The Ludwig von Mises Institute presents The Libertarian Tradition, an audio series with
Jeff Rickenbach.
I only very recently became aware of the existence of a book called Eight Ways to Run the Country,
a new and revealing look at left and right by Brian Patrick Mitchell.
I think I keep up fairly well with what's coming out that relates to the libertarian
tradition, so at first I thought perhaps this was a new book that had somehow slipped past
my net.
But once I looked into it, I found that it wasn't new at all.
Eight Ways to Run the Country was published four years ago, back in 2007, before I had
begun doing the libertarian tradition podcast for the Mises Institute and keeping my eagle
the book on lewrockwell.com back in 2007 when it first became available.
He spoke highly of it on the whole, though he expressed a few reservations, which I'll
come back to momentarily.
More recently, Anthony Gregory has jumped on the bandwagon with even greater enthusiasm,
claiming, again on lewrockwell.com, that Mitchell's little book is illuminating, and altogether
are the best explanation of the political spectrum, a volume that makes sense of all
the major mysteries.
I beg to differ, but before I go into exactly why, I should say something about what I do
like about this book.
Otherwise, I fear that my positive comments, and even the fact that my overall response
is mixed, not negative, will be utterly forgotten in the mad rush of negativity that'll be
coming your way over the next few minutes.
Brian Patrick Mitchell is the Washington Bureau Chief of Investors Business Daily.
He writes crisply and succinctly and very readably.
More important, he devotes a substantial amount of space to us, the libertarian movement.
Two of his 11 chapters, 25 of his 142 pages, are about us.
Nearly a fifth of his total text is about us.
It has been said with much wisdom that everyone's favorite subject is himself, unless, of course,
it's herself.
Any libertarian who loves reading about the libertarian movement and where its ideas fit
into the American political spectrum will want to read this book.
The problem for me is that I can't find myself in Mitchell's pages.
And by that I don't mean that he doesn't cite me or quote me.
He doesn't.
But that's irrelevant to my point.
My point is that I'm not there in his book in spirit, and neither is any other libertarian
who thinks as I do.
By Mitchell's standards, such libertarians as we simply don't exist.
Let me explain.
According to Mitchell, there are two kinds of libertarians.
There are the individualists and there are the paleo-libertarians.
The individualists are typified by the libertarians who staff the Cato Institute and Reason magazine.
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.
Few of these individualists believe in God or the traditional moral values associated with such faith.
They are, in fact, deeply resentful of people trying to impose their morality on others.
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.
Nor are they much impressed with the role churches have historically played in bringing order to community life.
They believe that free individuals create their own order as they pursue their own interests,
and their ideal society is not a group bound together by mutual obligation or freely accepted authority,
but a free association of autonomous individuals protected by an accepted legal framework.
These individualists typically support the Libertarian Party, whose 2000 platform, Mitchell informs us, is a pedophile's dream.
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.
Also, as Mitchell notes in a tone of shocked horror, it would bar the government from restricting private adoption services,
which would effectively legalize the buying and selling of children for sexual service.
Moreover, Mitchell writes, most individualists have confined their complaints about the Iraq
and Afghanistan wars to the sacrifice of civil liberties at home and warnings about the costs
and risks of military intervention.
Many have publicly backed the use of force abroad.
The Paleo-libertarians, by contrast, have opposed the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, opposed
them forthrightly and absolutely.
Mitchell uses the late Harry Brown to typify the Paleo-libertarian view of national defense.
Brown, he writes, was all for defending the country, but thought the country would not
much need defending if it were not so imperialistic.
Brown believed, according to Mitchell, that war is just one more government program, inefficiently
run like the U.S. Postal Service.
Government doesn't work, even when fighting wars.
He quotes Brown again, if a government wins a war, it's only because it's fighting another
government.
Paleo-libertarians, according to Mitchell, are typified not only by Brown, but also by
by the people who staff the Ludwig von Mises Institute and write for lewrockwell.com.
And what that means, he has already made abundantly clear, for he has written about another of
the intellectuals he has chosen to focus on, Justin Raimondo of antiwar.com, that his organizational
attachments are to the right.
He is a contributing editor of the American Conservative and a former adjunct scholar at
the Ludwig von Mises Institute.
Not that.
If A is B and B is C, then A is C. The Ludwig von Mises Institute is on the right.
A paleo-libertarian, Mitchell maintains, is a right-leaning libertarian.
Yet he also wants us to believe that paleolibs are anarchists of a sort.
For the paleolib is confident of man's ability to live without government.
He believes that virtually everything that governments have tried to manage, from lighthouses
to law enforcement, can be better managed by private persons or groups.
For the paleolib, as Mitchell understands him, at its best, government is a necessary
evil.
At its worst, it is the greatest evil the world has ever known.
He quotes Harry Brown as saying that government is merely an agency of coercion.
Of course there are other agencies of coercion, such as the mafia, so to be more precise,
government is the agency of coercion that has flags in front of its offices.
Or to put it another way, government is society's dominant producer of coercion.
The mafia and independent bandits are merely fringe competitors, seeking to take advantage
of the niches and nooks neglected by the government.
So there you have it, the contemporary libertarian movement, individualists who support so-called
limited government and are irreligious hedonists and libertines, and paleolibs who want to
abolish the government and replace it with a vast network of churches that would try
to impose traditional Christian morality on everyone through the power of persuasion and
The use of social and cultural sanctions, like boycotts and shunning.
Is this cockeyed or what?
This is what I would expect from a clever journalist who knew nothing about the subject,
contemporary libertarianism, but was not unfriendly toward it.
It's the sort of conclusion somebody who was doing a very quick introductory study of the
subject might come up with.
But I certainly can't find myself in this mishmash.
I don't regard government, even at its best, as a necessary evil.
I regard it as an unnecessary evil.
Like Mitchell's paleolibs, I want to abolish it entirely.
But my moral views are more like those of Ayn Rand than like those of any traditionalist
Christian I've ever encountered.
I'm as secular as they come.
I care nothing about churches and tend to stay away from them.
I think individuals who want to structure their lives around traditional values and traditional ways should definitely do that.
I wish them well and hope they have happy and pleasant lives.
Myself, I've always preferred a more bohemian lifestyle.
I pick and choose among the traditions I find around me, honoring those I like, ignoring those I don't like,
and working to create new traditions of my own to replace the ones I jettison.
Like the individualists, I think one of the appealing qualities of a free society is its
openness to individual choice and experimentation in personal lifestyle.
But I'm sure as hell no advocate of the childish fantasy of limited government.
Nor am I alone in all this.
I personally know many other contemporary libertarians who would have difficulty recognizing
themselves in the distorted funhouse mirror Brian Patrick Mitchell has held up to what
Murray Rothbard always called this movement of ours.
In fairness to Mitchell, I must acknowledge that portraying and anatomizing the contemporary
libertarian movement was not his chief objective in writing this book.
He was up to something much more ambitious than that.
And back in 2007, Tom Woods seems to have thought that Mitchell did a pretty good job
of achieving his more ambitious goal.
What to my mind makes Mitchell's book valuable, Tom wrote back then, is its usefulness as
a political and philosophical primer for those who would like to understand the ideological
landscape in America.
In that sense, Mitchell's book is rather like The Nine Nations of North America, if
you remember that extremely astute 30-year-old Tom, except that, in my judgment at least,
Joel Garot makes his case in the nine nations of North America, whereas Brian Patrick Mitchell
does not make his in eight ways to run the country.
To Mitchell, you see, there are eight ideological stances at play in contemporary American politics.
There are three kinds of leftists, the communitarians, the progressives, and the radicals, who are
better known to the rest of us as anarcho-communists.
There are three kinds of conservatives, the paleocons, the theocons, that is, the religious
right and the neocons.
And there are, as we have seen, two types of libertarians.
All these permutations are necessary because each group has a different combination of
attitudes toward the issue of what Albert J. Nock called social power versus state power.
Some of them like state power and dislike social power.
Others dislike state power and like social power.
Still others dislike both social power and state power.
Yet others like both state power and social power.
In the case of the libertarians, the indies don't like social power while the paleolibs
do.
Simplistic?
Yes.
Misleading?
Yes.
A Procrustian bed into which many actual libertarians simply can't be made to fit?
Definitely.
To return to my own case, my name is publicly associated with the Ludwig von Mises Institute,
so probably I'm a paleolib in Mitchell's eyes, though he does acknowledge that all libertarians
accept the basic libertarian program of private property and individual rights, and so there
There is considerable crossover among indies and paleolibs supporting the same organizations
and writing for the same magazines.
The part of this sentence in which Mitchell asserts that all libertarians accept individual
rights is not technically correct, of course.
Ever since Max Stirner in the mid-19th century, so-called consequentialist libertarians have
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.
This is merely another indication of how little Mitchell really understands about libertarianism, how quick and superficial his study of it was.
On the other hand, when Mitchell says there's a lot of crossover institutionally among indies
and paleolibs, he's right.
Frankly, I wish he had devoted more of his discussion to the many ways in which these
supposedly different types of libertarians do in fact work together to advance common
goals.
Instead, he devotes most of his energy in his two chapters on this movement of ours
to perpetuating the supposed feud between the Mises Institute libertarians and the Beltway
libertarians of the Cato Institute and the Reason Foundation.
This kind of thing is a waste of time and energy, I think.
It seems to me every libertarian should just do his or her own thing and hope their fellow
libertarians will surprise them by actually accomplishing something by pursuing their
different strategies.
We should be critical of each other to be sure.
We should subject our fellow libertarians to the closest scrutiny, and we should bar
no holds in our criticism, particularly if we believe that what our fellow libertarian
is doing might mislead the public, selling it something that isn't libertarianism but
is being presented under that name.
But endless dwelling on our differences will get us nowhere, and portraying those differences
Those in a way that doesn't even account for the available evidence?
Ditto.
This is Jeff Rigenbach.