A Strange Liberty: Politics Drops Its Pretenses

Jeff Deist’s A Strange Liberty: Politics Drops Its Pretenses is a collection of more than forty essays that apply Austrian economics and libertarian theory, especially the writings of Murray Rothbard, Hans-Hermann Hoppe, and Ron Paul, to many of the big issues of the day: failure of democracy; the attacks on civil society; fake pandemics and the never-ending national emergency state; immigration; strategies for freedom.

“Politics without Pretense” is a perfect description of the first section of essays. Here Deist discusses the inherently conflicting nature of politics—compared to the inherently cooperative nature of economic freedom and mutually advantageous exchange in the marketplace. Following in Rothbard’s footsteps, Deist notes the prescience of the ideas from John C. Calhoun’s 1850 Disquisition on Government where Calhoun wrote of how a written constitution would never be sufficient to stop the “net tax consumers” (those who benefit more from government spending than they pay in taxes) from politically overwhelming the net taxpayers, leading to virtually unlimited government. This of course came to pass long ago.

Deist states the obvious fact that is nevertheless shocking to the typical American, who has been indoctrinated all of his or her life about the supposed necessity of a gigantic nation-state and the “god” of democracy. But democracy, Deist points out, is futile in a nation with more than 330 million people, a veritable political “tower of babble” on steroids.

The best hope, he says, is federalism—the one uniquely American contribution to political philosophy. Several of the essays explain the theory behind decentralization, or federalism, and offer practical advice on how to achieve it. Unlike “left libertarians” who are scared to death of being criticized by the far left Southern Poverty Law Center (or, God forbid, the Washington Post!), Deist doesn’t shy away from the Sword, arguing that secession is the very essence of self-determination. “[S]ecession movements represent the last best hope for reclaiming our birthright,” he writes. Thomas Jefferson would heartily agree, as did Ludwig von Mises and Murray Rothbard. And as would almost all of the American Founding Fathers, who fought a long and bloody war in order to secede from the British Empire. “Separation,” or secession, was “the” principle of the American Revolution, said Massachusetts Senator Timothy Pickering, who was George Washington’s adjutant general during the Revolution and later his secretary of war and secretary of state.

There are several wonderful essays on secession, decentralization, subsidiarity, localism, and nullification as the means by which we can regain our liberties. They all share Deist’s theme that all crises are ultimately local and that “the” question of the twenty-first century is about centralization versus decentralization of state powers. “Our task is to end the charade of one nation,” he writes. The regime is illusionary, after all—based on mountains of lies, myths, and propaganda. It is one big, phony Wizard of Oz charade that will collapse if enough Americans come to understand that they greatly outnumber the relatively small cabal of political connivers, liars, and manipulators who run it. That’s how the “mighty” Soviet Union fell apart. As the late Yuri Maltsev, who was born and raised in the Soviet Union and who once worked for Mikhail Gorbachev said, for decades no one there believed anything the Soviet government said. They only pretended to. Not even the largest totalitarian dictatorship in modern history could survive that. The Soviets were forced to allow their “satellite states” to walk away peacefully (with minimal last-ditch thuggery).

Deist describes the state as sort of a blob that eventually swallows everything in its path. It’s hard to argue with this since, as he writes, for much of the population the state has replaced family, religion, civil society, and even respect for the elderly. It has also toiled mightily to replace plain English and logic with its “state-linguistic complex,” which seeks to impose new words and new meanings for old words in pursuit of totalitarian political power.  

Languages evolved over centuries in civil societies; the current American state wants to command that we speak only in ways that enhance its powers, says Deist. It’s all part of the nefarious plan of “destructionism,” or the literal destruction of existing society—the primary goal of socialists everywhere, as Mises explained in his 1922 book, Socialism.

A particularly intriguing essay is “Secession Begins at Home.” It is based on Hoppe’s theory of “bottom-up revolution,” whereby persuasion and democratic institutions are used to effectively secede from the central state at the individual, family, community, and local levels. Ignore the central state and turn your back to it rather than attempting to reform it, in other words. Don’t lift a finger to help in the enforcement of unjust and unconstitutional federal laws at the local level, for “without local enforcement by compliant local authorities, the will of the central government is not much more than hot air,” wrote Hoppe. This would suggest that elections for local sheriffs may be far more important to freedom than presidential elections. The essay “How to Secede Right Now” contains a list of action points to be implemented now as strategy to start the bottom-up response.

There are essays on money and banking that very clearly explain why the Fed is no longer a central bank but “a lawless economic government unto itself.” The essay “MMT: Not Modern, Not Monetary, Not a Theory” eviscerates the latest hoary, mercantilist propaganda in support of a governmental monetary monopoly—“modern monetary theory,” or MMT. After reading it, you are bound to agree that it would be more accurately named “Zimbabwean Monetary Theory.”

Jeff Deist is no fan of the current Democratic Party propagandist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman. You will find that Deist has the man perfectly pegged as an “intellectual lightweight” who makes no attempt to appear nonpartisan for the sake of academic integrity; incessantly cites opinions as facts; accuses his critics of being, well, liars; and feels that he doesn’t need to win over anyone who disagrees with him. He is a museum-quality specimen of a typical New York Times/Washington Post government establishment mouthpiece.

Ludwig von Mises was the greatest economic thinker of the twentieth century (arguably of any century). Another particularly fascinating chapter in A Strange Liberty speculates on what Mises would think about the West today in terms of the health of Austrian economics, central banking, academia, immigration, and nationalism. Spoiler: Mises would be “amazed by the sheer force of central bank money creation” today.

Having been a university economics professor for forty-one years, I agree completely with Deist’s description of the academic economics profession. In fact, I have believed this characterization to be true ever since I was in graduate school in the late 1970s. As Deist writes: “Most economists don’t concern themselves much at all with finding truth or helping us better understand the world, or serving humanity by working to increase our wealth and happiness. From my perspective, economics exists mostly to provide sinecures for people whose chief concern is whether a tiny group of their peers think they’re smart.”

Paul Samuelson, whose introductory economics textbook dominated the textbook market from 1948 to the 1980s and who had a tremendous influence on the economics profession, admitted as much in a 1970s essay in the Journal of Political Economy. What motivates academic economists like himself, he said, is the prospect of procuring “the applause of our peers.” It was precisely this kind of egomania that immediately drew me away from “mainstream” economists like Samuelson and his ilk and to the Austrian school. It was blatantly obvious that the Austrians were of the exact opposite mindset. Their writings all struck me as being the products of economists who were deeply determined to better understand how the world works and to spread this knowledge for the good of society, the applause of “peers” be damned. And they did not restrict themselves to very narrow specialties within economics like the mainstream did; instead, they applied history, mathematics, statistics, philosophy, and sociology in their writings—not to acquire the applause of three or four peers but to better understand reality.

Unlike open-borders libertarians, who behave like little ayatollahs in denouncing or defaming anyone who disagrees with them, Deist presents a scholarly discussion in a roundtable format of immigration featuring pro and con ideas taken from the writings of Ludwig von Mises, Murray Rothbard, Walter Block, and Hans-Hermann Hoppe. He proves that the issue is not as simple (or simplistic) as the open-borders libertarians say it is. After all, Americans have been debating immigration policy since the Louisiana Purchase.

The section on strategy contains six essays and is worth the price of admission itself. You will learn that Deist thinks that we live in “post-persuasion America,” where most people are beyond persuasion; that libertarians are yet to really face the sober reality of what has happened to American freedom; and that they are essentially “politically vanquished.” Nevertheless, in “The Case for Optimism” he says optimistically, the state is financially unsustainable, just as the Soviet Union was. “The New Rules of Engagement” is a battle cry for how to proceed—individually and on the local level—against leviathan policies that are strangling us.

More importantly, the kind of libertarianism described in A Strange Liberty, of a world organized around civil society and markets (not crony capitalism) is bound to appeal to the traditional American penchant for pragmatism. What is truly unrealistic, Deist points out by quoting Rothbard, is that: “The man who puts all the guns and all the decision-making power into the hands of the central government and then says, ‘Limit yourself,’” is approached with adulation for guidance and wisdom. History has proven “limited constitutional government” to be one of the biggest oxymorons of all time.

A Strange Liberty can be thought of as a detailed road map for freedom.