We have seen that libertarians have as their prime responsibility the focussing on the invasions and aggressions of their own State. The libertarians of Graustark must center their attentions on attempting to limit and whittle down the Graustark State, the Walldavian libertarians must try to check the Walldavian State, and so on. In foreign affairs, the libertarians of every country must press their government to refrain from war and foreign intervention, and to withdraw from any war in which they may be engaged.

The last antiinterventionist and antiimperialist thrust of the old conservative and classical liberal isolationists came during the Korean War. [p. 275]

Left-liberal intellectuals are often a wondrous group to behold. In the last three or four decades, not a very long time in human history, they have, like whirling dervishes, let loose a series of angry complaints against free-market capitalism. The curious thing is that each of these complaints has been contradictory to one or more of their predecessors. But contradictory complaints by liberal intellectuals do not seem to faze them or serve to abate their petulance — even though it is often the very same intellectuals who are reversing themselves so rapidly.

The fashionable attack on growth and affluence is palpably an attack by comfortable, contented upper-class liberals. Enjoying a material contentment [p.

As we have mentioned, the selfsame liberals who claim that we have entered the “postscarcity” age and are in no further need of economic growth, are in the forefront of the complaint that “capitalist greed” is destroying our scarce natural resources. The gloom-and-doom soothsayers of the Club of Rome, for example, by simply extrapolating current trends of resource use, confidently predict the exhaustion of vital raw materials within forty years.

All right: Even if we concede that full private property in resources and the free market will conserve and create resources, and do it far [p. 255] better than government regulation, what of the problem of pollution? Wouldn’t we be suffering aggravated pollution from unchecked “capitalist greed”?

We have saved for the last this problem: What if police or judges and courts should be venal and biased — what if they should bias their decisions, for example, in favor of particularly wealthy clients? We have shown how a libertarian legal and judicial system could work on the purely free market, assuming honest differences of opinion — but what if one or more police or courts should become, in effect, outlaws? What then?

We come now to what is usually the final argument against the libertarian position. Every libertarian has heard a sympathetic but critical listener say: “All right, I see how this system could be applied successfully to local police and courts. But how could a libertarian society defend us against the Russians?”