. 247 00:27:01.760 --> 00:27:10.760 Suppose I were to invent a new word, zaxalbacks, and define it as a metallic sphere like the Washington Monument. 248 00:27:10.760 --> 00:27:14.760 That's the definition, a metallic sphere like the Washington Monument. 249 00:27:14.760 --> 00:27:19.760 In short, I build my ill-chosen example into the definition. 250 00:27:19.760 --> 00:27:26.760 Now, some linguistic subgroup might start using the term zaxalbacks as though it just meant metallic sphere, 251 00:27:26.760 --> 00:27:31.760 or as though it just meant something of the same kind as the Washington Monument, and that's fine. 252 00:27:31.760 --> 00:27:38.760 But my definition incorporates both, and this conceals the false assumption that the Washington Monument is a metallic sphere. 253 00:27:38.760 --> 00:27:45.260 Any attempt to use the term Zaxelbacks, meaning what I mean by it, involves the user in this false assumption. 254 00:27:45.260 --> 00:27:48.260 That's what RAND means by a package deal term. 255 00:27:48.260 --> 00:27:55.760 Now, I think the word capitalism, if used with the meaning most people give it, is a package deal term. 256 00:27:55.760 --> 00:28:04.260 By capitalism, most people mean neither the free market, Simplicitor, nor the prevailing neo-mercantilist system, Simplicitor. 257 00:28:04.260 --> 00:28:11.260 Rather, what most people mean by capitalism is this free market system that currently prevails in the Western world. 258 00:28:11.260 --> 00:28:18.260 In short, the term capitalism is generally used conceals an assumption that the prevailing system is a free market. 259 00:28:18.260 --> 00:28:23.260 And since the prevailing system is in fact largely one of government favoritism toward business, 260 00:28:23.260 --> 00:28:31.260 the ordinary use of the term carries with it the assumption that the free market is government favoritism toward business. 261 00:28:31.260 --> 00:28:35.260 And similar considerations apply to the term socialism. 262 00:28:35.260 --> 00:28:40.260 Most people don't mean by socialism anything so precise as state ownership of the means of production. 263 00:28:40.260 --> 00:28:45.260 Instead, they really mean something like the opposite of capitalism. 264 00:28:45.260 --> 00:28:49.260 Then if capitalism is a package deal term, so is socialism. 265 00:28:49.260 --> 00:28:56.260 It conveys opposition to the free market and opposition to neo-mercantilism as though these were one and the same. 266 00:28:56.260 --> 00:29:02.820 And that, I suggest, is the function of these terms, to blur the distinction between the free market and neo-mercantilism. 267 00:29:02.820 --> 00:29:07.460 Such confusion prevails because it works to the advantage of the statist establishment. 268 00:29:07.460 --> 00:29:13.060 Those who want to defend the free market can more easily be seduced into defending neo-mercantilism. 269 00:29:13.060 --> 00:29:18.340 And those who want to combat neo-mercantilism can more easily be seduced into combating the free market. 270 00:29:18.340 --> 00:29:21.540 Either way, the state remains secure. 271 00:29:21.540 --> 00:29:28.540 I don't mean to suggest that evil statists have deliberately conspired to corrupt our language to serve their own nefarious ends. 272 00:29:28.540 --> 00:29:33.540 That sometimes happens, of course, but it's not necessary. 273 00:29:33.540 --> 00:29:37.540 Rather, a perverse, invisible hand processes at work. 274 00:29:37.540 --> 00:29:43.540 The prevailing use of the terms capitalism and socialism persists because it serves to preserve the status system of which it is a part. 275 00:29:43.540 --> 00:29:46.540 Think of it as spontaneous work. 276 00:29:46.540 --> 00:29:49.540 Sorry. 277 00:29:49.540 --> 00:29:57.540 If capitalism and socialism are such potentially confusing terms, should we be even more cautious about the loaded term anarchism? 278 00:29:57.540 --> 00:29:59.540 Actually, I don't think so. 279 00:29:59.540 --> 00:30:05.540 People's initial associations with the term may be more negative, but they're also more superficial. 280 00:30:05.540 --> 00:30:10.540 People are much quicker to admit that they don't know much about anarchism and aren't sure what anarchists really stand for 281 00:30:10.540 --> 00:30:14.540 than they are to make analogous admissions about capitalism and socialism. 282 00:30:14.540 --> 00:30:22.540 This term also highlights the distance from other views and thus makes compromises with or backslidings into such views harder to gloss over. 283 00:30:22.540 --> 00:30:29.540 Plus the term anarchism has the advantage of sounding exciting and radical, which gives it a certain appeal, especially among the young. 284 00:30:29.540 --> 00:30:35.540 Back to Rothbard's argument. If libertarian's alliance with the conservative right was beginning to corrode libertarian principles, 285 00:30:35.540 --> 00:30:41.540 and if the mainstream liberal left was just a new Toryism, what of the socialist left? 286 00:30:41.540 --> 00:30:45.340 Rothbard, the socialist left, comprises two distinct strands. 287 00:30:45.340 --> 00:30:50.340 One is a right-wing authoritarian strand promoting statism, hierarchy and collectivism. 288 00:30:50.340 --> 00:30:54.900 This strand Rothbard dismisses as a projection of conservatism trying to accept and dominate 289 00:30:54.900 --> 00:30:57.520 the new industrial civilization. 290 00:30:57.520 --> 00:31:02.300 The other is an initially left-wing, comparatively libertarian strand, far more interested in 291 00:31:02.300 --> 00:31:06.160 achieving the libertarian goals of liberalism and socialism, especially the smashing of the 292 00:31:06.160 --> 00:31:07.860 state apparatus. 293 00:31:07.860 --> 00:31:12.100 But the left socialists he holds are trapped in a crucial inner contradiction. 294 00:31:12.100 --> 00:31:16.260 They criticize not only state power, but private property. 295 00:31:16.260 --> 00:31:20.640 Yet how is the collective to run its property without becoming an enormous state itself? 296 00:31:20.640 --> 00:31:25.260 According to Rothbard, the majority of socialists, unable to resolve this contradiction, 297 00:31:25.260 --> 00:31:29.880 quote, turned sharply rightward, completely abandoned the old libertarian goals and ideals 298 00:31:29.880 --> 00:31:34.300 of revolution and the withering way of the state, and became cozy conservatives, permanently 299 00:31:34.300 --> 00:31:42.300 had been fully reconciled to the state, the status quo, and the whole apparatus of neo-mercantilism, state monopoly capitalism, imperialism and war. 300 00:31:42.300 --> 00:31:50.300 For conservatism too had reformed and regrouped to try to cope with the modern industrial system and had become a refurbished mercantilism, 301 00:31:50.300 --> 00:31:58.300 a regime of statism marked by state monopoly privilege in direct and indirect forms to favored capitalists into quasi-feudal landlords. 302 00:31:58.300 --> 00:32:02.300 The affinity between right socialism and the new conservatism became very close. 303 00:32:02.300 --> 00:32:07.300 The former advocating similar policies, but with a demagogic populist veneer. 304 00:32:09.300 --> 00:32:15.300 The result from Rothbard's viewpoint was the triumph of what is now and has for some time been the establishment, 305 00:32:15.300 --> 00:32:22.300 the permanent war economy, the full-fledged state monopoly capitalism and neo-mercantilism in the military-industrial complex, 306 00:32:22.300 --> 00:32:31.300 wherein, he said, education has become mere mass drilling and the techniques of adjustment to the task of becoming a cog in the vast bureaucratic machine. 307 00:32:31.300 --> 00:32:37.300 At the time that Rothbard was writing, however, he saw a ray of hope in the re-emergence of the anti-authoritarian left. 308 00:32:37.300 --> 00:32:44.300 In the very next issue, for example, he followed up left and right the prospects for liberty with liberty and the new left, 309 00:32:44.300 --> 00:32:48.300 contrasting the social democrats of the old left with the student radicals of the new. 310 00:32:48.300 --> 00:32:56.300 Quote, Social democracy gave a pseudo-progressive and idealistic tone to the state monopoly capitalism of the New Deal, 311 00:32:56.300 --> 00:33:05.300 Comfortably assumed a large portion of power and eagerly came to give liberal and socialist coloration to the Cold War and the permanent war economy that prevails in the United States. 312 00:33:05.300 --> 00:33:13.300 While the typical old left goal is to move into the seats of state power and maneuver the state into piecemeal reforms to be imposed upon the public from above, 313 00:33:13.300 --> 00:33:23.300 the new left scorns statism and social reformism and aims to stimulate the people themselves to build parallel institutions outside of and confronting the state apparatus, end quote. 314 00:33:23.300 --> 00:33:37.300 This negative attitude toward reformism, shared by Rothbard and the anti-authoritarian left, has often been criticized as utopian, a purest all-or-nothing perfectionism that rejects any partial or immediate steps toward liberty. 315 00:33:37.300 --> 00:33:45.300 This is a serious misunderstanding. From a Rothbardian perspective, any move, large or small, in the direction of liberty is to be welcomed. 316 00:33:45.300 --> 00:33:51.300 Of course, the large moves will be welcomed more enthusiastically than the small ones, but all are improvements. 317 00:33:51.300 --> 00:33:53.300 No Rothbardian will ever say, 318 00:33:53.300 --> 00:33:57.300 If you can't cut government by 100%, I don't want to cut it all. 319 00:33:57.300 --> 00:34:04.300 One root of this misreading is a failure to distinguish between endorsement of a direction of change and endorsement of the stops along the way. 320 00:34:04.300 --> 00:34:08.300 Suppose there's a serial killer who murders 100 people a year. 321 00:34:08.300 --> 00:34:11.300 And suppose I manage to convince him to cut it down to 50. 322 00:34:11.300 --> 00:34:13.300 50 is his lucky number, say. 323 00:34:13.300 --> 00:34:15.300 By all means, that's an improvement to be welcomed. 324 00:34:15.300 --> 00:34:20.300 And I would even, I think, deserve some praise and gratitude for helping to make the world a little better. 325 00:34:20.300 --> 00:34:26.300 But that doesn't mean I should start celebrating this guy's new 50 murders a year rule as a great libertarian policy, 326 00:34:26.300 --> 00:34:31.300 or that I should stop looking for an opportunity to cut it down to zero by bringing the killer to justice. 327 00:34:31.300 --> 00:34:37.300 Above all, it doesn't mean that I should help the killer implement his 50 murders a year policy. 328 00:34:40.300 --> 00:34:47.300 By the same principle, if taxation is theft, for example, then although we should welcome any diminution in the government's rate of theft, 329 00:34:47.300 --> 00:34:52.260 Theft, we cannot actually participate in the government's new, kinder, less intense thievery 330 00:34:52.260 --> 00:34:57.020 without becoming thieves ourselves, nor should we praise these moderate improvements in such 331 00:34:57.020 --> 00:35:01.660 a way as to commit ourselves to criticizing more radical improvements. 332 00:35:01.660 --> 00:35:05.640 It's been said that we should not let the perfect become the enemy of the good, a phrase 333 00:35:05.640 --> 00:35:10.940 people seem to use only when they are about to recommend something dishonorable. 334 00:35:10.940 --> 00:35:16.400 But letting the somewhat good become the enemy of the even better hardly seems preferable. 335 00:35:16.400 --> 00:35:20.400 Rothbard was fond of quoting the maxim of abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, 336 00:35:20.400 --> 00:35:24.400 gradualism in theory is perpetuity in practice. 337 00:35:24.400 --> 00:35:28.400 Another root of the Rothbard as utopian perfectionistividh 338 00:35:28.400 --> 00:35:32.400 is the fact that Rothbardians do indeed reject many reforms that are advertised 339 00:35:32.400 --> 00:35:36.400 as incremental steps toward liberty, but in such cases the reforms are rejected 340 00:35:36.400 --> 00:35:40.400 not because they are incremental, but because they do not really move in the direction of liberty. 341 00:35:40.400 --> 00:35:44.400 One example is education vouchers, which as Rothbardians we find problematic 342 00:35:44.400 --> 00:35:58.400 is problematic, not because they fall short of a free market and education, but because they threaten to extend to the private schools the kind of micromanagement control the government currently exercises over public schools, thus arguably making things worse. 343 00:35:58.400 --> 00:36:11.400 Another is so-called privatization, not in the term's original sense of a transfer of services from government provision to free market provision, but in what has come to be the prevailing sense of a conferral of governmental privilege 344 00:36:11.400 --> 00:36:25.400 To the Rothbardian, far from stripping government of some of its powers, such privatization simply transforms private firms into arms of the state. 345 00:36:25.400 --> 00:36:33.400 Now whether a shift from a comparatively socialistic to a comparatively fascistic mode of statism is a move up or a move down is perhaps a matter of taste. 346 00:36:33.400 --> 00:36:42.400 But at any rate, we do the libertarian cause no favor by encouraging potential converts to associate plutocratic political cronyism with the free market. 347 00:36:42.400 --> 00:36:49.400 Similar criticisms apply to deregulation, when the entities being deregulated are the beneficiaries of state privilege, 348 00:36:49.400 --> 00:36:55.400 as when the Reagan administration eased restrictions on savings and loans while keeping Federal deposit insurance intact, 349 00:36:55.400 --> 00:36:59.400 thus giving them carte blanche to take risks with the taxpayers' money. 350 00:36:59.400 --> 00:37:05.400 Rothbardian's refusal to engage in reformist politics can seem a bar to political effectiveness. 351 00:37:05.400 --> 00:37:09.400 If you can't participate in the regular political process through where he goes, 352 00:37:09.400 --> 00:37:15.400 doesn't that leave you with only the decidedly unsatisfactory options of violent revolution on the one hand 353 00:37:15.400 --> 00:37:18.400 or defeatist passive withdrawal on the other? 354 00:37:18.400 --> 00:37:24.400 But first, once the Rothbardian position is correctly distinguished from all or nothing perfectionism, 355 00:37:24.400 --> 00:37:28.400 it's no longer clear that Rothbardians can't be involved in ordinary politics. 356 00:37:28.400 --> 00:37:33.680 Politics, voting, running for office, and so forth. Such activities might be regarded 357 00:37:33.680 --> 00:37:38.240 as giving impermissible sanctions to the state. But if you infiltrate the Death Star in order 358 00:37:38.240 --> 00:37:43.080 to blow it up, does that really count as falling to the dark side? 359 00:37:43.080 --> 00:37:47.720 To wield political power, admittedly, is to run the risk of being corrupted. But is such 360 00:37:47.720 --> 00:37:52.640 corruption inevitable? It seems like a sizable block of Ron Paul clones in Congress could 361 00:37:52.640 --> 00:37:57.960 be pretty effective in scaling back the state without sacrificing any libertarian principle. 362 00:37:57.960 --> 00:38:10.960 Perhaps more importantly, however, the assumption that the only eternal alternatives to traditional politics are violent revolution on the one hand and resignation on the other is valid only for non-libertarian political programs. 363 00:38:10.960 --> 00:38:23.960 If the realization of your agenda requires the command of state power, then the only alternatives to working within the system are seizing control of government in a coup d'etat or giving up on your political goals entirely. 364 00:38:23.960 --> 00:38:34.960 But for a libertarian, political success is less a matter of directing the state towards certain favorite ends and more a matter of blocking it from wreaking more evil. 365 00:38:34.960 --> 00:38:43.960 Hence, while withdrawal from engagement with the state would count as defeatism for statist ideologies, it need not be so for libertarians. 366 00:38:43.960 --> 00:38:49.960 Hence Rothbard's enthusiasm for the sorts of strategy he saw himself as sharing with the New Left. 367 00:38:49.960 --> 00:38:55.960 Education, building alternative institutions, mass civil disobedience. 368 00:38:55.960 --> 00:38:59.960 The point is not to scribble libertarian amendments into the Constitution, 369 00:38:59.960 --> 00:39:06.960 but to make unlibertarian laws unenforceable, to make civil society ungovernable. 370 00:39:06.960 --> 00:39:09.960 What else did Rothbard find a value in the New Left? 371 00:39:09.960 --> 00:39:24.960 He was, of course, especially impressed by the work of such revisionist New Left historians as Gabriel Kolko and William Appleman Williams who had shown that powerful business elites were among the principal lobbyists for the supposedly anti-business but actually corporatist cartelizing legislation. 372 00:39:24.960 --> 00:39:37.960 But it may come as a surprise to learn that for Rothbard, the New Left's quote, most crucial contribution to both ends and means is its concept of participatory democracy. 373 00:39:37.960 --> 00:39:54.960 In the broadest sense, the idea of participatory democracy is profoundly individualist and libertarian, for it means that each individual, even the poorest and most humble, should have the right to full control over the decisions that affect his own life. 374 00:39:54.960 --> 00:40:04.960 This may seem less surprising once one realizes that for Rothbard the free market is the fullest realization of participatory democracy. 375 00:40:04.960 --> 00:40:10.960 and in this he is simply following his teacher, Ludwig von Mises, who wrote, 376 00:40:34.960 --> 00:40:39.340 Economic Democracy and the strictest sense of the word. In the last analysis, all decisions 377 00:40:39.340 --> 00:40:43.060 are dependent on the will of the people as consumers." 378 00:40:43.060 --> 00:40:46.420 Of course, Mises has his tongue in his cheek when he calls the free market an economic 379 00:40:46.420 --> 00:40:51.540 democracy, a term borrowed from the socialist left. But rather than saying that Mises is 380 00:40:51.540 --> 00:40:55.860 giving an existing term an opposite meaning, perhaps we should say that Mises is laying 381 00:40:55.860 --> 00:40:59.980 bare the real commitments of an existing ideal. 382 00:40:59.980 --> 00:41:04.660 The idea that markets are more democratic than political so-called democracy has also 383 00:41:04.660 --> 00:41:07.060 has also been explored by David Friedman, who writes, 384 00:41:07.060 --> 00:41:12.860 quote, you can compare 1968 Fords, Chrysler's and Volkswagen's, 385 00:41:12.860 --> 00:41:16.460 but nobody will ever be able to compare the Nixon administration of 1968 386 00:41:16.460 --> 00:41:19.760 with the Humphrey and Wallace administrations of the same year. 387 00:41:19.760 --> 00:41:23.460 It is as if we had only Fords from 1920 to 1928, 388 00:41:23.460 --> 00:41:26.260 Chrysler's from 1928 to 1936, 389 00:41:26.260 --> 00:41:30.260 and then had to decide what firm would make a better car for the next four years. 390 00:41:30.260 --> 00:41:32.460 Imagine buying cars the way we buy governments. 391 00:41:32.460 --> 00:41:34.560 Ten thousand people would get together and agree to vote. 392 00:41:34.560 --> 00:41:39.560 Each for the car he preferred. Whichever car won, each of the 10,000 would have to buy it. 393 00:41:39.560 --> 00:41:44.560 It would not pay any of us to make any serious effort to find out which car was best. 394 00:41:44.560 --> 00:41:49.560 Whatever I decide, my car is being picked for me by other members of the group." 395 00:41:49.560 --> 00:41:54.560 For fans of participatory democracy, which sounds more genuinely participatory, 396 00:41:54.560 --> 00:41:59.560 the way we vote in the marketplace or the way we vote in the polling place. 397 00:41:59.560 --> 00:42:04.560 The political appeal of participatory democracy for Rothbard was its requirement of decentralization 398 00:42:04.560 --> 00:42:08.560 and its rejection of a layer of political representatives above the people. 399 00:42:08.560 --> 00:42:13.560 But Rothbard also found the idea appealing outside the narrowly political sphere. 400 00:42:13.560 --> 00:42:20.560 He wrote, quote, participatory democracy is at the same time a theory of politics and a theory of organization, 401 00:42:20.560 --> 00:42:28.560 an approach to political affairs and to the way new left organizations, or any organizations for that matter, should function. 402 00:42:28.560 --> 00:42:35.560 And he praised, quote, fascinating experiments in which workers are transformed into independent and equal entrepreneurs, end quote. 403 00:42:35.560 --> 00:42:41.560 Traditional socialist goals, such as workers' control of industry then, were apparently not anathema to Rothbard. 404 00:42:41.560 --> 00:42:48.560 Indeed, he would later argue that any nominally private institution that gets more than 50% of its revenue from the government, 405 00:42:48.560 --> 00:42:54.560 or is heavily complicit in government crimes, or both, should be considered a government entity. 406 00:42:54.560 --> 00:42:59.120 Since government ownership is illegitimate, the proper owners of such institutions are the homesteaders, 407 00:42:59.120 --> 00:43:02.960 those who have already been using and therefore mixing their labor with the facilities. 408 00:43:02.960 --> 00:43:08.000 This entails, inter alias, student and or faculty ownership of the universities. 409 00:43:08.000 --> 00:43:12.560 As for the myriad of corporations which are integral parts of the military industrial complex, 410 00:43:12.560 --> 00:43:18.640 one solution Rothbard says is to turn over ownership to the homesteading workers in the particular plants. 411 00:43:18.640 --> 00:43:23.040 He also supported third world land reforms considered socialistic by many conservatives. 412 00:43:23.040 --> 00:43:28.040 on the grounds that existing land tenure represented continuing aggression by title holders of land 413 00:43:28.040 --> 00:43:31.040 against peasants engaged in transforming the soil. 414 00:43:31.040 --> 00:43:36.040 And here again Rothbard is following that wild-eyed leftist, Ludwig von Mises, who wrote, 415 00:43:36.040 --> 00:43:43.040 quote, nowhere and at no time has the large-scale ownership of land come into being through the working of economic forces in the market. 416 00:43:43.040 --> 00:43:50.040 It is the result of military and political effort founded by violence that has been upheld by violence and by that alone, end quote. 417 00:43:50.040 --> 00:44:02.040 Many left-wing critics of the market, such as Elizabeth Anderson, would reject the idea of any serious affiliation between leftist and free market libertarian conceptions of participatory democracy. 418 00:44:02.040 --> 00:44:13.040 One of Anderson's criticisms of the market is that it privileges exit over voice, that is, it gives people the freedom to act like consumers and withdraw from situations they oppose, 419 00:44:13.040 --> 00:44:19.040 but allows little scope for the freedom to act like citizens and shape their social institutions through shared discussion. 420 00:44:19.040 --> 00:44:26.040 But this is a false dichotomy for it is precisely the right of exit that is the strongest guarantee of voice. 421 00:44:26.040 --> 00:44:32.040 The complaints and suggestions of an equal partner who is free to withdraw his or her productive contribution 422 00:44:32.040 --> 00:44:38.040 are bound to be taken more seriously than those of a subjugated partner who has no choice but to put up with whatever develops. 423 00:44:38.040 --> 00:44:42.040 Putting an iron curtain around a cooperative venture does not make it more cooperative. 424 00:44:42.040 --> 00:44:54.040 The sort of participatory democracy that anti-authoritarian leftists favor is thus more closely affiliated, more naturally allied with Misesian market democracy than with political democracy. 425 00:44:54.040 --> 00:45:08.040 Ever since libertarians and leftists went their separate ways back in the 19th century, libertarians have specialized in understanding governmental forms and mechanisms of oppression and the benefits of competitive, for-profit forms of voluntary association. 426 00:45:08.040 --> 00:45:18.040 Association, while leftists have specialized in understanding non-governmental forms and mechanisms of oppression and the benefits of cooperative, not-for-profit forms of voluntary association. 427 00:45:18.040 --> 00:45:32.040 My own view is that each side has something valuable to learn about the issues in which the other side is specialized, and Rothbard's insight into the affinity between allegedly socialist and allegedly capitalist forms of participatory democracy might be a good place to start. 428 00:45:32.040 --> 00:45:36.040 Rothbard's enthusiasm for the left did not last, of course. 429 00:45:36.040 --> 00:45:43.040 By 1970, he was writing pieces with titles like The New Left R.I.P. and Farewell to the Left. 430 00:45:43.040 --> 00:45:48.040 In his view, after a promising beginning, the anti-authoritarian left had largely disintegrated 431 00:45:48.040 --> 00:45:53.040 into political opportunists on the one hand and cultural irrationalists on the other. 432 00:45:53.040 --> 00:46:00.040 While it had once been, he said, the most intense, the most notable and the most far-flung anti-war movement in American history, 433 00:46:00.040 --> 00:46:12.040 When they succeeded in toppling an American president and forcing a halt to the bombing of North Vietnam while managing to radicalize countless numbers of Americans and reveal the imperial corporate state nature of the American system, 434 00:46:12.040 --> 00:46:18.040 all that now remained of the New Left, he said, was the final reflexive convulsions of the corpse. 435 00:46:18.040 --> 00:46:20.040 Was he right? 436 00:46:20.040 --> 00:46:22.040 Certainly he was in part. 437 00:46:22.040 --> 00:46:27.040 We've indeed seen all too many former 60s radicals either scrambling for the establishment political trough 438 00:46:27.040 --> 00:46:42.040 And when the students for a democratic society, Rothbard's favorite leftist group, collapsed and gave way to the terrorist weather underground, for example, that was hardly an auspicious development for the new left. 439 00:46:42.040 --> 00:46:45.040 On the other hand, I'm not convinced by all of these examples. 440 00:46:45.040 --> 00:46:54.040 For example, Rothbard, along with many male leftists, it should be said, viewed the feminist movement as an example of the cultural irrationalism to which the new left was succumbing. 441 00:46:54.040 --> 00:46:59.040 whereas I regard it as a crucial recovery of libertarians authentic 19th century heritage 442 00:46:59.040 --> 00:47:02.040 and a vital complement to any politics of liberation. 443 00:47:02.040 --> 00:47:08.040 That's an example of the importance to libertarians of understanding non-state forms of domination that I mentioned earlier. 444 00:47:08.040 --> 00:47:15.040 It's not as though the leftist elements that Rothbard liked ever completely disappeared. 445 00:47:15.040 --> 00:47:19.040 The organizational infrastructure collapsed, but not the aspiration. 446 00:47:19.040 --> 00:47:28.040 It wasn't just free market libertarians, but also anti-authoritarian leftists who are left in the lurch by the deterioration of 60s radicalism. 447 00:47:28.040 --> 00:47:36.040 Rather than looking around sadly for an organized movement of the anti-authoritarian left, perhaps we should have tried to become that movement. 448 00:47:36.040 --> 00:47:44.040 From our present standpoint, what lessons should we draw from the past four decades since Rothbard first published Left and Right? 449 00:47:44.040 --> 00:47:48.040 We've seen one conservative revolution after another, Reagan, Thatcher, Bush. 450 00:47:48.040 --> 00:47:58.040 We've seen what happens when conservatives get in power and finally are in a position to scale back the state like they've been telling us for years they do if those awful liberals didn't keep blocking them. 451 00:47:58.040 --> 00:48:06.040 We've seen the purge of libertarian elements from the right, begun by Buckley and others during the Cold War, reach its apogee during the war on terror. 452 00:48:06.040 --> 00:48:21.040 It's becoming clear that, in Lew Rockwell's words, conservatism has always been messianic, militarist, nationalist, bloodthirsty, imperialist, centralist, redistributionist and in love with the hangman state. 453 00:48:21.040 --> 00:48:27.040 As I see it then, Rothbard's left and right has never been more urgently relevant than it is right now. 454 00:48:27.040 --> 00:48:32.040 Today we face a situation remarkably similar to the one Rothbard was facing in the 1960s, 455 00:48:32.040 --> 00:48:37.040 including shifting ideological alliances and an increasingly unpopular war. 456 00:48:37.040 --> 00:48:46.040 Rothbard writes that modern libertarians forgot or never realized that opposition to war and militarism had always been a left-wing tradition which included libertarians. 457 00:48:46.040 --> 00:48:57.040 So when the right-wing revealed itself as the great partisan of total war, the libertarians were unprepared to understand what was happening and tailed along in the wake of their supposed conservative allies. 458 00:48:57.040 --> 00:49:08.040 He was talking about Vietnam in the Cold War, but his diagnosis would apply equally well to those libertarians who have allowed themselves to be lured into support for the current administration's military policy. 459 00:49:08.040 --> 00:49:12.040 But the architects of that policy have misfired. 460 00:49:12.040 --> 00:49:22.040 The 9-11 attacks initially appeared to have killed off the so-called Vietnam Syndrome of aversion to war that the imperialist elite have so long bemoaned. 461 00:49:22.040 --> 00:49:30.040 But Bush and his cronies have flatfootedly managed to reinvigorate it and to reawaken popular suspicion of presidential war rhetoric. 462 00:49:30.040 --> 00:49:36.040 Rothbard once said that Richard Nixon was one of the best organizers the anti-war movement ever had. 463 00:49:36.040 --> 00:49:40.040 Bush has a fair claim to share that august company. 464 00:49:40.040 --> 00:49:43.040 The anti-authoritarian left is becoming newly active. 465 00:49:43.040 --> 00:49:51.040 Even Rothbard's beloved Students for a Democratic Society has recently been revived and has been explicitly welcoming of libertarian participation. 466 00:49:51.040 --> 00:49:55.740 Likewise, just two days ago on the LRC blog, I saw a letter from leading left-wing decentralized 467 00:49:55.740 --> 00:50:01.180 Kirkpatrick Sale to Lew Rockwell, informing him about an upcoming secessionist convention. 468 00:50:01.180 --> 00:50:06.200 The potential for a revival of Rothbard's left-libertarian coalition is certainly there. 469 00:50:06.200 --> 00:50:10.960 But this time we have a powerful tool that Rothbard lacked, the Internet. 470 00:50:10.960 --> 00:50:15.160 We are no longer confined to short-run broadsheets printed up in someone's basement. 471 00:50:15.160 --> 00:50:19.120 We now have access to a worldwide audience and can far more easily find and coordinate 472 00:50:19.120 --> 00:50:23.120 with like-minded people, bypassing the establishment channels of information. 473 00:50:23.120 --> 00:50:27.120 I don't know what the circulation of left and right was in 1965, 474 00:50:27.120 --> 00:50:31.120 but today it's available to potentially millions of people at the click of a button, 475 00:50:31.120 --> 00:50:35.120 as are literally thousands of other important libertarian works. 476 00:50:35.120 --> 00:50:39.120 And websites exploring cross-fertilization between free market and left-decentralist ideas 477 00:50:39.120 --> 00:50:43.120 are multiplying every month. Let me close by quoting a passage 478 00:50:43.120 --> 00:50:47.120 I recently saw on Brad Spangler's blog. 479 00:50:47.120 --> 00:51:17.120 Genuine libertarianism is very much left-wing. It's revolutionary. The long and tragic alliance of libertarians with the right against the specter of state socialism has come into a close, as it served no purpose after the fall of the Soviet Union, and so-called conservatives have subsequently taken to letting their true big government on steroids colors fly. In the period since the demise of the Soviet Union, both the radicals and the moderates among the left have been subconsciously seeking a new radical 480 00:51:17.120 --> 00:51:32.120 I believe that radical libertarians will be most effective when they overcome any lingering right-wing cultural contamination of the libertarian views and embrace their inherent radicalism, which is most at home on the left. 481 00:51:32.120 --> 00:51:37.120 For as the radicals go, so do the moderates gradually follow in small steps. 482 00:51:37.120 --> 00:51:43.120 It's time for libertarians to stop fighting the left and take up the challenge of leading the left. 483 00:52:01.120 --> 00:52:03.120 I can take a few questions. 484 00:52:03.120 --> 00:52:07.120 What about this response? Sure, what you're saying about conservatism, 485 00:52:07.120 --> 00:52:12.120 American conservatism fits European conservatism, which was traditionally theocratic and so on and so forth, 486 00:52:12.120 --> 00:52:15.120 but American conservatism, or at least certain strains of it, 487 00:52:15.120 --> 00:52:19.120 part back to the liberal, the libertarian American revolution, 488 00:52:19.120 --> 00:52:24.120 the separation of church and state here in this country, etc., etc. 489 00:52:24.120 --> 00:52:31.120 Well, I guess it probably depends on exactly what one picks out as conservatives or as the conservative movement. 490 00:52:31.120 --> 00:52:45.120 of Movement, certainly if we're talking about what came to be called the old right, which was the main opposition to FDR and the New Deal. 491 00:52:45.120 --> 00:52:50.120 We call those people conservatives now. A lot of them didn't call themselves conservatives at the time. 492 00:52:50.120 --> 00:52:56.120 They gradually came to start calling themselves conservatives and right-wingers because everyone told them that's what they were, 493 00:52:56.120 --> 00:53:09.120 Because the left had gone for all this neo-fascist stuff, but when Mencken, for example, first started his career, I think he would have been astonished in calling him a conservative. 494 00:53:09.120 --> 00:53:13.120 By the end of his career, he was willing to call himself one. 495 00:53:13.120 --> 00:53:25.120 So we have the old right to sort of get told of that, but once we start getting an organization, a movement that really starts calling itself conservative, you've got a lot of different tendencies. 496 00:53:25.120 --> 00:53:55.120 and a lot of different tendencies, but the one that suddenly becomes dominant is the sort of the Buckleyite, Russell Kirkean view, which of course always made nods, and not always sheer lip service, but always made nods to the founding fathers and the classical liberal tradition and so forth, and Buckley's memoirs are titled memoirs of a libertarian journalist, whatever unearthly meant by that. 497 00:53:55.120 --> 00:53:56.120 ." 498 00:53:56.120 --> 00:53:59.300 No, actually that's true in Europe too, I think, and certainly in Britain. 499 00:53:59.300 --> 00:54:05.300 I think conservatives, thatcher certainly made nods to the... 500 00:54:05.300 --> 00:54:10.300 And I think they were partly sincere, but it was also mixed up with all this neo-mercandilist 501 00:54:10.300 --> 00:54:11.300 stuff. 502 00:54:11.300 --> 00:54:19.300 ______ to what extent do you think claims about cultural leftism have to be bound up 503 00:54:19.300 --> 00:54:20.300 with libertarians being leftists? 504 00:54:20.300 --> 00:54:28.300 So consider people that are sexually traditional, like the Quakers, the Amish, who have often been inclined to be very anti-war. 505 00:54:28.300 --> 00:54:30.300 You haven't kept up with the Quakers lately, have you? 506 00:54:30.300 --> 00:54:37.300 In the past, there have been lots of very friendly things about them. 507 00:54:37.300 --> 00:54:46.300 And I know you've written, though, that there's some very sexually conservative things about them, conservative about the family. 508 00:54:46.300 --> 00:54:53.300 Do you see that as being intention, or do you think they can co-exist? 509 00:55:16.300 --> 00:55:21.300 to undermine the kind of culture that makes libertarian institutions stable. 510 00:55:21.300 --> 00:55:25.300 Some of those ideas are, some of those ideas aren't. 511 00:55:25.300 --> 00:55:34.300 But attention is not the same as a logical inconsistency. 512 00:55:34.300 --> 00:55:36.300 Some things are logically inconsistent. 513 00:55:36.300 --> 00:55:38.300 Some things are logically inconsistent with libertarianism. 514 00:55:38.300 --> 00:55:42.300 Others are logically inconsistent with the best grounds for libertarianism. 515 00:55:42.300 --> 00:55:49.300 Libertarianism is not a monogamous marriage, I don't know if that's the best example to use in making a concession to cultural compromise. 516 00:56:12.300 --> 00:56:20.300 I want to tell two very brief stories and offer an alternative to your views. 517 00:56:20.300 --> 00:56:29.300 The first brief story is, there was the anti-Vietnam march and there were thousands of lefties all saying US out of Vietnam. 518 00:56:29.300 --> 00:56:35.300 There were about three or four libertarians saying US out of the Bronx. 519 00:56:35.300 --> 00:56:50.300 The other brief story is I was part of Murray's little corporal's guard. We were members of the Peace and Freedom Party, which was the leftist anti-war party, and the two big groups were Progressive Labor and the Trotskyists. 520 00:56:50.300 --> 00:56:58.300 And we were part of the Progressive Labor Alliance, and we had a compromise where we voted for the gold standard and in favor of rent control. 521 00:56:58.300 --> 00:57:15.300 The point is that in those days, you could have libertarians on the fingers of one or two hands, or maybe three or four hands. 522 00:57:15.300 --> 00:57:22.300 Now we have tens of thousands of libertarians depending upon how you can make it. I don't see why we should have an alliance with anyone. 523 00:57:22.300 --> 00:57:36.300 I think that when the lefties are good on war, anti-war, we support them. When the righties are good on something, go and ask me what to support them. 524 00:57:36.300 --> 00:57:46.300 I don't see why we should be going after alliances. Hans takes the opposite point of view. He says, well, you know, we're really conservative. You take the, you know, we're really leftish. 525 00:57:46.300 --> 00:58:01.300 I sort of take the fun-line view that we're really libertarians, and there are no left-wing libertarians or right-wing libertarians, there are only libertarians, and those supposedly left-wing libertarians aren't really libertarians, and the right-wing libertarians, the pro-war ones, aren't really libertarians on that issue. 526 00:58:01.300 --> 00:58:12.300 Another quick story, Murray used to say, we kept looking around for the in-place, and finally we realized we were the in-place to be. 527 00:58:12.300 --> 00:58:20.300 Well, we are the in-place to be, and we don't need these commies and faggots. 528 00:58:20.300 --> 00:58:31.140 Well, remember who coined the term plumb line? It wasn't Rothbard, it was Benjamin Tucker. 529 00:58:31.140 --> 00:58:35.780 So the plumb line originally was, you know, so much farther to the left than Rothbard's plumb line. 530 00:58:35.780 --> 00:58:40.140 That's not an argument, just a snarky observation. 531 00:58:40.140 --> 00:58:48.860 Okay, a couple of things. First, certainly by an alliance, I don't think that one should make alliances 532 00:58:48.860 --> 00:58:55.540 where one compromises one's principles, I would never advise you to vote in favor of rent control. 533 00:58:55.540 --> 00:58:57.500 I'm not a pinko like Rothbard on that. 534 00:58:57.500 --> 00:59:08.100 Second, I'm not meaning to make a purely strategic point. 535 00:59:08.100 --> 00:59:15.300 I think that the aspects of the left that I do want to work with, 536 00:59:15.300 --> 00:59:45.300 There are a lot more of us than there were back in the day, but still there's still a lot more of the state than there is of us, so even though I don't think myself to be making a purely strategic point, if as a matter of fact our principles do enable us to ally with certain people, and aligning with them isn't just sort of, hey, 537 00:59:45.300 --> 00:59:51.300 We'll think what we think, and you think what you think, but we'll work together, but hey, maybe we can learn something from you, and maybe we can teach you something. 538 00:59:57.300 --> 01:00:05.300 What I heard from you was not necessarily an alliance so much as lead the left. That was a phrase that sort of stood out to me. 539 01:00:05.300 --> 01:00:13.300 So in a way, I don't think it's compromised so much as how can you lead or grab people and bring them in together. 540 01:00:13.300 --> 01:00:21.300 My personal interest would be Christian libertarians. How can you grab those guys and drag them in the right direction, or lead them, I guess, sounds a little nicer. 541 01:00:21.300 --> 01:00:31.300 What is your approach, or almost like tactical blueprint, to leading the left? 542 01:00:43.300 --> 01:00:54.300 I put a comment on his blog saying, I agree, but you shouldn't apply that we have only things to teach the left and nothing to learn from them. 543 01:00:54.300 --> 01:00:58.300 I think we have to learn from them, not things about libertarian principle, 544 01:00:58.300 --> 01:01:07.300 but things about how certain kinds of social dynamics work that they paid more attention to than we traditionally have, 545 01:01:07.300 --> 01:01:10.300 some of which I think they're right about, not all of it. 546 01:01:10.300 --> 01:01:26.300 But, so I think that we genuinely have something to learn from them, but I also think as a matter of strategy, the best way to approach someone you want to lead is not to say, I've got all the answers, you're an idiot, come follow me, and that may work on some people, but those aren't the people we want. 547 01:01:26.300 --> 01:01:56.300 And certainly one strategy is if we can avoid sliding into a tendency, which we do sometimes have, to confuse defending the free market with defending whatever big corporation happens to be doing something right now, even when in some cases they're doing some kind of government favoritism and so forth, we don't want to encourage in them the idea that the free market is all about promoting the privilege of big corporations and so forth. 548 01:01:56.300 --> 01:02:06.300 So in this case, the best strategy, I think, is to do something that I think we should do anyway, even apart from strategy. 549 01:02:06.300 --> 01:02:35.300 I wonder, you had a claimant argument earlier that the message by which the left, the ideals of the left became the ideals of the right or something like that and the reason why the left adopted the methodology of the right and the right adopted the methodology of the left 550 01:02:35.300 --> 01:02:48.300 I said something that sounded a little bit like that, but there wasn't anything of the right adopting the means of the left, I don't think. 551 01:02:48.300 --> 01:02:54.300 You sought to explain the change in the alliance between the left and the right. 552 01:02:54.300 --> 01:03:10.300 I was wondering if perhaps a more mundane explanation, what your thoughts are of a more mundane economic explanation being that perhaps the requirements to win elections cause the need for shifting alliances. 553 01:03:10.300 --> 01:03:24.300 The alliance of people that were libertarian in social views and libertarian in economic views was no longer tenable. 554 01:03:24.300 --> 01:03:26.300 Well, that just pushes the question back. 555 01:03:26.300 --> 01:03:35.300 That means a change in the ideology of political activists is to be explained by a change in the ideology of society generally. 556 01:03:35.300 --> 01:03:41.300 We ask, well, why that change? Why is it that interests that previously went together are now starting not to?