Jeff Deist writes at the Mises Institute Facebook page, in response to this NR column:
“Neoconservative National Review can’t help itself when it comes to Cuba. The deeply ingrained impulse to use state power for control, punishment, and reward cannot be reconciled with a professed belief in limited government or classical liberalism.”
National Review has long fancied itself “the adult in the room” on foreign policy, and but it should surprise no one that claims of being savvy and practical usually involve demands for more government power, control, and regulation of the economy.
As with most supporters of the Cuban embargo, NR‘s position appears to basically be: “Cuba doesn’t respect property rights, so we demand the US government violate property rights to make Cuba respect property rights.”
For whatever it’s worth, though, I’d rather National Review take its current position of demanding more government control of the economy (to “protect” us from a two-bit impoverished commie) which is a grand improvement over the magazine’s traditional and long-standing position of protecting us by demanding global nuclear war.
We’re not supposed to remember, for example, that one of National Review‘s founders’s Willi Schlamm, once said that the West should be prepared to kill (or sacrifice) 700,000,000 people to liberate them from Communism. David miller provides more details:
In a column of November 10, 1962, William F. Buckley, Jr. called for a nuclear war against the Russians, arguing that “if ever a cause was just, this one is, for the enemy combined the ruthlessness and savagery of Genghis Khan with the fiendish efficiency of an IBM machine [ah yes, that efficient Soviet Union!]…Better the chance of being dead, than the certainty of being Red. And if we die? We die.”
Bill Buckley was far from the only American rightist to call for nuclear war in the early 1960s. William Schlamm, a John Birch Society member who had helped found National Review in the 1950s told a Cologne, Germany audience in 1960 that the West should be prepared to sacrifice 700,000,000 people in order to defeat Communism. At a 1961 rally in New York City, John Birch Society member Clarence Manion stated “I am tired of hearing an old man like Linus Pauling cry his fear of death in a nuclear war…If we must fall to Communism, I would rather it be over the remains of 10,000,000 charred bodies, of which I would be proud to be one.”
With the latest demands for the continuation of Cold War-inspired micromanagement of the US economy, National Review is at it again with its pragmatic, hard-headed, prudent foreign policy recommendations. But at least this time, they just want to arrest and imprison those who attempt to exercise their private property rights by trading with Cubans. As we’ve seen, it could be a whole lot worse.
