Rothbard's Last Triumph
AN AUSTRIAN PERSPECTIVE ON THE
HISTORY OF ECONOMIC THOUGHT,
VOLUME I: ECONOMIC THOUGHT
BEFORE ADAM SMITH
Murray N. Rothbard
Edward Elgar, 1995
AN AUSTRIAN PERSPECTIVE ON THE
HISTORY OF ECONOMIC THOUGHT,
VOLUME II: CLASSICAL ECONOMICS
Murray N. Rothbard
Edward Elgar, 1995
An Unfaithful Companion
THE ELGAR COMPANION TO
AUSTRIAN ECONOMICS
Edited by Peter J. Boettke
Edward Elgar, 1994
The Skeptic as Inquisitor
KINDLY INQUISITORS
Jonathan Rauch
University of Chicago Press, 1993
Come One, Come All?
ALIEN NATION: COMMON SENSE
ABOUT AMERICA'S IMMIGRATION
DISASTER
Peter Brimelow
Random House, 1995
Alvin and Heidi Toffler
Turner Publishing, 1995, 112
pp.
Newt Gingrich claims that "Alvin and Heidi Toffler have
given us the
key to viewing current disarray within the positive framwork of a
dynamic,
exciting future" (p. 14). The book, he thinks, "is an
effort to
empower citizenslike yourself to truly take the leap and begin to
invent a Third
Wave civilization" (p. 17).
Though of course reluctant to disagree with so august a
personage as the
Speaker of the House, I cannot share his high opinion of this
book. The
Tofflers, like Karl Marx, think that technology determines
history. But Marx
got the details wrong. The Tofflers claim that industrial
development does not
inevitably pave the way to socialism, as he thought; instead, the
growth of
computers and other types of "open knowledge" will
lead to a new type
of society. "Third Wave" thinking has now superseded
Second Wave
industrialism, on which both old-fashioned capitalism and
socialism are based.
(First Wave or agricultural civilization is even more
outmoded.)
In predicting the increased importance of computers, the
Tofflers occupy the
firm ground of those seers who prognosticate by projecting the
immediate past
into the future. But they nowhere show that growth in information
has the
revolutionary effects on society that they postulate. Why
must changes
in technology alter the structure of the family, make nationalism
obsolete, and
require us to abandon traditional morality?
They condemn those who "appeal to nostalgia in their
rhetoric about
culture and values, as though one could return to the values and
morality of the
1950s—a time before universal television, before the
birth-control pill,
before commercial jet aviation, satellites and home
computers—without also
returning to the mass industrial society of the Second Wave"
(p. 77). How
do satellites change morality? The all-determining influence of
technology
operates in the Tofflers' system as an unquestioned axiom.
If their predictions are banal, and their social theory
unfounded and
simplistic, their recommendations for political change are more
than a little
sinister. Although constantly calling for decentralization, they
also complain
that we are "politically primitive and undeveloped" at
the "transnational
level." Decisions must be transferred "up" from
the nation-state
(p. 100). Translating the Tofflers' Third Wave argot into
English, this is a
call for global government. Not surprisingly, those who oppose
Nafta are
prisoners of the outmoded Second Wave.
Although our authors say some commendably harsh things about
socialism, they
by no means advocate the free market. Massive job retraining and
new forms of
collective bargaining are the order of the day: to think
otherwise is of course
to be enmeshed in Second Wave Thought (p. 53).
But what exactly the anticipatory democracy that they, and
Newt Gingrich,
see in store for us consists of, they mostly leave vague. To
demand specifics is
no doubt to fall victim to the discredited analytic approach,
pioneered by
Descartes (p. 60). These Third Wave thinkers, who take a
"systemic or
integrative view," have transcended old-fashioned logic.
Creating a New Civilization contains many more gems. We
learn, e.g.,
that St. Augustine thought that those who could add or subtract
had made a
covenant with the Devil (p. 35). But enough. Readers will have no
difficulty in
gauging the quality of the Tofflers' intelligence, or the
intelligence of those
who recommend them. This is not a book, but a symptom.
M.E. Bradford
University of Georgia Press, 1993, xxiv +
165 pp.
By profession M. E. Bradford was a literary scholar, and
Original
Intentions, issued shortly after his untimely death,
manifests his sure
touch for the nuances of words. We can already see Mel Bradford
in action by the
second word of his title—not "intention" but
"intentions."
By using the plural, Bradford called attention to a
fundamental fact about
the U.S. Constitution. Diverse persons and groups, both in the
Constitutional
Convention and the state ratification conventions, had various
purposes in mind
in their advocacy of the new charter of government. One cannot
then assume that
the views of any particular Framer have been enacted into
law.
Bradford applies this precept to no less than James Madison,
the "protagonist"
of the convention (p. 1). Madison arrived at the Convention a
strong
centralizer; and his Virginia Plan, introduced through his
follower Edmund
Randolph, would have allowed the larger states to dominate a
powerful national
legislature. Although, through shrewd maneuvers and the favor of
George
Washington, Madison succeeded in having his plan placed on the
convention's
agenda, he soon discovered that he could not force his designs
upon delegates
for the most part much less centralist than he was.
Madison at first failed to grasp the extent of resistance to
his
centralizing designs, and the convention neared collapse.
"That he
[Madison] was listening to other music instead of the baleful
iteration of these
predictions of adjournment sine die can be demonstrated by
his
functional indifference to the structure of the Great Convention
itself. For he
failed to treat it as an assembly representing the people of the
states"
(p. 9). Only when Madison came to recognize that most delegates
did not want the
basic framework of their way of life to be tampered with could
the convention
proceed.
I have dealt in some detail with Bradford's initial essay as
it illustrates
the basic features of his historical method. Like the great
historian of Rome
Sir Ronald Syme, he relied heavily on collective biography. With
immense labor,
he investigated the lives of as many as possible of the
convention's delegates.
His Constitution, unlike that, say, of Harry Jaffa, was informed
not only by the
views of James Madison, but by those of Roger Sherman, Charles
Cotesworth
Pinckney, and William Samuel Johnson as well.
Bradford possessed a keen logical mind, and his method avoids
a fallacy into
which lesser writers often fall. One frequently sees arguments of
this form: (1)
someone (e.g., Jefferson, Madison) was the principal author of a
document (e.g.,
the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution); (2) the
person in question
held views of a particular character; (3) therefore, these views
can be used to
specify the fundamental intent of the document.
After Bradford's work, the fallacy in this line of thought
should be
apparent. If a document has more than one author, or is adopted
by a group, only
views shared by the group can be imputed to the document. And, as
Bradford went
on to argue, matters are yet more complicated.
Even if one knew the views of all delegates to the
Constitutional
Convention, the work of interpretation has just begun. Though the
Convention
proposed the Constitution, it did not institute the new regime.
That task
belonged to the state conventions that ratified the Constitution,
and thus the
intentions of the delegates to those conventions must be taken as
authoritative.
To construct a detailed picture of all the state conventions is a
Herculean
task, but it was not beyond Bradford's powers. In chapters on the
ratifying
conventions of Massachusetts, South Carolina, and North Carolina,
he presents
the results of his painstaking investigations.
Like King Lear, Bradford could say, "I will teach you
differences."
He stresses always the influence of the local, and the effects of
seemingly
minor events. Had the state conventions been held in a different
order, he
speculates, the Constitution might well have failed of
adoption.
Some generalizations can, however, be ventured. "That the
powers of the
new government are few and explicit is in the ratifying
conventions the central
theme of the Federalist defense of the United States Constitution
and a primary
explanation of why the sequence of ratification went as it
did" (p. 41).
The dominant desire of the Framers and ratifiers of the
Constitution was to
maintain the settled ways of the past rather than impose some new
philosophical
scheme. Not for Bradford is the Straussian view that the Framers
were
enlightenment philosophers who wished to establish a new order
based on
rationalist principles. Quite the contrary, Bradford finds the
British
Constitution of 1688 their principal model. "For early
English
constitutional history is a universe of discourse, a structure of
values
inherent in the language of its expression that is the opposite
of metaphysical
speech concerning abstract moral principles and ideal
regimes" (p. 33).
Elsewhere, Bradford applies his biographical method to other
historical
issues. In "Religion and the Framers" he argues that
the current
Supreme Court's understanding of the establishment clause of the
First Amendment
ignores the intent of the Congress that proposed it. Once again,
he works by
careful building up of biographical detail and attention to the
particularities
of debate. In "Changed Only a Little" he deploys his
method to
challenge the view that the Reconstruction Amendments
fundamentally altered the
Constitution.
Though Bradford opposed fitting history to a Procrustean bed
of philosophy,
he was himself a philosophical intelligence of considerable
stature; and his
protests against improper philosophizing have themselves a deeper
end in view.
Bradford feared the imposition of what, following Michael
Oakeshott, he terms a
teleocratic political order. This sort of regime subordinates
politics to some
overarching goal—such as, to take an example not at random,
equality. The
governing powers need observe no limits in pursuit of their end;
and the result,
inevitably, is despotism. Instead, Bradford directed the full
force of his
scholarship and personality toward the promotion of a nomocratic
order—a
system that operates by fixed rules of procedure, never to be set
aside.
M. E. Bradford was a scholar of immense gifts, devoted to the
cause of
liberty. Though he was denied in life the full recognition that
he deserved, he
could apply to himself the words of Browning's Paracelsus:
"But after, they
will know me."
Harry V. Jaffa
Regnery Gateway, 1994, xv + 408 pp.
Peter Abelard confounded the readers of Sic et Non by
placing
side-by-side opinions of the Church Fathers that seemed
contradictory, while
offering no reconciliation. Harry Jaffa has done him one better.
Much of his
Original Intent consists of contradictory opinions of his
own, without
excuse or explanation.
As Jaffa sees matters, many alleged conservatives
misunderstand original
intent. They attack liberal Supreme Court Justices such as
William Brennan for
reading into the Constitution their own value judgments. Instead,
they urge,
judges should confine themselves to the text as meant by its
Framers.
To Jaffa, this conservative approach, like the view it
ostensibly opposes,
is a variety of moral relativism. It offers no reason why the
text of the
Constitution should be taken as authoritative. Instead, a correct
method of
interpretation will read the Constitution in the light of its
fundamental
principles, as stated in the Declaration of Independence.
The "all men are created equal" clause of the
Declaration, in
particular, underlies the American system and in Jaffa's mind
should exercise
decisive force in all matters constitutional. It encapsulates the
basic
principle of natural law, and only by recourse to it can the
snares of
relativism and legal positivism be avoided. Abraham Lincoln, for
Jaffa a figure
of superhuman proportions, best understood the Constitution's
inner meaning. He
saw that, fundamentally, the Constitution takes slavery to be
immoral, its
compromises with that institution notwithstanding. Lincoln
correctly maintained
that the Constitution intends slavery to be in the "course
of ultimate
extinction."
Jaffa shows himself well aware of a crucial objection to his
reading of the
Declaration. If the equality clause mandates the abolition of
slavery, why did
many signers of the Declaration, including of course Jefferson,
hold slaves? No
problem, Jaffa responds: the signers realized that it would be
practically
impossible to abolish slavery immediately. Instead, the equality
clause states
an ideal to be approached, as prudence best dictates, in the
course of time.
In other words, the alleged basic principle of morality
commits one to no
concrete action at all. "Lincolnian morality—the
morality of the
Founding Fathers—was prudential . . . we cannot decide upon
an intelligent
policy to deal with slavery, unless we know that slavery, in
principle, is
morally wrong. But knowing that it is wrong does not, of itself,
tell us what to
do about it" (p. 29).
Thus, the signers of the Declaration could, in Jaffa's view,
consistently
join absolute rejection of slavery with slaveholding. Jaffa does
not tell us
why, if practical exigencies made the advocacy of immediate
abolition
impossible, the anti-slavery signers did not state their
commitment to a more
gradual program. Was this, too, unprudential? Why, if, as Jaffa
maintains,
belief in the immorality of slavery was widespread, even in the
South?
Jaffa, the supposed defender of morality against relativism,
in fact
supports principles that are empty of content until some wise
statesmen,
quintessentially Lincoln, deigns to fill in the blanks as he
wishes. To think
that moral principles have prescriptive force in all
circumstances makes one a
Kantian, heedless of consequences. "Prudential morality
means doing the
most good, or the least evil, in any given situation. As Lincoln
once said, `I
would consent to any great evil, to avoid a greater one'"
(p. 29). Nothing,
then, is intrinsically evil, if one credits Jaffa with meaning
what he says. You
may cheat, steal, or murder, if by so doing, you prevent a
greater evil. Why he
attributes his prudential view to Aquinas, who taught that some
acts are always
wrong, escapes me.
Jaffa will no doubt respond that I am a moral relativist, if
not a dread
Calhounite. How can anyone fail to see that there is a clear
proof, starting
from self-evident premises, that slavery violates natural law?
Unfortunately,
Jaffa never sets out this proof rigorously; at most he gestures
at an argument.
His basic point seems to be that human beings do not differ from
one another as
do men from animals, or men from God. Thus, it is wrong to treat
human beings as
if they were beasts and not persons.
Jaffa appears to believe that from the mere recognition that
human beings
and beasts differ in nature, some proposition about the
immorality of slavery
follows; he thinks that those who question this cannot
acknowledge that human
beings have a distinct essence. Why not? I wish Jaffa would state
his inference
explicitly: vague comments about the invalidity of the fact-value
distinction
will not suffice.
But suppose my criticism is mistaken: then we know, don't we,
that slavery
is wrong. Or do we? Jaffa also tells us, appealing to the
authority of his
teacher Leo Strauss, that there is an unsolvable conflict
"between
Jerusalem and Athens—between revelation and reason" (p.
351). We are
left then in skepticism: we cannot know with certainty the
ultimate truth about
the world. (Incidentally, how do Strauss and Jaffa know this?)
But, if so, how
can we claim to have "self-evident" demonstrations of
the moral truth
of equality? Certainly some have interpreted the claims of
revelation
differently. Who is Jaffa to say that they are wrong? And, by his
own statement,
he cannot demonstrate that revelation is invalid. (I pass over
his attempt to
deduce equality from the Golden Rule as unworthy of comment.)
So far, then, we have a morality that commits one to nothing
and a
self-evident demonstration founded on skepticism. But Jaffa is
not yet done. He
tells us that the equality clause is basic to the proper
interpretation of the
Constitution. And yet he readily acknowledges that several
provisions of the
Constitution appear to sanction slavery. The fugitive slave
clause is the "most
powerful evidence of slavery within the Constitution. . . . For
not only does it
give federal constitutional recognition to the law of chattel
slavery within the
slave states, but it requires the government of the United States
to assist in
the enforcement of that law" (p. 65).
Further, the clause guaranteeing to the states a republican
form of
government "implies that every state then existing was
already republican.
It implies thereby not only that there was no `intolerable'
conflict between
slavery and republicanism, but that there was no conflict at
all" (p. 66).
Faced with such facts, one might think the appropriate
response obvious.
Should not Jaffa abandon his claim that the Constitution
incorporates his
understanding of equality? But, as we have already abundantly
seen, Jaffa is no
ordinary man. He responds by drawing a distinction between
principles and
compromises. The provisions that allow slavery are mere
compromises,
inconsistent with the Constitution's principles: they may be set
aside as the
prudence of the true statesman dictates.
Jaffa gives no argument that the provisions he terms
"compromises"
were intended to have less force than anything else in the
Constitution;
nevertheless, he is certain that he has grasped the true intent
of its Framers.
The explicit provisions of the document are to be read in terms
of a principle,
equality, that never appears there. Nothing must be allowed to
interfere with
Jaffa's Transcendental Deduction of Abraham Lincoln.
Jaffa's book rests on a fundamental misconception. He acts as
if only two
alternatives exist: accept his version of natural law or embrace
moral
relativism. But why can there not be an objective morality that
arrives at
different conclusions from Jaffa? Why is he so sure that Calhoun,
e.g., did not
believe in rights apart from interests? Many Southerners (and
some Northerners)
at the time of the Civil War believed that the Bible allows
slavery. Were all of
them moral relativists? For all that Jaffa has shown, one can
even accept
natural law ethics and think slavery sometimes licit. St. Thomas
Aquinas, whose
standing to expound natural law is at least equal to Jaffa's,
held this position
(I hasten to add that I am here concerned with Jaffa's arguments,
not the
morality of slavery).
Jaffa seems incapable of proceeding for more than a few pages
without
tripping up. He claims, though in more muted form than elsewhere
, that
Alexander Stephens's "Cornerstone Speech" was
influenced by Darwin's
Origin of Species, a work that says nothing about human
races or
evolution (p. 48). He finds the three-fifths clause of the
Constitution
contradictory: "how can three-fifths of a person be counted,
when there is
no such thing in nature" (p. 64)? Perhaps Jaffa will find
faulty a recipe
that calls for a half-teaspoon of sugar, since there are no such
things in
nature as half-teaspoons.
I have every confidence that regardless of what I, or any
other critic, has
to say to Professor Jaffa, nothing will disturb his belief that
he is one of the
blessed possessors of political truth.
Murray N. Rothbard
Edward Elgar, 1995, xvi + 556 pp.
Murray Rothbard tells us that this gigantic work was first
envisioned as a "standard
Adam Smith-to-the-present moderately sized book, a sort of
contra-[Robert]
Heilbroner" (p. xv). When we see what has emerged from that
plan, a
parallel at once springs to mind. Cervantes began Don
Quixote as a short
story, according to Ramón Menéndez-Pidal; but he
gradually
expanded it into one of the great books of the world. Likewise,
the "moderately-sized
book" has become one of the great intellectual enterprises
of our age.
For Rothbard, the history of economics has an unusually broad
scope. To him
it include not only economic theory but virtually all of
intellectual history as
well. As he often did in conversation, Murray Rothbard here
advances definite
and well-thought out interpretations of major historical
controversies.
As an example, Machiavelli was in his view a "preacher of
evil"—not
for him the fashionable portrayal of the Florentine as the
founder of value-free
political science (p. 189). With characteristic acuity, Rothbard
asks: "Who
in the history of the world, after all, and outside a Dr. Fu
Manchu novel, has
actually lauded evil per se and counselled evil and vice
at every step
of life's way? Preaching evil is to counsel precisely as
Machiavelli has done:
be good so long as goodness doesn't get in the way of something
you want, in the
case of the ruler that something being the maintenance and
expansion of power"
(p. 190).
And he concludes his discussion with a stinging rebuke to
modern political
scientists, who "eschew moral principle as being
`unscientific' and
therefore outside their sphere of interest" (p. 192).
Rothbard firmly rejects the Weber thesis, according to which
the "inner-worldly
asceticism" that Calvinism encouraged played a key role in
the rise of
modern capitalism. Capitalism began long before Calvinism; and
the stress upon "God
and profit" that Weber found distinctively Protestant was
present in the
Catholic Middle Ages.
For the Weber thesis, Rothbard substitutes another contrast
between
Catholics and Protestants, here following Emil Kauder. The
Calvinist stress on
the calling led to emphasis on work and saving and distrust of
consumption:
Catholic Europe, in the Aristotelian and scholastic tradition,
found nothing
wrong with consumption. This difference led to a crucial split in
the growth of
economics, between utility and cost-of-production theories of
price.
I fear that readers will have become impatient because I have
yet to treat
economic theory. But one last topic before doing so, covered in
what to my mind
is the single most brilliant page in Rothbard's two volumes. With
a few bold
strokes, Rothbard demolishes oceans of misinterpretation about
the quarrel
between the ancients and moderns. "The pitting of
`tradition' vs.
`modernity' is largely an artificial antithesis. `Moderns' like
Locke or perhaps
even Hobbes may have been individualists and `right-thinkers,'
but they were
also steeped in scholasticism and natural law" (p. 314).
Further, on the same page our author strikes at another theory
of vast but
unmerited influence. "Neither are John Pocock and his
followers convincing
in trying to posit an artificial distinction and clash between
the libertarian
concerns of Locke or his later followers on the one hand, and
devotion to
`classical virtue' on the other . . . why can't libertarians and
opposers of
government intervention also oppose government `corruption' and
extravagance?
Indeed, the two generally go together" (p. 314). I wish that
everyone
interested in European history would study this marvelous
page.
Rothbard firmly opposes the Whig view of the history of
economics, in which "later"
is inevitably "better," thus rendering the study of the
past
unnecessary. In his view, much of economics consists of wrong
turnings; and the
present volume ends with a tale of decline that will surprise
many readers. Yet
paradoxically, Rothbard's own method is in another way Whiggish
itself. He has
his own firmly held positions on correct economic theory, based
on his
surpassing command of Austrian economics. He accordingly is
anxious to see how
various figures anticipate key Austrian themes or, on the
contrary, pursue blind
alleys.
The dominant theme in Rothbard's appraisal of economics is the
nature of
value. Economic actors, endeavoring to better their own position,
guide
themselves by their subjective appraisals of goods and services.
The pursuit of
an "objective" measure of value is futile: what
influence can such an
alleged criterion have, unless it is reflected in the minds of
economic agents?
Rothbard especially emphasizes, in this connection, the
so-called paradox of
value. How can it be that water costs little or nothing while
gold is
extraordinarily expensive? Life cannot exist without the former,
while the
latter is the merest luxury. The answer, fully developed by the
Austrian
school, depends on the fact that subjective appraisals of
particular units of a
good, not the supposed value of the whole stock of the good,
determined price.
Since water is abundant while gold is scarce, there is no anomaly
at all in the
greater price of the latter.
Our author never fails to praise those who reach or approach
this insight.
The scholastics fare especially well: Pierre de Jean Olivi, e.g.,
realized that
the "important factor in determining price is
complacibilitas, or
subjective utility, the subjective desirability of a product to
the individual
consumers. . . . utility, in the determination of price, is
relative to supply
and not absolute" (p. 61). Again, he lauds Jean Buridan for
extending the
subjective utility analysis to money (p. 74).
A key corollary of the subjectivist position is that an
exchange does not
consist of an equality: each party values more highly what he
obtains than what
he surrenders. Those who miss the point arouse our author to
protest. Even
Aristotle, whom he much admires as a philosopher, does not escape
censure: "Aristotle's
famous discussion of reciprocity in exchange in Book V of his
Nicomachean
Ethics is a prime example of descent into gibberish.
Aristotle talks of a
builder exchanging a house for the shoes produced by a shoemaker.
He then
writes: `the number of shoes exchanged for a house must therefore
correspond to
the ratio of builder to shoemaker. . . .' How eh? can there
possibly be a ratio
of `builder' to `shoemaker'?" (p. 16). Those who knew Murray
Rothbard can
almost hear him asking this.
The subjectivist insight by no means died with the close of
the Middle Ages.
On the contrary, the School of Salamanca upheld it in the
sixteenth century; and
in the eighteenth, Cantillon and Turgot considerably extended it.
But the path
of economics was not one of continued progress. Theory suffered a
major setback
through the work of one of Rothbard's main villains, Adam
Smith.
Far from being the founder of economics, Smith in the eyes of
Rothbard was
almost its gravedigger. Although Smith in his classroom lectures
solved the
paradox of value in standard subjectivist fashion, "in the
Wealth of
Nations, for some bizarre reason, all this drops out and
falls away"
(p. 449). Smith threw out subjective utility and instead sought
to explain price
through labor cost. Because of Smith's mistake, the "great
tradition [of
subjectivism] gets poured down the Orwellian memory hole"
(p. 450).
Rothbard's discussion of utility constitutes only one strand
in his
powerfully argued case that Smith derailed economics from the
analytical
achievements of the scholastics and their French and Italian
successors. And
even in the discussion of utility, I have had to omit much. (The
brilliant
dissection of Daniel Bernoulli's mathematical approach to utility
[pp. 380–81],
e.g., should not be missed). But no review can do justice to the
scores and
scores of insights and scholarly discoveries in this volume.
Murray N. Rothbard
Edward Elgar, 1995, xvi + 556 pp.
The reader of this volume will at once face a puzzle: how was
one person
able to unify so vast a mass of material into a tightly organized
narrative? I
cannot pretend to provide a full answer, but one part of the
solution lies in
the fact that Rothbard follows a few main themes with iron
consistency.
One of these central themes emerges in the book's initial
chapter: "J.B.
Say: the French Tradition in Smithian Clothing."
Jean-Baptiste Say, far
from being a mere popularizer of Adam Smith, "was the first
economist to
think deeply about the proper methodology of his discipline, and
to base his
work, as far as he could, upon that methodology" (p.
12).
And what is the procedure that Say advocated? One starts from
certain "general
facts" that are incontestably known to be true. From these,
the economist
reasons deductively. Since the beginning axioms are true,
whatever is validly
deduced from them also is true. Here, in brief compass, Say
discovered the
praxeological method that came to full fruition in the work of
Mises and
Rothbard himself.
To understand praxeology, a key point about the initial axioms
must be kept
in mind. The starting points are common sense,
"obvious" truths, e.g.,
that people engage in exchange in order to benefit themselves.
The economist
should not begin from oversimplified hypotheses about the economy
as a whole,
chosen because convenient for mathematical manipulation. To
adopt this wrong
method was the besetting vice of the economics of David Ricardo,
the main
impediment, in Rothbard's view, to the development of economic
science in the
nineteenth century.
This conflict of method had a fundamental effect on the
content of Say's and
Ricardo's economics. Say began from the individual in action, the
subject of the
common sense propositions he took to be axiomatic. Thus, Say
placed great
emphasis on the entrepreneur. One cannot assume that the economy
automatically
adjusts itself: only by the foresight of those able and willing
to take risks
can production be allocated efficiently. "It seems to us
that Say is
foursquare in the Cantillon-Turgot tradition of the entrepreneur
as forecaster
and risk-bearer" (p. 26).
Again, Say's stress on the individual underlies his analysis
of taxation,
which Rothbard rates among his greatest contributions. Some,
including
notoriously Adam Smith, consider taxes a way to benefit the
public; but Say
would have nothing of this nonsense. Taxation, in essence, is
theft: the
government forcibly seizes property from its rightful owners. If
the
powers-that-be then condescend to spend some of their ill-gotten
gains for the "public
benefit," they are in reality purchasing people's goods with
the people's
own money. Taxation, accordingly, should be as low as possible:
the search of
Smith and his followers for "canons of justice" in
taxation must be
rejected. Rothbard characteristically adds: why have any taxes at
all?
As any reader will discover after a few pages, Rothbard spurns
the
desiccated neutrality of much contemporary pseudo-science. He has
his heroes and
villains, chosen not by arbitrary preference but according to his
carefully
reasoned conception of economic principles. Yet he is no
uncritical partisan of
his heroes: he is a master of the fine discriminations that Dr.
Leavis has
taught us characterize the great critic.
When, we turn to Rothbard on Ricardo, the atmosphere is
entirely different.
Once again, our author reverses conventional opinion. Say was not
a popularizer,
but a great economist; likewise, Ricardo was not the first truly
scientific
economist. His much-praised logic is "verbal
mathematics" that
fundamentally misconceives economics. "Ricardo was stuck
with a hopeless
problem: he had four variables, but only one equation with which
to solve them:
Total output (or income) = rent + profits + wages. To solve, or
rather pretend
to solve, this equation, Ricardo had to `determine' one or more
of these
entities from outside his equation, and in such a way as to leave
others as
residu<als" (p. 82).
Rothbard explains with crystal clarity the path by which
Ricardo sought to
escape. He simply held fixed as many of his variables as he
could: by
oversimplified assumptions, he could "solve" his
equations. In
particular, he adopted a theory of rent based on differential
productivity,
which Rothbard neatly skewers; and he made price largely a
function of the
quantity of labor time embodied in a commodity's production.
Ricardo's labor theory of value had a consequence that would
no doubt have
shocked its author: it paved the way for Marxism. "Marx
found a crucial
key to this mechanism [by which the capitalist class would be
expropriated] in
Ricardo's labor theory of value, and in the Ricardian socialist
thesis that
labor is the sole determinant of value, with capital's share, or
profits, being
the `surplus value' extracted by the capitalist from labor's
created product"
(p. 409). And with his stress on the Ricardian roots of Marxism,
Rothbard begins
a devastating assault on "scientific socialism," the
like of which has
not been seen since Böhm-Bawerk.
As Rothbard notes, Marx's economics falls into error from the
start. Marx
assumed that in an exchange, the commodities traded have equal
value. Moreover,
he took this postulated equality in a very strong sense: both of
the goods must
be identical to some third thing. This, by spurious reasoning
that Rothbard
deftly exposes, he claimed could only be labor.
But the flaw in Marx's derivation does not lie in the details
of his
argument. A leitmotif of Rothbard's work is that an
exchange consists
not of an equality, but rather of a double inequality. Marx's
whole edifice thus
rests on a spurious assumption, and the three volumes of Das
Kapital
constitute an elaborate attempt to conjure a solution to a
non-existent problem.
But the difficulties of Marxist economics are not confined to
its starting
point. Rothbard points out that Marx's theory of wage
determination really
applies not to capitalism but to slavery. "Oddly, neither
Marx nor his
critics ever realized that there is one place in the economy
where the Marxist
theory of exploitation and surplus value does apply: not
to the
capitalist-worker relation in the market, but to the relation of
master and
slave under slavery. Since the masters own the slaves, they
indeed only pay them
their subsistence wage: enough to live on and reproduce, while
the masters
pocket the surplus of the slaves' marginal product over their
cost of
subsistence" (p. 393).
Rothbard does not confine his assault on Marxism to an
exposure of its
economic fallacies. Behind the economics of Marxism, he finds a
heretical
religious myth, the goal of which is "the obliteration of
the individual
through `reunion' with God, the One, and the ending of cosmic
`alienation', at
least on the level of each individual" (p. 351).
One might at first think that abstruse theosophical
speculations that date
back to Plotinus have little to do with Marxism. But Rothbard
convincingly shows
that Marx, through the intermediary of Hegel, presented a
secularized version of
this witches' brew in the guise of "scientific
socialism." In the
course of doing so, Rothbard makes Hegel's philosophy seem
amusing; his remarks
on the "cosmic blob" are worthy of Mencken (p. 349).
Rothbard's
analysis of Marx's philosophy re-enforces the pioneering
investigations of Eric
Voegelin; this parallel between the conclusions of these two
great scholars is
all the more remarkable in that Rothbard, though familiar with
Voegelin, was not
deeply influenced by him
So filled with material is the book that one could easily
write another
detailed review stressing entirely different parts of it, such as
the long and
learned account of the bullionist controversy. I shall, with
regret, confine
myself to two final items. In his discussion of utilitarianism,
Rothbard's
philosophical turn of mind is evident. He notes that according to
that system,
reason "is only a hand-maiden, a slave to the passions. . .
. But what,
then, is to be done about the fact that most people decide on
their ends by
ethical principles, which cannot be considered reducible to an
original personal
emotion" (p. 57)?
Rothbard has here rediscovered an objection to utilitarianism
raised by
Archbishop Whately: how can utilitarianism accommodate
preferences based on
competing ethical systems? John Stuart Mill, though familiar with
the objection,
never answered it in a convincing way.
I cannot resist ending with Rothbard's assessment of Mill:
"John Stuart
was the quintessence of soft rather than hardcore, a woolly
minded man of mush
in striking contrast to his steel-edged father. . . . John Stuart
Mill's
enormous popularity and stature in the British intellectual world
was partially
due to his very mush-headedness" (p. 277).
You will not elsewhere encounter an intellectual historian who
writes like
that. Murray Rothbard's two volumes are a monument of
twentieth-century
scholarship.
Edited by Peter J. Boettke
Edward Elgar, 1994, xvii + 628
pp.
This entry in Edward Elgar's Companion Series purports to be a
survey and
guide to modern Austrian economics. It contains eighty-seven
articles on a
variety of topics related to the Austrian School. When faced
with a book of
eighty-seven articles, the reader confronts a problem—where
to begin?
Articles by Professor Don Lavoie of George Mason University never
fail to
astonish, and so I at once found my way to his "The
Interpretive Turn."
I was not disappointed.
Lavoie has uncovered a crucial defect in the way many
Austrians discuss
valuation: "Subjectivism is often expressed by Austrians in
mentalistic
terms. Subjective tastes are `in the mind' of the actor;
subjective cost is the
next most valued option the actor had in mind at the moment of
choice."
This statement about subjective tastes "is mired in the
metaphysical view
that all I can be certain of is what is self-evident to my own
mind, and that,
in order to interact with others, I need to take it on faith that
other minds
are constituted like mine." On this view Lavoie believes,
"the cost of
an action would appear to involve some kind of mysterious
mind-reading process."
Instead, Austrians should move "away from the Cartesian
model of the
isolated individual mind, and towards the notion of
intersubjectivity and
language . . . meaning is not inaccessibly buried in the private
recesses of
isolated minds; <it is publicly available in all sorts of
readable texts"
(p. 57).
Few passages have in recent years puzzled me so much as this.
Does Lavoie
really think that preferences are not mental? That, for example,
when I prefer
vanilla to chocolate ice cream, nothing is going on in my mind?
Lavoie of course
is right that there are all sorts of difficult questions, raised
by Wittgenstein
and others, about how one has access to someone else's thoughts;
but surely it
is the very midsummer of madness to deny that preferences are
mental at all. Is
my preference for vanilla ice cream, if I may revert to a topic I
find far more
congenial than Lavoie's lucubrations, in a text? Who wrote
it, and where
can it be purchased?
And why does Lavoie think that to recognize that preferences
are mental
commits one to a Cartesian position? Descartes held that mind and
body are
separate but interacting substances: what does this have to do
with the simple
acknowledgement that preference is "in the mind"?
Incidentally,
Descartes did not think it rested on faith that there are other
minds; but to
pursue at length Lavoie's interpretation of Cartesian philosophy
would prove an
unprofitable enterprise.
Methodological individualism, as usually understood, fares no
better at the
hands of our philosophical revolutionary. "To be sure,
society is composed
of individuals, but just as surely individuals are composed of
society. The
claim that the action of an isolated actor is fundamentally
simpler than social
action is not convincing" (p. 58). What society I am
composed of? the
United States? Russia? Or does Lavoie mean only that individuals
are influenced
by society? But who ever denied that? Who are the dreaded
"atomists"
and "Cartesians" that so arouse Lavoie's ire?
As one might expect, Crusoe economics, like the individual
mind, must be
banished; neither can be admitted into an up-to-date Austrianism
based on "phenomenological
hermeneutics." "The Crusoe of the novel thinks in
socially constituted
categories; he is unquestionably the product of the British
culture of his day.
. . , thus Crusoe economics is either deceptive or
incoherent" (p. 58).
What nonsense! How has Lavoie managed to remain unaware that
Crusoe examples do
not take the genesis of thought as their subject?
Fortunately, the other contributors steer clear of the
Cloud-Cuckoo land
where Lavoie (one hopes temporarily) resides. But the volume
elsewhere displays,
if in a less extreme form, the dubious doctrines of the
"radical
subjectivists." David L. Prychitkto, in an entry entitled
"Praxeology,"
has no use for the distinct methodological trait of the school:
The claim that
economics may be derived deductively from the self-evident
axioms. "Austrian
praxeology has failed to answer that apparently innocent, but
troubling, [Bruce]
Caldwell question—how does one choose between rival systems
of thought that
also claim to be deduced from absolutely true axioms?" (p.
81).
The Caldwell Question troubles me much less than it does
Prychitko. I should
have thought the answer obvious: one examines the rival systems,
testing for
logical validity in standard fashion and scrutinizing the axioms'
alleged
self-evidence. If the difficulty is supposed to be that both
systems pass all
the tests and thus leave the ground for choice obscure, one can
respond only by
denying that the supposition is coherent. If reason leads
inevitably to
contradiction, we might as well all close up shop.
The objection Prychitko has raised, if in my view invalid,
nevertheless is
interesting. I cannot say the same for the following: "A
scientist that
claims he beholds timeless, absolute truth embodied by an
irrefutable system of
thought, no matter how sincere his beliefs may be, is a scientist
who
effectively closes himself off from discourse. The claim of
`apodictic
certainty' tends to break down into a kicking, stomping,
unreasonable and
apoplectic certainty in the face of criticism" (p. 81). No
doubt we have
here the explanation for the proverbial violence of
mathematicians and
philosophers. These denizens of the a priori, faced with
opposition, must at
once don their brass knuckles.
Ralph Raico, in his superb "Classical Liberalism and the
Austrian
School" has a different view: "a rather odd claim of
both T.W.
Hutchinson and Milton Friedman may be mentioned. These authors
have asserted
that the strictly a priori approach of Mises and his
followers
(praxeology) is incompatible with the values and spirit of
liberalism. Neither
Hutchinson nor Friedman, however, has provided a sufficiently
coherent argument
to warrant, or even allow, serious rebuttal" (p. 322).
After perusal of Lavoie and Prychitko, it is a relief to turn
to Barry
Smith's "Aristotelianism, Apriorism, Essentialism."
Smith maintains
that Austrian economics has been for at least a hundred years,
"the
standardbearer of the Aristotelian methodology" (p. 33).
Among the tenets
of this position he includes "The world exists,
independently of our
thinking and reasoning. . . . We can know what the world is like,
at least in
its broad outlines, both via common sense and via scientific
method" (pp.
33–34 emphasis omitted).
Methodology is but one of the volume's parts, and the work
ranges widely
over "Fields of Research," "Applied Economics and
Public Policy,"
and "History of Thought and Alternative Schools and
Approaches" as
well. Obviously, only a few articles can be singled out for
discussion. Peter
Klein's "Mergers and the Market for Corporate Control"
repays careful
study. As Klein insightfully notes, Rothbard showed that the
exigencies of
monetary calculation place "an upper bound on the size of
the firm"
(p. 397). Further, Mises anticipated the central point of an
influential article
by Henry Manne on shareholders' limitation of managerial
autonomy.
Another outstanding piece, though one I am unable entirely to
agree with, is
Leland Yeager's "Utilitarianism." Yeager spurns
act-utilitarianism;
instead, like Mises and Hazlitt before him, he makes the
promotion of social
cooperation "the indispensable means to what human beings
find good for
themselves individually and jointly" (p. 330). Yeager
clearly has
identified a central element in ethics, but I doubt that the sum
and substance
of morality can be derived from social cooperation alone. How, as
an instance,
does social cooperation bear on the rightness or wrongness of
abortion?
The essays by Robert Batemarco and Peter Lewin on capital
theory and the
business cycle respectively are competent and welcome, and the
cycle is
discussed in a few other places. But why are so few pages
allotted to discussion
of Austrian macroeconomics? Did Hayek not merit the Nobel Prize
for work on the
Misesian theory of the business cycle? Did this theory, and
related matters of
capital and interest, not propel the Austrian school into new
prominence? Is the
Austrian theory of the interest rate so insignificant as to
warrant no entry?
The work includes essays on "Causation and Genetic
Causation in
Austrian Economics," "Self-organizing Systems,"
and "The
Freiburg School of Law and Economics" but nothing on
Fetter's theory of
rent or Mises's money regression theorem and the discussions of
it by, among
others, Don Patinkin and Benjamin Anderson. Other oddities: the
section entitled
"Precursors and Alternatives" to the Austrian school
includes two
precursors and fifteen alternatives; the section on political
philosophy
contains nothing on natural rights.
In sum, the work is mistitled. It is not a Companion to
Austrian
Economics but rather a guide to an eccentric selection of
topics that match
the editor's foibles.
Jonathan Rauch
University of Chicago Press, 1993. A Cato
Institute Book,
xi + 178 pp.
According to journalist Jonathan Rauch, malign forces,
subsumed under the
categories Fundamentalists and Humanitarians, threaten freedom of
thought and
speech. Rauch hopes to thwart their nefarious plans by exploring
the
philosophical basis of freedom. Though one must applaud the
ambition of this
latter-day John Stuart Mill, he does the cause of free speech
little good with
his confused defense of skepticism.
Rauch fervently opposes what he terms the Fundamentalist
Principle. Its
adherents include, but are not confined, to religious believers.
It states that
"[t]hose who know the truth should decide who is right"
(p. 6).
Against this, Rauch counterposes the Liberal Principle:
"Checking of each
by each through public criticism is the only legitimate way to
decide who is
right." Perhaps this will convict me in Rauch's eyes of
being a "true
believer," but his Fundamentalist Principle strikes me as
obviously
correct. If someone must decide who is right, why not those who
know the truth?
Should it rather be those who don't know the truth?
But, Rauch will respond, this misses the issue. Just what he
contends is
that no one has privileged access to truth: we cannot know in
advance that a
certain person, or group of persons, is right. Here Rauch falls
into confusion.
If what he means is that one should not accept an unsupported
claim by someone
that he is the fountainhead of truth, that is one thing; but why
need a
Fundamentalist do so? Suppose, to take a case that seems
particularly to arouse
Rauch's ire, someone supports papal infallibility because he
thinks there are
good grounds to do so. Why does Rauch assume that any claim of
privileged access
to truth must be itself taken on faith?
Rauch would probably respond in this way. The empirical rule
of science
requires that "only the experience of no one in
particular" be
considered in assessing claims to knowledge. "In other
words, in checking—deciding
what is worth believing—particular persons are
interchangeable" (pp.
52–53, emphasis removed). Thus, claims that individuals have
had special
religious experiences that give them access to truth can be
dismissed, since not
everyone can have such experiences. So much for Paul on the road
to Damascus.
Rauch has accomplished something altogether remarkable with
his "empirical
rule." He has eliminated much of history. How can the
statement "George
Washington did not believe in entangling alliances," for
example, be
checked by the experiences today of interchangeable people? The
statement
appears to make inexpungable reference to the thought of one very
particular
person. Should all claims to knowledge of historical statements
that mention an
individual's thoughts be thrown out because of Rauch's
"empirical rule"?
Further, Rauch has not shown that all claims to superior
access to truth
rest on non-interchangeable experiences. What if someone is much
better at
reasoning things out than others? (Assume this has been confirmed
by following
the empirical rule). Is it all right to let him decide
what is right?
The problems with Rauch's assault on the Fundamentalist
Principle have just
begun. Why need a supporter of the principle oppose Rauch's
Liberal Principle?
That is to say, why can't someone believe both that those
who know the
truth should decide what is right and that these ideas should
stand exposed to
public criticism?
Rauch's rejoinder can easily be imagined. If someone is
guaranteed to know
the truth, why listen to criticism of him? What he says goes.
Indeed; but this
misses an elementary point. You can't both believe that what
someone says is
true and that a criticism of what he says is right. But why must
the former
belief automatically suppress the latter? Perhaps after you hear
the
counterargument you will stop believing that what the oracle says
is true.
Brian Tierney has shown in The Origins of Papal
Infallibility that
infallibility was used by dissident Spiritual Franciscans to
criticize the Pope.
Since the true Pope was infallible, but so-and-so had fallen into
manifest
error, he could not be the true Pope. Hardly what one
would expect from
Rauch's historical caricature of the Middle Ages!
Whatever one thinks of the Fundamentalist Principle, though,
Rauch has
failed to raise a point relevant to free speech. Unless his
benighted
fundamentalists in some way act against those who do not accept
the truth, why
is there a problem about free speech at all? Perhaps, if Rauch
is right,
fundamentalists too readily believe propositions for which
evidence is lacking;
but unless they interfere with others who do not share their
convictions, free
speech lies in no danger from them.
No doubt some fundamentalists do wish to block dissent; but
belief that you
have the truth is neither a sufficient nor necessary condition
for anti-free
speech measures. Not sufficient: suppose a principle one claimed
to know is that
free speech should not be violated. And not necessary: Rauch, who
disclaims
special access to the truth, seem quite willing to sweep under
the rug ideas
such as creationism which he thinks lack merit. Admittedly, he
would not impose
criminal sanctions on those who favor them: but those who profess
ideas he
dislikes can be "marginalized" and excluded from
teaching
positions.
But have we not been too severe with Rauch? Isn't criticism of
our opinions
an excellent idea? Who can reasonably object to the Liberal
Principle? Who,
indeed? As stated, the principle is vacuous. What constitutes
effective
criticism? The principle does not tell us, leaving the most
strident
authoritarian free to accept it. All he need do is specify
acceptable criticism
as he wishes: e.g., "anything that differs with what Big
Brother has said
is ipso facto false." Rauch has endeavored to plug
this loophole
with his "empirical rule," with results we have already
had occasion
to see.
And a less academic point also tells against Rauch's Liberal
Principle. What
important group has ever disallowed criticism? Medieval Islamic
theologians? The
Soviet Communist Party? Both were marked by furious debates.
These groups, and
many others, have of course crushed some kinds of dissent; but
that is a far cry
from the absence of criticism that Rauch fears. Rauch might say
that debate
among theologians, e.g., does not meet the terms of his Liberal
Principle. What
he wants is criticism open to everyone, unbound by limits fixed
in advance. But
Rauch utterly fails to show that unlimited criticism is needed to
advance truth.
Why not, for all he has shown to the contrary, just enough
criticism to prevent
stagnation? And who is to say that an elite will necessarily fall
short of this
goal?
The term "fundamentalist" usually is applied to
religious
believers, but Rauch includes considerably more in its embrace.
He has
discovered a new variety of fundamentalists, those who believe
that theoretical
arguments conclusively show the desirability of the free market.
"Another
man . . . told me [Rauch] that serious economists knew
that the minimum
wage throws poor people out of work and cuts off the bottom rung
of the ladder.
I mentioned that quite a lot of people, including a lot of
supposedly serious
economists, had concluded that the minimum wage helps people, on
balance. . . .
He replied that if a study shows that red is really black, it is
not a credible
study, or it has overlooked something" (p. 91).
I have quoted this passage at some length, as it makes clear
Rauch's own
intellectual dogmatism. As everyone but Rauch knows, there is a
simple but
strong argument that minimum wage laws cause unemployment. If you
accept the
argument, and believe it renders questionable empirical studies
that claim to
contradict it, then, in Rauch's view, you stand condemned as a
fundamentalist.
But why is one guilty of intellectual sin if one is more
reluctant than
Rauch to abandon a strong theory? Rauch himself seems quite
willing to dismiss
accounts of "paranormal" phenomena that contravene
his theory
of how the world works (pp. 54–55). Evidently, to qualify as
a believer in
liberal science, you must adopt Rauch's opinions, giving them (no
doubt within
limits he would be happy to specify) just the empirical weight
that he does.
It is not enough for Rauch to give us a philosophical
justification for
freedom. He also offers an unusual version of the history of
philosophy. He
holds, following Karl Popper, that the ideal state that Plato
depicted in the
Republic is totalitarian. (Never a hint, of course, that
this
interpretation is controversial.)
"What makes the whole massive totalitarian machine
possible is the view
of knowledge which undergirds it. Plato believed what so many of
us
instinctively believe: that the way to produce knowledge is to
sit down in a
quiet spot and think clearly. . . . Liberalism holds that
knowledge comes only
from a public process of critical exchange, in which the wise and
unwise alike
participate" (p. 33).
The unwary reader will conclude from this that Plato did not
think criticism
essential to philosophical knowledge. The very reverse is the
case: the process
of dialectical reasoning lies at the essence of Plato's
philosophy. Has Rauch
ever reflected on what Plato meant by calling knowledge
"justified true
belief?" But since he incredibly equates Plato's Forms with
the external
world, perhaps it is better that he not reflect on Plato any more
at all (p.
36).
Rauch rightly protests against university speech codes, which
proscribe
views and expressions liable to hurt the feelings of women or
assorted minority
groups. Yet even his argument against those he terms
Humanitarians lacks
cogency. He maintains that since the purpose of a university is
the advancement
of knowledge, those hurt by so-called hate speech must put up
with their injured
feelings. This is the price of intellectual advance.
Far be it from me to defend political correctness, but why
must the
advancement of knowledge be accorded unconditional primacy? (I
here grant for
the sake of argument that complete free speech does best advance
knowledge.)
What if the defender of PC willingly gives up a slight
possibility of new
knowledge in return for avoiding a great deal of hurt feelings?
What has Rauch
to say against this, other than that his "faith" in
liberal science
directs him to choose otherwise? The best contribution Rauch
could make to
freedom of thought and speech is to abandon at once further work
on the subject.
Peter Brimelow
Random House, 1995, xix + 327 pp.
The customary approach to immigration by libertarians has been
a simple one.
No restrictions on freedom of entry into a country (or exit from
it) can be
justified; as Robert Bartley's Constitutional Amendment has it,
"There
shall be no borders" (p. 140). Peter Brimelow challenges
this view in Alien
Nation and in doing so raises fundamental issues of political
theory.
Brimelow begins by building a prima facie case that
current
immigration to the United States does indeed pose a problem. The
1965
Immigration and Nationality Act Amendments, according to
supporters such as
Senator Edward Kennedy, intended to bring about no drastic change
in the
American population. Quite the contrary, the new legislation
sought to remedy
the alleged inequities of the 1920s national origins system.
Supporters of the
reform, including President Lyndon Johnson, castigated those who
predicted an
inundation from the Third World as alarmists.
The alarmists have turned out to be right."Every
one of Senator
Kennedy's assurances has proven false. Immigration levels
did surge
upward. They are now running at around a million a year,
not counting
illegals. Immigrants do come predominantly from one
area—some 85
percent of the 16.7 million legal immigrants arriving in the
United States
between 1968 and 1993 came from the Third World" (p. 77,
emphasis in orig<%0>inal).
Brimelow skillfully deflates efforts by immigration advocates
to minimize
the significance of these figures. True, as a percentage of the
U.S. population,
the Great Surge of 1900–1910 in immigration exceeded the
influx of the
1980s and 1990s. But the new groups have a higher birthrate than
that of the
white ethnic stock that predominated until 1965; and, to an
unprecedented
extent, few of the new entrants return to their native countries.
Brimelow, a
master of explaining statistics in clear fashion, uses two
charts, the Wedge and
Pincers, to show the radical impact of post-1965 immigration. By
2050, according
to Census Bureau estimates, non-Hispanic whites will cease to be
a majority of
the population, should present immigration trends continue.
Arguments that deny the present danger because American
society has
assimilated successfully vast numbers of immigrants fail to
impress our author.
In the past, waves of immigration have been followed by
"great lulls":
the period from 1920–1940, for example, saw a massive drop
in immigrants.
But, since the 1965 legislation, no period of digestion seems in
sight for the
new arrivals to be Americanized.
And do our new entrants even wish to be Americanized? In
contrast to past
eras, when immigrants spurned the label
"hyphenated-American," many
newcomers avow their contempt for the existing order.
"Groups like the
campus-based MEChA . . . are openly working for Aztlan, a
Hispanic-dominated
political unit to be carved out of the Southwest and (presumably)
reunited with
Mexico" (p. 194).
Further, and here Brimelow broaches the most controversial
point of his
provocative book, past immigrants came mainly from Europe; in
1950, the U.S.
population was about 90% white. If whites from Southern and
Eastern Europe did
manage, with substantial difficulty, to become absorbed into the
majority
culture by the 1960s, does it follow that vast numbers from Asia,
Latin America,
and Africa can do so as well? Brimelow thinks not: he fears that
the growth of
racial enclaves will polarize the United States into what an
earlier writer of
similar views termed "clashing tides of color."
Absent decisive action, the trends that Brimelow fears will
almost certainly
continue and worsen. Once residents in the country, immigrants
find it quite
easy to bring their relatives to our shores under very liberal
"family
reunification" provisions of the law. And, once granted
citizenship,
relatives may be imported with even greater facility. As if this
were not
enough, enormous number of illegal immigrants (perhaps 2-3
million temporarily
and 3-500,000 permanently per year in the early 1990s), have
arrived here. And,
by the terms of the Fourteenth Amendment, any child born in the
United States,
regardless of his or her parents' status, at once attains
citizenship. The new
citizen may now bring in, quite legally, more relatives, and so
on in an
ever-repeating cycle.
But the dire picture that Brimelow paints once more returns us
to the
question posed at the outset: Why is the situation just described
a problem?
What, if anything, is wrong with an ethnically diverse society?
Leftists,
including the libertarian variety, will dismiss Brimelow as a
racist; and are
not advocates of the free market committed to the unhampered
movement of people
across artificially drawn political divisions? Julian Simon has
argued on many
occasions that immigration promotes prosperity: those who
prophesy otherwise, he
thinks, are doomsayers along the lines of the radical
environmentalists.
Brimelow's case rests on no claims of genetic inferiority of
Third World
immigrants. "There are quite enough reasons to worry about
immigration
without using Herrnstein and Murray's work [The Bell
Curve]. Would-be
demagogues should note that I do not so use it here" (p.
56). What, then,
is his complaint?
He maintains that a nation is constituted by a common ethnic
heritage:
sufficiently diversify a country racially and you cease to have a
nation. "The
word `nation' is derived from the Latin nescare; to be
born. It
intrinsically implies a link by blood. A nation in a real sense
is an extended
family" (p. 203). By advancing this definition, Brimelow
commits himself
neither to saying that all residents of a nation must be
of the same
race nor to asserting that those of the dominant group should
have more
political rights than others. But the Universal Nation of Ben
Wattenberg and his
cohorts is a contradiction in terms: a nation of its essence
partakes of the
particular. (Incidentally, Brimelow I think errs in seeing his
own
characterization of nation as like that of Senator Moynihan.
Neither is a
sufficient or necessary condition of the other [p. 203].)
But again, our question recurs: why does this matter? If
Brimelow is right,
a society with "too much" ethnic diversity does not
constitute a
nation. So what? Why should one concern oneself about what
appears an argument
from definition? Do we not know, as libertarians, that the basis
of social order
is the rights of individuals, not the supposed conditions on
which a collective
entity rests?
Brimelow's argument will not so readily go away. If you say to
him, "I
am no nationalist: I do not care whether a nation, in your sense,
exists,"
his reply will jar your complacency. "The free market
necessarily exists
within a societal framework. And it can function only if the
institutions in
that framework are appropriate. . . . Some degree of ethnic and
cultural
coherence may be among these preconditions" (p. 175,
emphasis removed).
Brimelow calls history to witness that societies have never
successfully <%0>continued
for long with the degree of ethnic mixing that the 1965 Act has
brought about.
His case does not at all depend on acceptance of his own vigorous
brand of
nationalism.
Rather, his argument against libertarian free-immigrationists
takes this
form: should you open the borders in the way you desire, you will
destroy the
free society that you advocate. His criticism, then, is that free
immigration is
a self-defeating position, to use Derek Parfit's term in his
Reasons and
Persons.
But what of the economic advantages of immigration? Does not
free movement
across borders promote the international division of labor?
Brimelow responds by
drawing a vital distinction. The circumstances that obtain in a
complete free
market differ altogether from those of a welfare state. Those who
enter the
United States education at taxpayers' expense; further, they
often at once
count in affirmative action quotas, thus securing for themselves
preferred
employment. Hardly the free market in action!
And what of the economic benefits of an increased number of
workers?
Brimelow does not altogether deny their existence; but, following
the
calculations of George Borjas rather than those of Julian Simon,
he suggests
that they have no great importance. As Borjas sees matters, much
of the gains
that come from an increased number of workers go to the
immigrants themselves; a
good part of the remainder of the gains goes to capital by
depressing the level
of wages. I think it worth noting, though, that not only
capitalists but
consumers benefit from reduced labor costs.
Brimelow uses a philosophically interesting argument in
building his case
for immigration reform. He asks, what happens if, respectively,
his and his
critics' policies are applied but turn out badly? If he has
erred, we have
forfeited the benefits of a certain amount, probably small, of
economic growth.
If his critics are wrong, we have taken a giant step toward
national suicide. If
we are uncertain what to do, should we not avoid the action that
threatens the
most harm? Here Brimelow's work intersects with the contention of
many decision
theorists that, in a situation of uncertainty, one should
primarily act to avoid
the worst possible outcome. An argument like Brimelow's, though
deployed to very
different political ends, plays a large part in Rawls' Theory
of Justice.
(Pascal's wager is a variant of the same line of thought.)
Peter Brimelow's skill in exposition conceals the magnitude of
his
achievement. Behind the smooth and easy flow of his prose lies a
penetrating
grasp of the literature of history, economics, demography, and
political theory
relevant to his inquiry. [See endnote.] Brimelow's analysis, and
the
distinctive nationalist point of view which it expresses,
contribute in a bold
and original way to the debate on immigration. Those who wish to
argue with him
must contend with a born polemicist, who has been careful to
anticipate
counterarguments.
ENDNOTE: One minor historical slip: Edmund Burke's
Reflections on the
Revolution in France does not contain a "famous
lament for the
executed Queen Marie Antoinette" (p. 275).
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