WEBVTT NOTE Eight Ways to Run the Country 1 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:09.480 The Ludwig von Mises Institute presents The Libertarian Tradition, an audio series with 2 00:00:09.480 --> 00:00:12.800 Jeff Rickenbach. 3 00:00:12.800 --> 00:00:19.800 I only very recently became aware of the existence of a book called Eight Ways to Run the Country, 4 00:00:19.800 --> 00:00:25.320 a new and revealing look at left and right by Brian Patrick Mitchell. 5 00:00:25.320 --> 00:00:30.100 I think I keep up fairly well with what's coming out that relates to the libertarian 6 00:00:30.100 --> 00:00:35.800 tradition, so at first I thought perhaps this was a new book that had somehow slipped past 7 00:00:35.800 --> 00:00:37.080 my net. 8 00:00:37.080 --> 00:00:40.560 But once I looked into it, I found that it wasn't new at all. 9 00:00:40.560 --> 00:00:46.460 Eight Ways to Run the Country was published four years ago, back in 2007, before I had 10 00:00:46.460 --> 00:00:52.460 begun doing the libertarian tradition podcast for the Mises Institute and keeping my eagle 11 00:01:22.460 --> 00:01:28.300 the book on lewrockwell.com back in 2007 when it first became available. 12 00:01:28.300 --> 00:01:32.900 He spoke highly of it on the whole, though he expressed a few reservations, which I'll 13 00:01:32.900 --> 00:01:35.180 come back to momentarily. 14 00:01:35.180 --> 00:01:40.700 More recently, Anthony Gregory has jumped on the bandwagon with even greater enthusiasm, 15 00:01:40.700 --> 00:01:47.500 claiming, again on lewrockwell.com, that Mitchell's little book is illuminating, and altogether 16 00:01:47.500 --> 00:01:52.820 are the best explanation of the political spectrum, a volume that makes sense of all 17 00:01:52.820 --> 00:01:54.980 the major mysteries. 18 00:01:54.980 --> 00:02:01.040 I beg to differ, but before I go into exactly why, I should say something about what I do 19 00:02:01.040 --> 00:02:02.860 like about this book. 20 00:02:02.860 --> 00:02:08.360 Otherwise, I fear that my positive comments, and even the fact that my overall response 21 00:02:08.360 --> 00:02:14.820 is mixed, not negative, will be utterly forgotten in the mad rush of negativity that'll be 22 00:02:14.820 --> 00:02:17.680 coming your way over the next few minutes. 23 00:02:17.680 --> 00:02:23.060 Brian Patrick Mitchell is the Washington Bureau Chief of Investors Business Daily. 24 00:02:23.060 --> 00:02:26.820 He writes crisply and succinctly and very readably. 25 00:02:26.820 --> 00:02:33.020 More important, he devotes a substantial amount of space to us, the libertarian movement. 26 00:02:33.020 --> 00:02:39.340 Two of his 11 chapters, 25 of his 142 pages, are about us. 27 00:02:39.340 --> 00:02:43.380 Nearly a fifth of his total text is about us. 28 00:02:43.380 --> 00:02:49.740 It has been said with much wisdom that everyone's favorite subject is himself, unless, of course, 29 00:02:49.740 --> 00:02:51.120 it's herself. 30 00:02:51.120 --> 00:02:56.520 Any libertarian who loves reading about the libertarian movement and where its ideas fit 31 00:02:56.520 --> 00:03:01.140 into the American political spectrum will want to read this book. 32 00:03:01.140 --> 00:03:06.200 The problem for me is that I can't find myself in Mitchell's pages. 33 00:03:06.200 --> 00:03:10.060 And by that I don't mean that he doesn't cite me or quote me. 34 00:03:10.060 --> 00:03:11.060 He doesn't. 35 00:03:11.060 --> 00:03:13.100 But that's irrelevant to my point. 36 00:03:13.100 --> 00:03:19.400 My point is that I'm not there in his book in spirit, and neither is any other libertarian 37 00:03:19.400 --> 00:03:21.380 who thinks as I do. 38 00:03:21.380 --> 00:03:26.340 By Mitchell's standards, such libertarians as we simply don't exist. 39 00:03:26.340 --> 00:03:28.460 Let me explain. 40 00:03:28.460 --> 00:03:32.020 According to Mitchell, there are two kinds of libertarians. 41 00:03:32.020 --> 00:03:36.740 There are the individualists and there are the paleo-libertarians. 42 00:03:36.740 --> 00:03:42.860 The individualists are typified by the libertarians who staff the Cato Institute and Reason magazine. 43 00:03:42.860 --> 00:03:55.860 These individualists, Mitchell writes, are really rather pro-government, because as they see it, government, after all, provides the necessary framework for the individual's pursuit of happiness. 44 00:03:55.860 --> 00:04:02.860 Few of these individualists believe in God or the traditional moral values associated with such faith. 45 00:04:02.860 --> 00:04:09.860 They are, in fact, deeply resentful of people trying to impose their morality on others. 46 00:04:09.860 --> 00:04:27.460 They exhibit reluctance to make moral judgments themselves, and give everyone else in American political life reason to suspect that they are just libertines, who don't believe in right or wrong, but push libertarianism because it would let them do as they please. 47 00:04:27.460 --> 00:04:34.460 Nor are they much impressed with the role churches have historically played in bringing order to community life. 48 00:04:34.460 --> 00:04:41.460 They believe that free individuals create their own order as they pursue their own interests, 49 00:04:41.460 --> 00:04:49.460 and their ideal society is not a group bound together by mutual obligation or freely accepted authority, 50 00:04:49.460 --> 00:04:56.460 but a free association of autonomous individuals protected by an accepted legal framework. 51 00:04:56.460 --> 00:05:06.060 These individualists typically support the Libertarian Party, whose 2000 platform, Mitchell informs us, is a pedophile's dream. 52 00:05:06.060 --> 00:05:15.860 After all, it affirms a right Murray Rothbard long argued that we should respect, every child's right to run away from his or her parents. 53 00:05:15.860 --> 00:05:24.360 Also, as Mitchell notes in a tone of shocked horror, it would bar the government from restricting private adoption services, 54 00:05:24.360 --> 00:05:31.000 which would effectively legalize the buying and selling of children for sexual service. 55 00:05:31.000 --> 00:05:36.880 Moreover, Mitchell writes, most individualists have confined their complaints about the Iraq 56 00:05:36.880 --> 00:05:43.760 and Afghanistan wars to the sacrifice of civil liberties at home and warnings about the costs 57 00:05:43.760 --> 00:05:46.720 and risks of military intervention. 58 00:05:46.720 --> 00:05:51.260 Many have publicly backed the use of force abroad. 59 00:05:51.260 --> 00:05:57.780 The Paleo-libertarians, by contrast, have opposed the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, opposed 60 00:05:57.780 --> 00:06:00.740 them forthrightly and absolutely. 61 00:06:00.740 --> 00:06:06.900 Mitchell uses the late Harry Brown to typify the Paleo-libertarian view of national defense. 62 00:06:06.900 --> 00:06:12.020 Brown, he writes, was all for defending the country, but thought the country would not 63 00:06:12.020 --> 00:06:15.820 much need defending if it were not so imperialistic. 64 00:06:15.820 --> 00:06:22.100 Brown believed, according to Mitchell, that war is just one more government program, inefficiently 65 00:06:22.100 --> 00:06:25.300 run like the U.S. Postal Service. 66 00:06:25.300 --> 00:06:28.360 Government doesn't work, even when fighting wars. 67 00:06:28.360 --> 00:06:34.160 He quotes Brown again, if a government wins a war, it's only because it's fighting another 68 00:06:34.160 --> 00:06:35.160 government. 69 00:06:35.160 --> 00:06:40.700 Paleo-libertarians, according to Mitchell, are typified not only by Brown, but also by 70 00:06:40.700 --> 00:06:46.580 by the people who staff the Ludwig von Mises Institute and write for lewrockwell.com. 71 00:06:46.580 --> 00:06:52.220 And what that means, he has already made abundantly clear, for he has written about another of 72 00:06:52.220 --> 00:06:59.720 the intellectuals he has chosen to focus on, Justin Raimondo of antiwar.com, that his organizational 73 00:06:59.720 --> 00:07:01.980 attachments are to the right. 74 00:07:01.980 --> 00:07:07.420 He is a contributing editor of the American Conservative and a former adjunct scholar at 75 00:07:07.420 --> 00:07:10.540 the Ludwig von Mises Institute. 76 00:07:10.540 --> 00:07:11.540 Not that. 77 00:07:11.540 --> 00:07:19.660 If A is B and B is C, then A is C. The Ludwig von Mises Institute is on the right. 78 00:07:19.660 --> 00:07:25.900 A paleo-libertarian, Mitchell maintains, is a right-leaning libertarian. 79 00:07:25.900 --> 00:07:31.820 Yet he also wants us to believe that paleolibs are anarchists of a sort. 80 00:07:31.820 --> 00:07:37.380 For the paleolib is confident of man's ability to live without government. 81 00:07:37.380 --> 00:07:42.640 He believes that virtually everything that governments have tried to manage, from lighthouses 82 00:07:42.640 --> 00:07:48.420 to law enforcement, can be better managed by private persons or groups. 83 00:07:48.420 --> 00:07:54.100 For the paleolib, as Mitchell understands him, at its best, government is a necessary 84 00:07:54.100 --> 00:07:55.100 evil. 85 00:07:55.100 --> 00:07:59.300 At its worst, it is the greatest evil the world has ever known. 86 00:07:59.300 --> 00:08:04.560 He quotes Harry Brown as saying that government is merely an agency of coercion. 87 00:08:04.560 --> 00:08:11.480 Of course there are other agencies of coercion, such as the mafia, so to be more precise, 88 00:08:11.480 --> 00:08:16.300 government is the agency of coercion that has flags in front of its offices. 89 00:08:16.300 --> 00:08:22.240 Or to put it another way, government is society's dominant producer of coercion. 90 00:08:22.240 --> 00:08:28.200 The mafia and independent bandits are merely fringe competitors, seeking to take advantage 91 00:08:28.200 --> 00:08:32.580 of the niches and nooks neglected by the government. 92 00:08:32.580 --> 00:08:39.180 So there you have it, the contemporary libertarian movement, individualists who support so-called 93 00:08:39.180 --> 00:08:45.880 limited government and are irreligious hedonists and libertines, and paleolibs who want to 94 00:08:45.880 --> 00:08:50.860 abolish the government and replace it with a vast network of churches that would try 95 00:08:50.860 --> 00:08:57.460 to impose traditional Christian morality on everyone through the power of persuasion and 96 00:08:57.460 --> 00:09:02.720 The use of social and cultural sanctions, like boycotts and shunning. 97 00:09:02.720 --> 00:09:05.100 Is this cockeyed or what? 98 00:09:05.100 --> 00:09:10.220 This is what I would expect from a clever journalist who knew nothing about the subject, 99 00:09:10.220 --> 00:09:14.580 contemporary libertarianism, but was not unfriendly toward it. 100 00:09:14.580 --> 00:09:19.660 It's the sort of conclusion somebody who was doing a very quick introductory study of the 101 00:09:19.660 --> 00:09:22.580 subject might come up with. 102 00:09:22.580 --> 00:09:26.140 But I certainly can't find myself in this mishmash. 103 00:09:26.140 --> 00:09:31.080 I don't regard government, even at its best, as a necessary evil. 104 00:09:31.080 --> 00:09:34.280 I regard it as an unnecessary evil. 105 00:09:34.280 --> 00:09:38.360 Like Mitchell's paleolibs, I want to abolish it entirely. 106 00:09:38.360 --> 00:09:43.100 But my moral views are more like those of Ayn Rand than like those of any traditionalist 107 00:09:43.100 --> 00:09:45.200 Christian I've ever encountered. 108 00:09:45.200 --> 00:09:47.200 I'm as secular as they come. 109 00:09:47.200 --> 00:09:50.760 I care nothing about churches and tend to stay away from them. 110 00:09:50.760 --> 00:09:58.680 I think individuals who want to structure their lives around traditional values and traditional ways should definitely do that. 111 00:09:58.680 --> 00:10:02.520 I wish them well and hope they have happy and pleasant lives. 112 00:10:02.520 --> 00:10:06.660 Myself, I've always preferred a more bohemian lifestyle. 113 00:10:06.660 --> 00:10:14.260 I pick and choose among the traditions I find around me, honoring those I like, ignoring those I don't like, 114 00:10:14.260 --> 00:10:19.620 and working to create new traditions of my own to replace the ones I jettison. 115 00:10:19.620 --> 00:10:25.220 Like the individualists, I think one of the appealing qualities of a free society is its 116 00:10:25.220 --> 00:10:30.560 openness to individual choice and experimentation in personal lifestyle. 117 00:10:30.560 --> 00:10:35.740 But I'm sure as hell no advocate of the childish fantasy of limited government. 118 00:10:35.740 --> 00:10:37.940 Nor am I alone in all this. 119 00:10:37.940 --> 00:10:43.340 I personally know many other contemporary libertarians who would have difficulty recognizing 120 00:10:43.340 --> 00:10:49.380 themselves in the distorted funhouse mirror Brian Patrick Mitchell has held up to what 121 00:10:49.380 --> 00:10:54.060 Murray Rothbard always called this movement of ours. 122 00:10:54.060 --> 00:10:59.540 In fairness to Mitchell, I must acknowledge that portraying and anatomizing the contemporary 123 00:10:59.540 --> 00:11:04.540 libertarian movement was not his chief objective in writing this book. 124 00:11:04.540 --> 00:11:07.740 He was up to something much more ambitious than that. 125 00:11:07.740 --> 00:11:12.960 And back in 2007, Tom Woods seems to have thought that Mitchell did a pretty good job 126 00:11:12.960 --> 00:11:16.140 of achieving his more ambitious goal. 127 00:11:16.140 --> 00:11:21.820 What to my mind makes Mitchell's book valuable, Tom wrote back then, is its usefulness as 128 00:11:21.820 --> 00:11:27.340 a political and philosophical primer for those who would like to understand the ideological 129 00:11:27.340 --> 00:11:29.800 landscape in America. 130 00:11:29.800 --> 00:11:34.540 In that sense, Mitchell's book is rather like The Nine Nations of North America, if 131 00:11:34.540 --> 00:11:41.020 you remember that extremely astute 30-year-old Tom, except that, in my judgment at least, 132 00:11:41.020 --> 00:11:47.660 Joel Garot makes his case in the nine nations of North America, whereas Brian Patrick Mitchell 133 00:11:47.660 --> 00:11:51.600 does not make his in eight ways to run the country. 134 00:11:51.600 --> 00:11:58.760 To Mitchell, you see, there are eight ideological stances at play in contemporary American politics. 135 00:11:58.760 --> 00:12:05.060 There are three kinds of leftists, the communitarians, the progressives, and the radicals, who are 136 00:12:05.060 --> 00:12:08.940 better known to the rest of us as anarcho-communists. 137 00:12:08.940 --> 00:12:15.340 There are three kinds of conservatives, the paleocons, the theocons, that is, the religious 138 00:12:15.340 --> 00:12:18.380 right and the neocons. 139 00:12:18.380 --> 00:12:22.660 And there are, as we have seen, two types of libertarians. 140 00:12:22.660 --> 00:12:27.980 All these permutations are necessary because each group has a different combination of 141 00:12:27.980 --> 00:12:35.780 attitudes toward the issue of what Albert J. Nock called social power versus state power. 142 00:12:35.780 --> 00:12:39.900 Some of them like state power and dislike social power. 143 00:12:39.900 --> 00:12:43.740 Others dislike state power and like social power. 144 00:12:43.740 --> 00:12:47.980 Still others dislike both social power and state power. 145 00:12:47.980 --> 00:12:52.540 Yet others like both state power and social power. 146 00:12:52.540 --> 00:12:58.220 In the case of the libertarians, the indies don't like social power while the paleolibs 147 00:12:58.220 --> 00:12:59.220 do. 148 00:12:59.220 --> 00:13:00.220 Simplistic? 149 00:13:00.220 --> 00:13:01.220 Yes. 150 00:13:01.220 --> 00:13:02.220 Misleading? 151 00:13:02.220 --> 00:13:03.220 Yes. 152 00:13:03.220 --> 00:13:10.280 A Procrustian bed into which many actual libertarians simply can't be made to fit? 153 00:13:10.280 --> 00:13:12.280 Definitely. 154 00:13:12.280 --> 00:13:18.800 To return to my own case, my name is publicly associated with the Ludwig von Mises Institute, 155 00:13:18.800 --> 00:13:25.840 so probably I'm a paleolib in Mitchell's eyes, though he does acknowledge that all libertarians 156 00:13:25.840 --> 00:13:32.440 accept the basic libertarian program of private property and individual rights, and so there 157 00:13:32.440 --> 00:13:39.000 There is considerable crossover among indies and paleolibs supporting the same organizations 158 00:13:39.000 --> 00:13:42.040 and writing for the same magazines. 159 00:13:42.040 --> 00:13:47.640 The part of this sentence in which Mitchell asserts that all libertarians accept individual 160 00:13:47.640 --> 00:13:51.080 rights is not technically correct, of course. 161 00:13:51.080 --> 00:13:57.120 Ever since Max Stirner in the mid-19th century, so-called consequentialist libertarians have 162 00:13:57.120 --> 00:14:13.120 have argued that an individual should act as though he respects the rights of others, even though no such thing as rights actually exists, because conducting his affairs in this way will, in the long run, benefit him. 163 00:14:13.120 --> 00:14:23.120 This is merely another indication of how little Mitchell really understands about libertarianism, how quick and superficial his study of it was. 164 00:14:23.120 --> 00:14:28.680 On the other hand, when Mitchell says there's a lot of crossover institutionally among indies 165 00:14:28.680 --> 00:14:31.140 and paleolibs, he's right. 166 00:14:31.140 --> 00:14:36.380 Frankly, I wish he had devoted more of his discussion to the many ways in which these 167 00:14:36.380 --> 00:14:42.800 supposedly different types of libertarians do in fact work together to advance common 168 00:14:42.800 --> 00:14:43.800 goals. 169 00:14:43.800 --> 00:14:48.940 Instead, he devotes most of his energy in his two chapters on this movement of ours 170 00:14:48.940 --> 00:14:55.640 to perpetuating the supposed feud between the Mises Institute libertarians and the Beltway 171 00:14:55.640 --> 00:15:00.980 libertarians of the Cato Institute and the Reason Foundation. 172 00:15:00.980 --> 00:15:04.580 This kind of thing is a waste of time and energy, I think. 173 00:15:04.580 --> 00:15:10.780 It seems to me every libertarian should just do his or her own thing and hope their fellow 174 00:15:10.780 --> 00:15:16.000 libertarians will surprise them by actually accomplishing something by pursuing their 175 00:15:16.000 --> 00:15:17.900 different strategies. 176 00:15:17.900 --> 00:15:20.960 We should be critical of each other to be sure. 177 00:15:20.960 --> 00:15:25.880 We should subject our fellow libertarians to the closest scrutiny, and we should bar 178 00:15:25.880 --> 00:15:31.620 no holds in our criticism, particularly if we believe that what our fellow libertarian 179 00:15:31.620 --> 00:15:37.460 is doing might mislead the public, selling it something that isn't libertarianism but 180 00:15:37.460 --> 00:15:40.520 is being presented under that name. 181 00:15:40.520 --> 00:15:46.200 But endless dwelling on our differences will get us nowhere, and portraying those differences 182 00:15:46.200 --> 00:15:50.160 Those in a way that doesn't even account for the available evidence? 183 00:15:50.160 --> 00:15:51.760 Ditto. 184 00:15:51.760 --> 00:15:52.760 This is Jeff Rigenbach.