Speaking of Liberty

2. War

WAR AND FREEDOM

[A version of this talk was delivered at the Freedom Summit in Phoenix, Arizona, on October 12, 2002.]

Concerning the Bush administration’s foreign policy, I’m not sure that most libertarians—to say nothing of most Americans—have considered the full extent of what we are dealing with here. On television, Bush promised war against Iraq and war-crimes trials for any Iraqi military leader who follows orders, if Iraq failed to meet a series of demands. One of them was as follows: Iraq “must stop all illicit trade outside the oil-for-food program.”

Consider what this meant. The US threatened total war against a country if it permits its citizens to exercise their natural right to trade and improve their lot in life. This is not just contrary to free-trade principles. It is contrary to all standards of human decency. Quite frankly, a more despotic demand is hard to imagine.

Bush says there “can be no peace if our security depends on the will and whims of a ruthless and aggressive dictator.” If others take that statement differently from the way he intended it, they may be forgiven.

Before Bush gave his speech, the Bush administration had issued a National Security Strategy for the United States—a blueprint for domestic and global conquest by the US government—of free markets and free trade. It asserts the right of the US to deliver a preemptive strike against any country anywhere that gets on Washington’s nerves, and lays out a blueprint for permanent military occupation of the entire world by the US.

In the 1990s, when the US was busy looking for war rationales and throwing itself into every conflict it was fortunate enough to discover or create, Murray N. Rothbard wrote a satirical piece called: “Invade the World.” He wrote:

We must face the fact that there is not a single country in the world that measures up to the lofty moral and social standards that are the hallmark of the USA.... There is not a single country in the world which, like the US, reeks of democracy and “human rights,” and is free of crime and murder and hate thoughts and undemocratic deeds. Very few other countries are as Politically Correct as the US, or have the wit to impose a massively statist program in the name of “freedom,” “free trade,” “multiculturalism,” and “expanding democracy.” And so, since no other countries shape up to US standards—in a world of Sole Super-power—they must be severely chastised by the US. I make a Modest Proposal for the only possible consistent and coherent foreign policy: the US must, very soon, Invade the Entire World!

It would seem that the Bush administration received a copy of this article and used it as a working model for its own foreign policy. Just as Rothbard suggested, the invade-the-world strategy is taking place in the name of freedom. It is therefore incumbent on those of us who love free markets and free trade to speak out, not only against the despotic ambitions of this document itself, but also on behalf of the real meaning of economic freedom. We must fight our way through the thicket of rhetoric, political grandstanding, and moral hypocrisy to preserve some sense of the meaning of freedom itself.

This is not usually a problem when a president of the Democratic Party is in control. Given their constituents and rhetorical apparatus, the Democrats will not usually promote global empire while singing the praises of free markets, entrepreneurship, private property, and low taxes. What we get instead, as we did under Carter and Clinton, is talk of welfare rights, the urgency of redistribution, public education, labor rights, and the like.

And there is a certain honesty to this approach, for big government abroad and big government at home are a suitable match. There is no strict line of political demarcation between a government that minds its business at home or abroad. Internationally expansionistic states are not usually humble at home, and, as a matter of history, international and national socialist states have tended to be expansionist beyond their borders insofar as they have had the resources to do so. All this stands to reason.

What is more troubling, and far more difficult to unravel, is the situation we currently face, in which a regime knows and embraces a partisan language of economic liberty while promoting the opposite. Though the Republicans have been generally derided as the Stupid Party, in fact this approach of doublespeak is far shrewder than the approach of the other party. When Republicans promote big government as liberty, it is intimidating to the opposition, which finds itself robbed of its only opposition tactic, even as it is rhetorically compelling to those generally disposed to support the ideals of freedom.

Here is one example of what I mean. The Bush document says:

The concept of “free trade” arose as a moral principle even before it became a pillar of economics. If you can make something that others value, you should be able to sell it to them. If others make something that you value, you should be able to buy it. This is real freedom, the freedom for a person—or a nation—to make a living.

Now, it is hard to disagree with that. In fact, it might be seen as a summary of the libertarian economic credo. And yet, the United States imposes trade sanctions on half the countries of the world, and the sanctions against Iraq in particular have resulted in mass human suffering. The very administration that preaches the libertarian line on trade has imposed high tariffs on steel and timber, and pushed massive agricultural subsidies that blatantly violate all international trade treaties to which the US has become party. What we have here are actions that are the very opposite of the rhetoric, and yet the rhetoric plays the role of distracting people from what is really going on.

There are many other examples. The document preaches fiscal prudence, from an administration that has expanded government spending more dramatically and on more fronts than even LBJ. It preaches free markets but endorses the internationalization of US labor and environmental controls. It rails against centralized economic planning, but embraces global efforts to cut “greenhouse gases,” even going so far as to brag of spending the largest sum ever spent to stop alleged climate change. The document calls for free enterprise, but also a 50-percent increase in foreign aid slated for development assistance. It decries World Bank subsidies of the past, but calls for the World Bank to spend more on public schools and promises a 20-percent increase in the money contributed by the US toward that end.

In sum, we have here something worse than a wolf in sheep’s clothing. We have a wolf that has also learned to b-a-a-a-h. Even aside from partisan considerations, the permanent governing regime always needs an ideological rationale for maintaining control over the population, and a continuing supply of resources to feed all the pressure groups that live off the taxpayer. Even apart from elections, which change the flavor of government control but not its underlying reality, this permanent regime, which we can call the State, always seeks to expand.

For all the partisan bickering in Washington, all groups are pleased to cooperate in the overall mission of insuring the health of the State, and the best way is what they call bipartisanship: each votes the other’s priorities in exchange for having its own met. Thus does the welfare-warfare State thrive.

It is no surprise that today the great rationale of the proposed expansion of the State is the fight against terrorism, which doesn’t only mean stopping those who seek to harm US citizens on American soil, but encompasses some sort of blueprint for complete global domination. The war on terrorism is not just about stopping real threats, if it involves that at all. It is about securing the authority of the US government against anything and everything that might threaten its interests. That threat could be swarthy teams of violent criminals hailing from far-flung parts of the world. But, from the point of view of the State, the threat also comes from any political activist or even intellectual apparatus that does not unquestioningly yield to the power of the State.

This is most clear in an offhanded comment the document has on Colombia. It reads: “In Colombia, we recognize the link between terrorist and extremist groups that challenge the security of the State and drug trafficking activities that help finance the operations of such groups.” Thus we see here that the mere production of goods that people want to buy, combined with a political stance the US opposes, can get you branded a terrorist. If this is true in Colombia, where the document promises that the US government will provide “basic security to the Colombian people,” it is far more true right here at home.

The Bush document lays out a variety of criteria for distinguishing the good states from the bad states that the US now swears it can destroy on a whim. The document decries any State that tramples on what it calls the “nonnegotiable demands of human dignity,” among which are the rule of law, limits on the absolute power of the State, free speech, freedom of worship, equal justice, respect for women, religious and ethnic tolerance, and respect for private property.

It is not an objectionable list, though only the hopelessly naïve could possibly believe that the US has any intention of sticking by this list. US allies in the Near East and North Africa stand in constant violation of these principles. For that matter, the United States itself has a less than stellar record in defense of private property—after all, this is a country that takes up to 40 percent of your income. And you may notice that while the US decries those who have no limit on the absolute power of the State, there is no call for what the American colonists favored: a strictly limited State power.

In fact, a new doctrine has developed in Washington that says, in the words of this document, “weak states ... can pose as great a danger to our national interests as strong states.” And with all the foreign aid, military assistance, multilateral lending support, and military mandates that the US is imposing around the world, you can be sure that America is doing everything possible to prevent the formation of weak states around the world. It is quite a transition from the 18th century, when we went about creating a State that was deliberately weak, while warning against foreign entanglements, to the current situation in which a strong State at home goes on an imperial rampage to create subservient copies of itself around the world.

September 11 represented a horrible loss of life and property, but it also represented what many in the United States government considered to be a new lease on life. Osama bin Laden, having long left the public eye, even though he was blamed for the attacks, remains at large. The government is using the event as an excuse to trample on rights and liberties and vastly expand itself.

In every event, even the most calamitous, there are certain people and institutions that end up benefiting, so let us think about what institution has benefited the most from the events. What institution has accumulated more power and money and public respect? The answer is obvious: it is the State itself. One might think that this would be a problem for the Bush doctrine.

After all, if some other major institution, such as a church or company, uses a disaster it is responsible for, to claim that it should be given more money and power, we suspect its motives and certainly do not grant automatic deference. Why are so many willing to do this with the State? In part it comes down to the magic plural pronoun: “we.” In page after page, the Bush administration document uses this word to imply that the interests of the State are identical to the interests of the American people. It follows that whatever the government decides to do, whatever it deems to be in the public interest, must be the right thing. If you disagree, then you are opposing the public interest and you might just be a threat to public order itself. At the very least, the burden of proof is on you to explain why you might oppose the idea of a permanent wartime economy.

There is a revealing passage about halfway through the Bush administration’s manifesto. It reads as follows: “It has taken almost a decade for us to comprehend the true nature of this new threat.” What happened 10 years ago? The Cold War had vanished because of the sudden and unexpected dissolution of the Soviet Union, and so too the main ideological rationale for the buildup of the biggest, richest, most powerful State apparatus the world had ever seen. The history of the last 10 years can be read as a struggle between citizens to regain control of their lives and property against an immense governmental structure that seemed to lack a believable reason for its existence.

Then came September 11, 2001. The Bush document describes this event as has become customary: a hinge of history that forced the United States to rethink its place in the world and the meaning of freedom itself. It is not described as what it was: a wholly preventable hijacking by Saudi nationals trained in the US and motivated by revenge at US foreign policy. Had the pilots of the planes been armed, as they would have been, had federal regulations not prevented it, the hijackers would have been dealt with long before they could have wrecked the buildings.

Before this happened, the post-Cold War welfare-warfare State had many rationales to justify its continuation. Clinton attempted to merge a British-style paternalism with a US-style focus on international human rights. The great threat at home and abroad that had to be defeated was abstract and ideological: concerns like unfairness and injustice. This did not gain many converts, especially since it meant converting the US armed forces into a glorified corps of international social workers. There were a series of invasions and operations to stop alleged ethnic cleansing, to impose democracy, to end warlordism, and the like. There were the inevitable worries about China becoming too big for its britches.

None of these served as a replacement for the communist menace as a viable excuse for the permanent war economy. The military-industrial elites that live off the war threat were very worried about their long-term status, especially because internal polling continued to reveal a systematic and growing loss in confidence in government as an institution. Panic over the pace of private-sector technological development further worked to alarm the government, which still populated its offices with IBM Selectrics as Windows 98 was being shipped to customers. As Social Security became a laughingstock, and Clinton’s Monica problem did the same for the chief executive, US foreign policy came to be subject to withering critiques by a diverse group of intellectuals from the left and right.

To the government, September 11 meant an end to all of this. It held out the hope that something could be seen as a scarier threat to the public than government itself. It worked to transform public opinion about the government itself, from a menace to a savior. To be sure, this step was wholly unwarranted. It was the government that banned guns on planes, the government that ran airport security, the government that antagonized the hijackers, the government that created and sustained what became al-Qaeda, the government that received the advance warnings and did nothing, and the government that had promised and failed in every way to deliver security. September 11 was a spectacular government failure.

In order to distract us from this conclusion, the government has created the illusion that the greatest threat we face is somewhere out there, and we must trust the government to tell us from day to day what that threat is. Among them is what has come to be known as the rogue state.

The Bush document includes a fascinating definition of what constitutes a rogue state.

• A rogue state, it says, brutalizes its own people and squanders its national resources for the personal gain of its rulers. Check.
• It displays no regard for international law, threatens its neighbors, and callously violates international treaties to which it is party. Check.
• It is determined to acquire weapons of mass destruction, along with other advanced military technology. Check.
• It sponsors terrorism around the globe. Given that Osama and his men were once on the CIA payroll, and given what most of the Arab world believes about the US role in the Middle East, we have to say, check.
• Finally, the document says, almost in anticipation of this manner of critique, a rogue state hates the United States and everything for which it stands.

And in this last sentence we find the real definition: a rogue state is a state that our State hates and visa versa. We are back to the age-old problem of which true libertarians are all too aware: the State itself is the greatest source of conflict ever known to man.

The right response to September 11 would have been for government’s entire security apparatus to be dismantled, and to allow the airlines and other firms to provide their own security. But, of course, it had all the earmarks of a crisis, and history shows that crises are great opportunities for the State. The voices of clarity on this issue have been overwhelmed by those who have belligerently asserted that the government must do something, anything, in retaliation for 9-11.

Most tragically, the need for war was asserted by people who called themselves libertarians, people who otherwise claimed to understand the nature of government.

Without naming the guilty here, let me just say that only four institutions—to my knowledge—were willing to take a principled stand after 9-11: the Independent Institute, the Foundation for the Future of Freedom, the Center for Libertarian Studies, and the Mises Institute—four of the least well-connected among the hundreds of free-market organizations in this country. Once having signed up for the war on terrorism, mainstream libertarian organizations find themselves in an intellectual bind, fearing to criticize the foundations of the policy and enjoying the newfound access to power that the initial endorsement of the war gave them.

And yet, we should not be surprised at the failure of the mainstream libertarian movement to provide a voice of sanity in these times. For too long, they have seen the problem of government power not as a moral or principled concern but as something to be worked out among policy elites, among which they have wanted to include themselves. They have promoted the view that the means of achieving our ends is through joining the governing elites in their salons of DC, and impressing power holders with your intellectual agility. What could possibly beat cocktails with DeLay, Greenspan, and von Rumsfeld?

The moral courage that motivated the American colonists, Cobden and Bright, the war resisters, the tax protesters, the anti-New Deal writers, the anticommunist and anti-Nazi intellectuals—none of this experience has informed the dominant libertarian strategy of our age, so, of course, the libertarians have been largely and tragically co-opted.

There is a further intellectual problem at work among the mainstream of libertarians, and it is captured in the chart that purports to summarize all political ideology according to one’s opinion concerning the balance of civil and economic liberty. Nowhere on the chart is there anything about foreign policy or war—the murder end of the State. Quite frankly, libertarians just haven’t cared that much about the issue, even though war is the health of the State.

After a lifetime of activism in libertarian circles, Murray Rothbard came to observe that most people in the libertarian movement have no real interest in the issue, even though it can be said that war is by far the gravest threat to liberty mankind has ever known. There are many reasons for this oversight, among which is that we all tend to take the path of least resistance, and it is far easier to analyze a telecommunications bill than to denounce the CIA and the war power.

But, as Mises argued, if we hate socialism, we must also hate war. “Military Socialism is the Socialism of a state in which all institutions are designed for the prosecution of war,” he wrote.

The military state, that is the state of the fighting man in which everything is subordinated to war purposes, cannot admit private ownership in the means of production. Standing preparedness for war is impossible if aims other than war influence the life of individuals.... The military state is a state of bandits. It prefers to live on booty and tribute.

Mises is right: if we libertarians tolerate war, we tolerate tyranny.

But if the libertarians have shown a lack of courage stemming from intellectual failure, the American conservatives have been far worse. From the pages of the Wall Street Journal to National Review, there is one thing we can count on: bone-chilling calls for international bloodshed at the hands of the US State. It was bad enough during the Cold War, when American conservatives cheered on the warfare state—the emergence of a totalitarian bureaucracy within our shores—as a supposedly temporary measure to fight a particular enemy.

But nowadays, American conservatives have come to define themselves as the people least wary of using nuclear weapons and the most ready to cheer the death of innocents. The moral hypocrisy of these people—who think nothing of running an article calling for an end to abortion next to a piece defending the deaths of hundreds of thousands of foreigners, unborn and born—takes one’s breath away.

We have dealt here with three groups—the Bush administration, the libertarian mainstream, and American conservatives—that use the language of liberty to promote or defend its opposite. What about those of us who remain, those whose commitment to the free society is implacable, even in these times? I know this. There are more of us than the media take account of. The Bush document includes a passage that strikes me as true: “no people on earth yearn to be oppressed, aspire to servitude, or eagerly await the midnight knock of the secret police.” I would only add that this includes the American people.

Beneath all the hoopla of this past September 11, beneath the sickening displays of celebration for the government and the complete absence of commentary on most victims of 9-11, who, after all, were engaged in the peaceful, civilizing business of commerce, I did detect growing public frustration with the direction the warfare state is going. Apart from all the bombs, billions, and baloney, the only thing the federal government seems to have done to protect us from terrorism is make our airports even more inconvenient, and institute a perfectly ridiculous color-coded chart to tell us just how close the next terrorist threat allegedly is.

We are far from the time when a majority of public opinion will come to understand the real nature of the threat we face, and the real ideological foundations of the struggle in which our epoch has plunged us. But just as the partisans of the welfare-warfare State say that their reign must last the duration of our lifetimes, let us all commit to making sure that the resistance lasts just as long. Even if we do not achieve victory in our lifetimes, we might slow down the advance of tyranny and therefore have done good. If we do not even manage that, we can know that we have done the right thing, the moral thing, the courageous thing.

But is final victory really so unthinkable? In the 18th century, had the opponents of British imperial rule given up in 1750, there would have been no 1776. Had the anticommunists in Russia thrown in the towel in 1950, when Soviet rule seemed implacably secure, there would have been no 1989. Neither will we be intimidated and neither will we despair, because we are fighting the biggest of all big lies, the idea that the State is a means of security and salvation. In addition, we have on our side the greatest forces for good in human history: the ideas of liberty and the demand for freedom. From these principles, we will not be moved.

In the meantime, Bush threatens war. For my part, I favor the proposal of the Iraqi vice president that Bush and Saddam have a private duel. Choose your weapons, fellas, and leave the rest of us out of it.

FREE TRADE VERSUS WAR

[This speech was presented at the Mises Institute’s “Costs of War” Conference in Atlanta, Georgia, on May 22, 1994.]

Politics, like war, robs words of their meaning. This is especially true of the language of economics. For example, economists know what investment means and that it’s good for the economy; but the government uses investment to mean its profligate spending projects which are, of course, harmful to the economy. In 18th-century America, our forefathers knew what was meant by the word rights. When Thomas Jefferson and others used it, it meant limitations on government power. In today’s America, however, the word rights has become synonymous with government power. A violation of rights has come to mean the exercise of liberty.

So it is with the phrase free trade. Politics, and in particular that most concentrated form of politics—war, have ruined its meaning. In the 18th and 19th centuries, the term described the economic regime under which people could buy and sell across the borders without penalty from the government. The case for free trade was the case for free markets. When the government interferes in the freedom to contract, it benefits some—that is, powerful special interests, at the expense of others—that is, the people. Under free trade, on the other hand, the general good is served.

Originally, free trade was not like mercantilism, where the government monopolizes and otherwise hinders the right to trade across borders. Free trade was not like an export policy where domestic producers are subsidized so they can push their goods on consumers abroad at the expense of taxpayers at home. Free trade was not like a producer policy where large producers conspire with the government to decide what goods will be allowed to cross borders. Free trade was not like an industrial policy where large corporations are given investment guarantees in the disguised form of aid to foreign regimes. Free trade was not like imperialism, where a more powerful government imposes its will on a less powerful one through intimidation and force. Free trade was an ideal that grew out of the vision of liberty.

The same freedom that governs the market at home, its proponents believed, ought to govern trade across borders. Just as private parties negotiate their contracts for their goods and services at home, they would do so abroad. In the 18th and 19th centuries, to be a free trader meant to apply pressure to try to bring about this ideal through intellectual persuasion and political lobbying. Free traders brought that pressure to bear against their own government. That was where their moral obligation began and ended.

What about the term protectionism? It meant government manipulation of trade on behalf of particular interest groups. Governments can do this alone by erecting tariffs, quotas, and sanctions. Governments can engage in protectionism in cahoots with other governments as in Nafta or Gatt; but, however it is achieved, protectionism constitutes intervention in the natural order of liberty. To be consistent with history and theory, people who claim to favor free trade should be agitating against the US’s protectionist policies and US support of the protectionist policies of others.

Instead, many of the free traders commit much of their energies to lobbying for Nafta and Gatt, which represent the opposite of free trade. These agreements are mercantilist because they exalt the right of government to hinder trade. They support an export-driven policy under which producers are subsidized. They embody industrial policy where large corporations are paid off. They are imperialistic with regulations on labor and the environment to be harmonized across borders.

How did this all begin? When did free trade come to mean its opposite? As with so much else, it was World War II that changed everything. The trust and deference that the American people gave the government during the war spilled over to the postwar plans for carving up the spoils. At the Bretton Woods conference in 1944, trade came to mean investment guarantees and global bureaucracies in statist treaties between governments. This was central planning exalted to new heights.

As F.A. Hayek wrote in the neglected conclusion to his 1944 book, the Road to Serfdom, “If international economic relations, instead of being between individuals, become relations between whole nations organized as trading bodies, they will inevitably become the source of friction and envy.” Ludwig von Mises concluded in his 1944 book Omnipotent Government: The Rise of the Total State of Total War with a similar warning. “The establishment,” he said, “of an international body for foreign trade planning will end in hyperprotectionism.” These two great free marketeers understood how government uses the period immediately following a war as it does the war itself for State power and special-interest rewards.

The Wilson administration attempted this after World War I. An early draft of the League of Nations treaty included a world trade tribunal. After World War II, Mises and Hayek did not want such a thing to be imposed on us. Instead they wanted to recreate the 19th-century ideal. And thanks to the work of Mises and other partisans of the free market, when the Truman administration emerged from negotiations in Havana with something called the International Trade Organization, free-market advocates were ready. We had had the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund foisted on us, but free traders did stop the ITO.

The lobbying efforts of Philip Cortney, under the influence of Henry Hazlitt, proved definitive. In his book, the Economic Munich: The I.T.O. Charter, Inflation or Liberty, the 1929 Lesson, Cortney explained the dangers of turning over trade policy to an international body. “In the long run,” he said, “a centralized trade authority will globalize protectionism.” Cortney cited the charter of the International Trade Organization to make his point. It endorsed demand-side management and full-employment policies, which Cortney rightly regarded as code words for government planning. Thanks to such intellectual leaders and the Old Right in Congress, the ITO went down to defeat.

Of course, during the debates, the elites never missed a chance to smear the ITO opponents, and the language of trade was permanently subverted. Advocates of global bureaucracies began calling themselves free traders. The ITO, they said, would save free trade from itself just as the New Deal had saved capitalism from itself. The opponents of world bureaucracies, no matter how much they favored free trade, were called isolationists and protectionists—words drawn from recent war propaganda. As true believers in trade, the Old Right would not accept the term isolationist. And as opponents of mercantilism, of course, they rejected the word protectionist.

Centralizing bodies managing trade are, of course, not compatible with self-determination, even if erected in the name of free trade. In holding this view, the Old Right was in a great American tradition: Southern free traders from Jefferson to Calhoun. This tradition was not rooted in an internationalist ideology, obviously; neither did its proponents push for global treaties that violate sovereignty. The tradition was based on a hard-nosed understanding of the nature of power and a devotion to federalism and local control. When power is centralized, they argued, it expands and will be used against the people.

The best way to limit power is to limit centralization. For example, it is in the economic interest of smaller political units to maintain open trading relationships. The larger the political unit, as Hans-Hermann Hoppe has shown, the more enlightening a policy of autarchy can appear. The Southern free traders linked their economic doctrine with states’ rights as embodied in the Constitution, and with a noninterventionist foreign policy and severe limitations on what they call consolidation, that is centralization.

These ideas melded on a theoretical level because they speak to the right of individuals and communities to be free of arbitrary powers of distant rulers. Among the reasons the Declaration of Independence gave for overthrowing King George III was that he was “cutting off our trade with all parts of the world.” Jefferson presents a more elaborate argument in his 1774 essay Summary View of the Rights of British America. The outrages of the Sugar Act and the Townsend Duties demonstrated that Britain was willing to use coercion to deny Americans the liberty to trade—meaning to buy, to sell to anyone that they pleased. Jefferson regarded this as the essence of tyranny intolerable enough to warrant a violent overthrow of the government. “Single acts of tyranny may be ascribed to the accidental opinion of the day,” he wrote in 1774, “but a series of repressions begun in a distinguished period and pursued unalterably through every change of ministers plainly prove the deliberate systematical plan of reducing us to slavery.” To ensure the right of trade among other rights, the founders established, not a central government, but a federal one. It was a union among states, and these individual states would protect the people against the centralization of power by jealously guarding states’ rights and privileges.

Trade became an issue again in the debates of the Constitution, however. The so-called Federalists, actually the centralizers, accused the states of erecting barriers to trade under the Articles of Confederation. This was among the most serious accusations that could be made. It implied that the states were doing to each other what King George had done to America. The Federalists argued that the Constitution was necessary to bring about free trade among the states. In particular, they argued, the commerce clause would be the essential guarantee of a free flow of goods. The anti-federalists, really the anticentralists—official monikers being a prime example of the misuse of language—countered that the commerce clause conflicted with another valued precept of American liberty, that is, states’ rights.

The anti-federalists warned that the freedom of trade, like all freedoms, was best protected by the decentralized Articles of Confederation, or something similar, rather than by a new central government with central powers, especially the power to conduct trade policy. The anti-federalists argued that this clause could, and therefore, would be abused to the advantage of one sector as opposed to another. But the Constitution passed upon James Madison’s promise that this would never be so. “The commerce clause,” he said, “would forever be used to protect the liberty of every American to trade in an unhindered way just as every other American.”

Of course, history did not turn out that way. After the overthrow of the king, the partisans of Northern industrial and banking interests began agitating to abandon the principles of the Declaration. The Hamiltonians wanted the powers of King George to be exercised by the president in violation of the principles agreed upon in the Constitution. Their goal was the enrichment of special interests—manufacturing and banking—at the expense of the Southern states. The great statesmen of the first half of the 19th century, free traders to a man, were devoted to stopping the Hamiltonian power policy of executive power, entangling alliances and war, taxes, and protectionism to benefit northern elites.

The old Republicans wanted the political victory of 1800 used to roll back the centralizing that had taken place since 1787. Their goal was to secure a permanent victory over the Hamiltonians, who were both pro-State and pro-war, as well as pro-tariff.

Among the greatest of the Southern republicans was John Randolph of Roanoke— the aristocratic libertarian. He said,

Let us adhere to the policy laid down by the second, as well as by the first, founder of our republic. By the Camillus as well as the Romulus of the infant state to the policy of peace, commerce, and on friendship of all nations entangling alliances with none.

He was among the earliest and most hard core of the antiprotectionists of the Old South. His reasons were part philosophical, part economic, and part political. As a partisan of states’ rights, he saw no justification for granting an external power the right to interfere with commerce and the use of private property; yet Randolph was also a centralist of a particularly American sort. “When I speak of my country,” he wrote John Brockenborough, “I mean the commonwealth of Virginia. I was born in an allegiance to George III. My ancestors threw off the oppressive yoke of the mother country, but they never made me subject to New England in the matters spiritual or temporal, neither do I mean to become so voluntarily.”

Another great old Republican was John Taylor of Caroline. He was not only a brilliant political philosopher; he led the opposition to the Northern protective tariff. “Give us a free and open competition in our own market,” he said, “and we fear not to encounter like competition in the general market of the world.” Taylor saw the tariff as part of the apparatus of statist domination. The interest groups behind it were northern industrialists who wanted to feed their private greed at public expense. Rather than selling their wares on a level playing field of free competition, they sought government privilege. In 1821 the Congressional Committee of Manufacturers issued a report calling for protective tariffs to expand industry. In today’s language, men call this growing the economy, expanding trade, enacting fair trade, or any of another number of other chivalrous methods used to centralize trade authority. But Taylor saw the real motive of tariffs. They were a power grab.

But the manufacturers sought to gain from what came at the South’s expense in two respects. First, economically, the tariff harmed agriculture and transferred wealth. Second, politically it was contrary to the free-trade sentiments of the Old South, and it subverted Southern rights of political self-determination and was, therefore, a violation of the original federal compact.

Taylor was a lover of peace, so the industrialists were his natural enemies. As is so often the case, the pro-tariff party was also the pro-war party. The industrialists favored Hamilton’s attempt to foment a war with France to enhance the Executive. Taylor noted that the industrialists’ 1821 report complained that, “We flourished in war and are depressed in peace because manufacturers then flourished and now are depressed.” They hoped that the tariffs would similarly enhance their profits. If only today’s war and tariff party were half that honest! Taylor responded as follows: “They say,” he said, “we flourished in war. Who are we? Not the people of the states generally. They were loaded with taxes, deprived of commerce, and involved in debt. The families, which flourished in war, were the contracting and [industrialist] families, the latter by loans and premiums and the selling the wares of their factories at the profit of fifty or an hundred per centum. Had the great family of the people flourished,” said Taylor, “they would not have hailed peace” and trade.

The industrialists wanted to revive what Taylor had called the “property transferring policy which operated so delightfully in war.” Taylor said, “It is a consequence of war to transfer property. And this has hitherto been considered one of its evils.” But the Northern industrialists wanted to redefine redistribution as a virtue of war—with themselves on the receiving end of the loot, of course.

A third great Old South free-trade theorist was John C. Calhoun. He, too, denounced the tariff imposed by the Northern usurpers. “By a perversion of the powers of the Constitution, which was intended to protect the states of the Union in enjoyment of their natural advantages, they have stripped us of the blessings bestowed by nature and converted them to their own advantage. Restore our advantages by giving us free trade with the world, and we would become what they are now by our own means—the most flourishing people on the globe.”

In contrasting himself with his opponents, Calhoun said, “We want free trade, they restrictions. We want moderate taxes, frugality in the government, economic accountability, and a rigid application of the public money to the payment of debt.” Calhoun granted that the Constitution allowed the central government to impose a duty on imports for revenue purposes, but his analysis of power politics led him to believe that more was involved. Neither the tax imposed nor the revenue collected were being used for the general interest. They were being used by one group to destroy another. The tariff, therefore, violated the Constitution by benefiting one group at the expense of another without the exploited group’s consent.

Calhoun was, in addition to all of his other achievements, an impressive economist theorist. He defended free trade as necessary to the division of labor. As he explained, the South has

from soil and climate, a facility in rearing certain great agricultural staples. While other and older countries with dense population and capital greatly accumulated have equal facility in manufacturing various articles suited to our use. And thus a foundation is laid for an exchange of the products of labor mutually advantageous.

The tariff, he argued, acted as a tax on his trade. And a tax hurts the producer, he said, whether it is laid on the vender or the purchaser. It doesn’t matter whether the tax is a consumption tax or a production tax. In the end it hurts production because, he said, the tax must always eat into profits and therefore future capital. “The effect on us,” he wrote, “is to compel us to purchase at a higher price both what we obtain from them and from others without receiving a corresponding increase in the price of what we sell.”

Calhoun developed a unique way of thinking about the tariff that turned it into a populist issue. If the tariff is one-third, it is the same as the government taking one-third of what the producers raise in cotton, rice, and tobacco. Whether the goods are coming into the country or leaving it, a tariff of one-third is the theft of one-third. To Calhoun this meant that one-third of the toil and labor of the people of the South was being transferred to the North to build Northern industry and to feed a hostile government. “We are the serfs of the system,” he announced, “out of whose labor is raised, not only the money paid into the Treasury, but the funds out of which are drawn the rich rewards of the manufacturer associates and interests. Their encouragement is our discouragement.”

The survival of the South is at stake in this issue, he said. “The last remains of our great and once flourishing agriculture must be annihilated in the conflict. In the first instance, we will be thrown on the home market which can not consume a fourth of our products; and instead of supplying the world as we would with free trade, we would be compelled to abandon the cultivation of three fourths of what we now raise and receive for the residue whatever the manufacturers, who would then have their policy consummated by the entire possession of our market, might choose to give.”

Free trade, Calhoun believed, represented the ultimate safeguard of political rights. Without such trade, the South would become a captive nation, enserfed for a cabal of Northern industrialists tied to and dependent upon government power. His solution, of course, was to insert the right of interposition whereby South Carolina would stand as a buffer between the individual and the central government. To protect the Constitution, that is, Calhoun advocated disobedience to central government. That’s a sound principle.

Let’s compare Calhoun’s arguments against the tariff of abominations with Jefferson’s summary view. Both argued against violations of free trade. Both argued against a centralized government. Both argued that tariffs were taxation without representation. Both argued that this is tyranny, and both argued that radical means were justified in overthrowing the oppressor. This is one of the reasons that the founding fathers of the Confederacy felt themselves to be the heirs of the original founders. Tariff taxes precipitated both independence movements, and both were based on the view that liberty and free trade were of a piece. If Randolph, Taylor, Calhoun, and all their followers had been able to repeal the tariffs and prevent their reimposition, the war between the states might never have occurred. So many young men might never have died, and our nation might still be free.

Instead, after a reprieve in 1833, the central government engaged in more and more trade protectionism and centralized tyranny, which helped lead to war. In his seldom quoted first inaugural address, Abraham Lincoln pledged, “no bloodshed or violence,” but he also promised to “collect the duties in the impost no matter what.” He effectively announced that he planned to tax the South to death, and as soon as he was able to do so, Lincoln imposed the highest tariff in US history, doubling the rates to 48 percent. It’s no wonder that when Edmund Ruffin fired the first shot in the beginning of the war between the states, he aimed at a customs house—Fort Sumter.

The war is also appropriately called the War of Federal Aggression. And one aggression occurred in 1861 with the passage of the Morrill Tariff. The South made the choice for liberty through secession, and the Confederate Constitution specifically forbade high tariffs. At the beginning of the war, a revealing Boston newspaper editorial accused the South of the gravest crime of all, which the editorialist called the cause of the war. The South, said the editorial, wanted a system “verging on free trade. If the Southern Confederation is allowed to carry out a policy by which only a nominal duty is laid upon import, no doubt, the business of the chief Northern cities will be seriously injured.” Alas, the South was not allowed to carry out its policy of free trade, and the nation paid a terrible price.

It is a price that we are still paying, and we are repeating the same errors with regard to current trade policy. Despite the rhetoric we hear from Washington, there is no threat that free trade is going to break out anytime soon. A true regime of free trade, as Murray Rothbard has pointed out, would be greeted by Washington, DC, with about the same enthusiasm as the repeal of the income tax.

Let’s consider the linguistic categories that govern the great trade debates of our time— Nafta and Gatt. The media and the government have successfully created a political split of Manichean proportions. On one side we have the representatives of pure light—multinational corporations, every executive branch agency, the leaders of both parties of both houses of Congress, the media, all the ex-presidents, respected public intellectuals, Beltway think tanks, professors at every top university. They are called the free traders. On the other side, we have almost everyone else. Public opinion has been solidly against both Nafta and Gatt at least before it has been shaped by those on the other side. We can add to the public a handful of columnists and academics who have actually bothered to look at the documents in question. The people of light say that this latter group represents the forces of darkness—isolationists and reactionary opponents of free trade and progress.

Let’s look at how reality changes this conventional grouping. Nafta established a trade block primarily to benefit government-connected corporations and banking interests. It invested new powers in the Executive to interfere with trade from non-North American nations. It’s a natural consequence of Nafta that the US government would threaten trade war with Japan. It’s a natural consequence of Nafta that the US would set up a multibillion dollar fund to support the Mexican peso. It’s a natural consequence of Nafta that unprecedented levels of foreign aid would flow to Mexico City.

Like Hamilton’s domestic policy, Nafta is statist to the core. The Congressional Research Service tells us that under Nafta we cannot reduce regulation on labor or the environment even to retain investment. The labor side tells us that we are to have equal wages between men and women, which not even Hamilton would have favored imposing by Executive fiat. The Nafta-ites tell us that we retain our sovereignty under Nafta. It is partially true. We retain our sovereignty to increase our restrictions on business, to increase labor and environmental regulations, but we do not retain our rights to reduce them without monetary and trade penalties from trinational secretariats.

Nafta is imperialist. It preaches to other countries about what kinds of laws and regulations they should have—the social democratic mixed economy that is impoverishing us. Nafta is, of course, not the free trade of Jefferson, Randolph, Taylor, and Calhoun. It is trade for the few and not the many, for the particular interests and not the general interests.

What about Gatt and the World Trade Organization it proposes to establish? Same is true. It is sold as free trade, yet it represents something else entirely. It enshrines the principle of manipulating economies by demand-side management. It embraces so-called sustainable development, which is a code word for the entire environmentalist agenda. The World Trade Organization comes complete with a new ministerial conference, a director general, a secretariat plethora of committees, councils, and review bodies, and a bunch of new, fancy office buildings in Geneva. WTO’s mission will not be the lowering of trade barriers, but rather its stated goal of “achieving greater coherence in global economic policy making.” As US trade representative Mickey Kantor was toasting the end of the Gatt negotiations in December, the New York Times hailed the WTO as the trade equivalent of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund.

Jefferson, Taylor, Randolph, and Calhoun were right. Centralized government is the tyrant. These free-trade revolutionaries found the remedy in a love of liberty and a willingness to fight for independence. Like Mises writing in his 1919 work Nation, State, and Economy, they believed that “no people or part of a people should be held against its will in a political association that it does not want.”

For Jefferson, Randolph, Taylor, and Calhoun, the cause of independence was the force powerful enough to rally the public against distant rulers. But their desire for independence was not, of course, directed against any other country, and free trade was a key to this. As Calhoun said when he wrote to the Manchester Anti-Corn Law League in 1845, “I regard free trade as involving considerations far higher than mere commercial advantages as great as they are. It is, in my opinion, emphatically the cause of civilization and peace.”

But, civilization and peace are threatened. In Jefferson’s day the tyranny was centered in the British Crown. In our day the tyranny is centered in Washington, DC, and in New York, and in Geneva. We are surrounded by DC bureaucrats, Nafta bureaucrats, UN bureaucrats, bureaucrats with the World Bank and the IMF, and assorted scalawags on the pay of the governing elites. If we are to restore liberty, limited and local government, free enterprise, and, yes, free trade, we must begin by understanding the power that a legitimate regionalism and an old-fashioned devotion to independence will have in uniting us against the forces of central control. In doing so, we will stand with the author of the Declaration of Independence, with the republicans of the Old South, and with the signers of the Confederate Constitution.

TIME TO END PERPETUAL WAR

[This speech was delivered at the Center for Libertarian Studies and Rothbard-Rockwell Report Conference on the Warfare State, San Mateo, California, February 21, 1998.]

Is the US world empire decaying? At first glance, this may seem an odd time to be asking the question. The US is prepared to embark on an openly political war with no basis in just war theory. It can only end in further massive suffering for the Iraqi people, and a further diminution of American liberty. And yet it may be going forward, with American tax dollars being chewed up by a horrible war machine on an imperialist adventure.

Right now, no single country in the world is sufficiently powerful to challenge US hegemony and military might. Public opinion seems to be little help. Three in four Americans say they would back bombing raids and ground troops if the Clinton administration orders them. At a time when public respect for government in domestic affairs is at historic lows, the foreign-policy apparatus of the empire seems to have escaped serious public scrutiny.

All of this is true at one level. Yet below the surface, we see a different reality. The foundations of empire have begun to crack. US military actions since the end of the Cold War have not replenished the stock of public good will toward the warfare State. On the contrary, they have drawn down the capital built up over the prior 40 years when Americans were convinced that the warfare State was all that stood between them and nuclear annihilation by foreign powers. Public enthusiasm for the empire, while still far too high, has waned as compared with 20 years ago, and even since the first war against Iraq.

Virtually every country in the world has announced its resentment against the US attempt to run the world. In particular, the US’s position on Iraq is in the extreme minority. The US does not enjoy a consensus at the UN; world opinion on US global hegemony ranges from hired tolerance to extreme opposition. Pro-peace and anti-US groups are now active in every country where US bases exist.

Important members of the pundit class have already defected, especially from this most recent campaign against Iraq. The military itself is in disarray, crippled by a combination of affirmative action, feminization, and welfare dependency. And the US presidency, which has traditionally given direction and meaning to the empire, now lacks the moral legitimacy to lead the troops, much less to sustain a viable New World Order. Important elements of the establishment itself have split away from the globocop consensus. As a result of all these developments, the US empire is shakier than it has been since World War II.

Surely all of these developments count as bullish for American liberty, because in the final analysis, there can be no reconciling empire and freedom. Either one or the other must go. Either the US government can invade Iraq on a whim or our homes and businesses will be free from invasion by agents of the State. Either the US government will have bases in a hundred countries or our communities will not be permanently occupied by agents and judges working for Leviathan.

The framers intended to keep the US out of foreign wars. They understood that a government that goes in search of monsters to destroy will end up destroying its own people. The foreign-policy apparatus of today inflicts a horrible cost on the world. But the greatest cost of all—or at least the one that should matter to us the most—is the cost to the liberty that is our birthright. Though the American empire will not go without a fight, and the end could be years in the future, its collapse provides us with a great opportunity to do the hard work of restoring our liberty right here at home.

Of course to hear the spokesman for the empire tell it, everything about the global project is in full working order, a line which the media gladly parrot. But it is the nature of the State to lie. It lies about why it is taxing us. It lies about who is getting the money. It lies about its motives for regulating us. It lies about the legitimacy of its power. But no State lies nearly so much as an empire in the conduct of its foreign policy.

So, let’s examine the structural setting in which the US foreign policy of war and militarism is currently being conducted, beginning first with the domestic political setting. President Clinton, the man who denies having had sexual relations with Monica Lewinsky, has tried to persuade the American public that Saddam represents a direct threat to our country. But by now, as much as people prefer Clinton to his likely successors of Gore and then Gingrich, he has a serious credibility problem.

One wonders if any president could make a morally credible case for invading Iraq now. Think back to 1990, when George Bush had to make a case for war. He had several huge advantages that Clinton does not have. Iraq had invaded Kuwait. It was a fact. It’s true that Iraq may have had a credible case for doing so. The two countries are only separate because of arbitrary lines drawn by the British, and, besides, Kuwait was drilling for oil in Iraqi territory. Plus, the US ambassador to Kuwait, April Glaspie—and this is not in dispute—had already given the go-ahead to our then-ally Saddam.

Nonetheless, Iraq had invaded Kuwait, and once Bush decided he wanted to boost his standing in the polls, that invasion gave the US a clear objective, which was actually rather limited. According to the UN mandate, it was to get Iraq out of Kuwait and restore the ruling family to power. Even so, it wasn’t enough to garner support from Congress or the American public. Saddam had to be portrayed as an evil dictator—the new Hitler—wrecking the lives of his own people.

Then the Bush administration had to resort to a series of wild claims that Saddam had nuclear weapons, that he was tossing babies out of their incubators in Kuwait, and that Iraq would also invade Saudi Arabia, monopolize oil, and drive up the price of gasoline. This in turn could bring on a deep recession. As James Baker famously said, this splendid little war was about “jobs, jobs, jobs.”

Of course, the result was that the US forcibly kept Iraqi oil off the world market, a result far more restrictive of supply than any scare scenario cooked up by the Bush administration. The US government has gone from warning the world that Iraq may not sell oil to denouncing Iraq for wanting to sell oil, and forcibly preventing it from doing so. The warfare State is capable of stunning levels of perfidy. It is US sanctions, not Saddam’s attempt to cartelize Arab oil markets, that have kept Iraqi oil off the market.

Gulf War One, said George Bush at the time, was a test case for the New World Order. With the Cold War over and the economic basketcase enemy of international communism vanquished, the US would not dismantle its military empire but would find new uses for it. US foreign policy elites announced that they were the world’s only indispensable nation, the only force standing between order and international chaos. American taxpayers would be looted until the end of time for the sake of this order.

The US continued the Iraq war by another means. That way we could have an enemy—a man who can be relied upon to denounce the US in passionate tones—anytime the president in power happened to need one. To achieve this end, the US decided it would be best to commit genocide, to starve the people of Iraq and encourage them to die from disease as well (that’s why US bombers targeted sewage treatment plants, to poison the water supply). This has resulted in 1.4 million deaths, most of them children and old people denied access to food and medicine. But the power elite got what they wanted: a permanent enemy in a world where threats to US interests appear increasingly remote.

When compared to Gulf War One, Gulf War Two has no clearly defined objective. It is not going to provide greater access to sites for UN investigators. It is not going to make Saddam less belligerent. It’s not going to make him less popular with his own people and thereby undermine his rule. Quite the opposite; Saddam is given credit by his own people for having the courage to stand up to the evil empire.

In the official rationale for this war, Iraq is very mad at the US because Iraq doesn’t want Americans on the UN inspection team looking for chemical and biological weapons. Iraq says they might be spies, an accusation that is supposed to prove what a paranoid maniac Saddam is. From listening to his crazed rantings, you might think the US had it in for him.

Yet as Jeffrey Smith pointed out in the Washington Post, if US military planners do attack Iraq, they will be drawing on data about Iraqi capabilities and targets collected by UN inspection teams. Are UN inspectors spies? No one doubts it.

So far, the only credible excuse the US can come up with for attacking Iraq is that of supposed chemical and biological warfare. Yet even if Saddam did use these against the Kurds and threatens their use against Israel, are they a direct threat to Americans? Of course not. If a Texan or a Marylander told you he had bought a gas mask to protect himself from Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction, you would likely think him nuts.

But let’s just say Saddam did have the military technology to launch chemical weapons against the US. What better way to provoke such an attack than a 7-year economic embargo that has reduced Iraq’s once-thriving middle class to the status of hunters and gatherers? There is one better way: have the Secretary of State say on national television that she regards the death of 1.4 million civilians in Iraq as an “acceptable price to pay.” That is precisely what Madeleine Albright said in a televised interview in December 1996.

It takes a pretty nasty foreign government to be a greater threat to people than their own government. Yet we have to ask ourselves: which is the greater threat to the livelihood of the Iraqi people? Saddam? Or US bombs and embargoes? By any measure, it is the latter, and this is a national disgrace.

Another difference between then and now is the proximity to the Cold War, which had acculturated the public to the idea of empire. Bush’s war came a mere 20 months after the unraveling of socialism in Eastern Europe, and before so-called isolationist sentiment began to rise to the surface of public opinion.

But the Cold War ended a decade ago. People now in junior high school have no memory of it, and thus no memory of a time when the US military empire successfully portrayed itself as a messianic force for good in the world.

And think of this. In every past war, the US has gone out of its way to show its enemies as the aggressors, even if it has to phony up the charge. Ft. Sumter, the Maine, the Lusitania, Pearl Harbor, the Gulf of Tonkin, the Berlin nightclub, the invasion of Kuwait—in all of these, the US has gone out of its way to portray itself as the avenger of foreign aggression, which ultimately desires only peace and justice.

But not this time. As the New York Times put it, this is an openly political as versus defensive war. The Clinton administration is seeking to use the US warfare machine to punish a government headed by a man the White House does not like. It has gone so far as to intervene to scuttle diplomatic efforts at peace. Never before have the aggressive intentions of US foreign policy been so open.

Lacking a precipitating outrage against justice, it has been considerably more difficult for the Clinton administration to whip up public enthusiasm for this war. Of course public opinion polls show public approval of a war to oust Saddam from power. But as the New York Times has also warned, polls on politics increasingly reveal the answers people think they are supposed to give. What is unclear is how well they measure people’s actual opinions. This is especially true in times when politics is no longer a public preoccupation.

Reading the polls with this mind—that they are likely to measure more of what people think people think than what they really think—you get some interesting results. For example, support for a military solution against Iraq has dropped nine points since November, when the policy elites first began to call for Saddam’s head on a platter. A two-month public relations campaign to oust Saddam not only failed to whip up war fever; it actually had the reverse effect, at least for a time.

This reflects something more profound than that people think bombing is not a good idea. It reveals that a fundamental shift in the climate of opinion is taking shape, a shift that is likely to have far-reaching effects on the ability of US empire to function with confidence in the future.

Running an empire based on war requires more, much more, than tacit approval from the taxpayer public. It requires the public be charged up and cheering both the objective and the methods of war. When the public is so charged, the State is provided some public-opinion capital to spend when casualties and bills begin arriving. This is the real point of military parades, war drums, and the symbolic displays of patriotism required by the modern totalitarian project.

In the movie Wag the Dog, the main responsibility of the team manufacturing a war with Albania is goading public opinion in the right direction. For their purposes—which was to create a massive public distraction from the president’s peccadilloes—passive interest was not enough. So the hired team commissioned two popular songs—one rock and one folk—invented phony heroes for the public to love, and primed the pump on certain popular sacrificial rituals. The point of all this is to divert the public from thinking too carefully about the lies and false morality of the war itself.

The same pitch is necessary whether we’re dealing with a war made in Hollywood, as it was in the movie, or a real war involving actual people halfway around the world. In either case, public enthusiasm and calls for foreign blood are necessary to the warfare project. But in post-Cold War times, the drumbeat doesn’t always succeed in getting people to dance. In Gulf War Two, the long drumbeat to war has failed to even interest the public in any intense way.

As Meg Greenfield writes in her Newsweek column,

I can’t remember a run-up to a war—or whatever it is we are about to have with Iraq—as strong as this. It seems to have all the urgency for people of a once-a-week seminar on international relations.... There have been no constituencies, no sides, no hotly held positions. There are, instead, just desultory statements, odd articles and speculations and musings. The controversy, to the extent there is one, goes in no direction, takes no shape, commands no silent, grim attention of the kind people give when they believe themselves to be in the presence of a large, consequential and risky national undertaking.

The political parties have been surprisingly silent on the Iraq matter. The Democrats make perfunctory statements in defense of the White House’s position. And the Republicans are all over the map, on one hand calling for caution and on the other demanding the immediate murder of Saddam Hussein. But notice that resolutions, for or against any aspect of this Iraq war, were not voted on before Congress could recess for the Valentine’s Day week. They decided it was politically safer to make love than war.

This has provided a wonderful opportunity for the forces opposed to war to step into the vacuum and have our voices heard. A prominent Associated Press story last week led with the heroic efforts of Congressman Ron Paul of Texas to prevent Clinton from using force in the Gulf absent a Congressional declaration of war. He introduced emergency legislation to this effect.

Paul, you see, is old-fashioned enough to believe in the Constitution. This is the action of a real statesman, a man of courage willing to stand up to presidential power grabs, and say: absolutely not. That is not the way war is conducted in a civilized society. Ron has received more attention and support on this issue than any other he has addressed since he reentered political life two years ago.

Contrast this to Gingrich, the man whose constitutional responsibility it is to check the power of the White House. But in the case of Iraq, he has given Clinton, his supposed political bête noire, complete backing for anything this administration wants to do. Speaking for the entire Republican Party, Gingrich has threatened political retaliation only if Clinton does not go far enough. He has even said that he will not look too carefully into this Lewinsky matter because that would be, at this time, unpatriotic.

Outside the United States, it turns out, there are quite a few Ron Pauls, statesmen willing to stand up to the US global hegemon. In fact, the single most remarkable aspect of this run-up to war has been the utter isolation of the US. After years of propaganda about the glories of the international community, about the United Nations and our allies hither and yon, the US can now only consistently count on Britain and Israel as accomplices.

And it’s not clear how this action can be good for either Britain—which has a strong interest in keeping the peace in its neck of the woods—or Israel. This week in Bethlehem, some 900 schoolchildren and university students defied a government ban and marched in support of Iraq. “O Saddam our dear, hit Tel Aviv. O Saddam our dear, hit with chemicals,” they chanted, according to press reports. The students also burned the US and Israeli flags, shouting “Death to America, death to Israel.” As you can see, the peace process is coming along nicely.

It was several weeks after the US and British governments announced their planned war against Iraq before the international coalition backing the idea began to solidify. First, a trusted and valiant ally came forward: Canada. Then Australia, a country with a huge stake in the outcome. Finally, and most impressively, the great nation of Oman joined our coalition. It was probably the first time in its history that the word “Oman” was said on national radio.

In Gulf War One, using the usual combination of threats and bribes, the US was able to put together a multilateral fig leaf for its little war. Crucially, this coalition included Arab states. But for the present war, there have been few foreign policy adventures of the US that have so thoroughly united the Arab world against us. Not even the billions upon billions the US has slathered supposed allies with has paid off this time. It’s a measure of how utterly implausible US foreign policy has become—not only implausible but also deeply unwelcome around the world, and conspicuously immoral to anyone who still cares about justice.

Japan has officially backed US military intervention, but with a surprising degree of reticence. Support among the people of Japan is thin to nonexistent, a fact of which the ruling party must take note. Organizations within Japan devoted to kicking out the US military are growing all the time, particularly where US bases are located.

These groups are taking out advertisements in American newspapers to make the case against US imperialism. They mention the rise of crime and auto accidents where bases are located, the noise and danger associated with US overflights, the subsidization of prostitution and cultural degradation that come with the military presence. Americans who live near military bases on our own soil can relate.

This very day, demonstrations are taking place in Tokyo to protest US attacks on Iraq. There have been protests in front of a Yokosuka Army base every day since February 3. On February 6, 56 Japanese peace organizations filed a protest with the American Embassy. In Hiroshima, petitions circulate in shopping malls every day in protest, and they are then faxed every day to the White House. These petitions not only call for the US to leave Iraq, but also for the US to leave Japan.

The following letter was sent by the Japanese Network for Disarmament, the leading antimilitarist Japanese organization, to the White House:

To Bill Clinton:

The difference between now and the Gulf War seven years ago is that the current crisis is being staged unilaterally by yourself and the US military which you command, not by an invasion or violation of international law on the part of Saddam Hussein.

On this day, prior to imminent strikes against Iraq announced by you, you must make it clear that no support or agreement whatsoever can be found among the Japanese public for such militaristic adventures and mass slaughter....

Military attacks not only result in the loss of lives; they are nothing less than the worst form of international terrorism which prevents Iraqis from exercising their right to reform Iraqi society by themselves....

We are aware that the US itself believes in weapons of mass murder and mass destruction. Has the US not turned its back on the ruling by the International Court of Justice that the use of nuclear weapons is against international law, by, still today, filling its arsenals with more than 15,000 nuclear warheads?

Which “dictatorship” has violated the spirit of the International Test Ban Treaty, again and again, with so-called sub-critical nuclear tests? Which country continues to arm destroyers and aircraft and tanks with radiological arms, even after having killed numerous Iraqi children and harmed its own soldiers with depleted uranium weapons? Which country is opposed to a ban ... of such weapons? Was it not you, President Clinton, who ordered the decision not to sign the treaty banning antipersonnel landmines? ...

[W]e cannot suppress our astonishment and anger in regard to the fact that the US is intending to use the people of Iraq as guinea pigs for testing newly developed weapons.... We strongly oppose the use of US bases in Japan for such inhuman militaristic adventures....

We know that the new base which you are about to build in Nago, Okinawa ... is intended to serve the projection of national power and a policy of military intervention. Along with the people of Okinawa, we will say again and again that the elimination of these bases, not their relocation, is the solution.

The letter ends with the exhortation: “DO NOT KILL!”

So there’s no reason to take Japan’s backing of the US war plot too seriously. It demonstrates the extent to which the ruling party is wholly owned by the US and certainly not enthusiastic for the war. Protests against US military bases are taking place in Germany, Italy (where hotdogging Marine pilots just killed 20 people on the Northern Italian ski slopes), France, Spain, Scandinavia, and the US as well. Not even at the height of the Cold War had the US faced such intense international opposition.

The leaders of Russia have been especially resistant to US demands for total global power. For a day or two, US militarists tried to portray Boris Yeltsin as crazy and Yevgeny Primakov as a new Hitler. But there was a problem: their arguments against the Iraq war make an unusual amount of sense, so the only solution was to ignore the screams of protest coming from our on-again-off-again ally in a century of wars. As for Primakov being the new Hitler, an additional problem emerged: it turns out that he is Jewish. But this fact didn’t stop the Wall Street Journal from describing him as an Arabist, a mysterious term left over from the Cold War years meaning a critic of US Mideast policy.

Why does it matter that the US is increasingly isolated in running a global imperial campaign? As de la Boétie, Hume, Mises, Rothbard, and many others have emphasized, all government must ultimately rest on the consent of the governed for one clear reason: government represents a tiny minority of the population and the governed represent the great majority. When that consent is withdrawn, the government must necessarily collapse. It issues orders and no one obeys.

In our lifetimes, we have witnessed many examples of this, and, if you are like I am, you feel a surge of joy anytime a government anywhere collapses. It’s a reminder that no matter how impenetrable and ominous a government can seem, it is ultimately a fragile institution that must constantly tend to its public image to shore up confidence and legitimacy.

It turns out that this Hume-Mises insight also applies on the international scale. The US has long dreamed of establishing a world government. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, the prospect seemed to be at hand. The dream of the social democratic, redistributionist, regulatory, welfare-warfare State run by what Clinton calls the indispensable nation seemed close to becoming a reality.

What is the role of the UN in this enterprise? To operate as a democratic fig leaf for US control. Just like domestic government, world government also needs consensus to survive and thrive. Without that consensus, the US may find itself issuing orders, like Ceausescu in his palace, but with no one obeying. With the growing global resistance to the Iraqi adventure, we are witnessing something like a withdrawal of consent that threatens the very existence of the world State.

A global government run by the US in the manner proposed by Clinton is a fragile project, even more so than the British empire of the 19th century. Britain frequently used native troops, usually from racial and ethnic minorities, to run its colonies. They were highly trained and managed by British officers. But the troops at least had some connection to the cultures they were ruling. Conflicts were handled by local troops and they chose their battles with an eye to not undermining political support for the British regime.

The US empire of our time consists entirely of US troops, periodically touched up by a smattering of players from governments the US keeps on its payroll. Such an empire is as unviable in the long run as socialism itself. It is hardly surprising there is growing resistance, and it is resistance that the US has neither anticipated nor has any way to meet on a civil level.

Most impressively, this resistance is not only political; it is also moral. And here we must give due credit to Pope John Paul II, and indirectly to the US bishops, for protesting this war at every step. The Pope was a leading critic of the last Gulf War, and despite neoconservative attempts to silence him in this country, he helped prepare Christians around the world to say no to the US-run New World Order.

Immediately after leaving Cuba, where his visit has stirred up opposition to communist control and another US embargo, he went to work trying to bring a peaceful resolution to the Iraqi conflict. The Pope has demanded that the US “swear off” military options, and succeeded in persuading Kofi Annan to visit Iraq, thereby forestalling strikes for a bit longer.

Some US commentators say the Pope’s interests in this are merely parochial. He knows that Christians are well-treated in Iraq, at least as compared with every other Arab nation. He is concerned for their fate with continued sanctions and military strikes. By describing these concerns as parochial, the intention is to dismiss them, as if to say US political concerns are far more important than the lives of any foreign Christians.

In fact, the Pope’s concerns reflect a long-standing Catholic concern that the conduct of war accord with the Augustinian-Thomist doctrine of the Just War. War must be defensive. It must never target civilians. Its means must be proportional to the threat. It must be a last resort. Peace must be established and kept as soon as the fighting is over. Revenge against a defeated enemy is ruled out of order. The US campaign against Iraq must be regarded as profoundly unjust according to every one of these tenets.

The US bishops have exercised uncharacteristic courage in opposing this war, and all seven active Cardinals have signed a letter saying that military force would be “difficult if not impossible to justify” morally. They specifically call for “widening the participation of other governments, especially Arab states, in the concerted effort to bring about Iraqi compliance on these issues.”

The ranks of the dissidents on this war contain some interesting new recruits. Tony Snow, the neoconservative columnist, has expressed profound skepticism about the war. Robert Novak has been as sound as Joe Sobran and Ron Paul. I’m pleased to see Pat Buchanan, who seemed to have gone soft on the empire insofar as it is cracking down on supposedly unfair traders, has solidly opposed the Clinton war on Iraq.

Jude Wanniski led the way in condemning the embargo, and has written memo after memo attacking US policy on Iraq. I’m also pleased to announce that William F. Buckley has criticized the idea of bombing Iraq and even suggested loosening the embargo. He has retained some conscience, even after everything.

Just to prove that no one is beyond redemption, Jack Kemp has said of this war:

I don’t want to bomb. And I believe the debate right now is between the bombers and those who want to bomb even more. My hope would be that we would exhaust all diplomatic efforts. So I advance that concept in the hopes that we could get out of this cul-de-sac without putting American troops, men and women, on the ground into Iraq.

Good for Kemp. He may be a big-government conservative. He may think that government can work domestic wonders through big-spending HUD programs. But he at least has some skepticism about the ability of Madeleine Albright or anyone else to run the world via bombing campaigns. If forced to choose between a cheesy welfare program like enterprise zones and a murderous global military empire run at my expense, I’ll take the enterprise zones any day. Meanwhile, Steve Forbes has called for the assassination of Saddam and a massive air war. I think all of us need to hold off when it comes to whom to support in the next election.

Tom Clancy, the warmongering novelist, has also had a change of heart, asking in the New York Times:

Who has told us that it is O.K. to kill women and children? ... Who has prepared us and the world for the unpalatable consequences of even a successful attack? What exactly would we be trying to accomplish? What constitutes success? How likely is failure, and what would be the consequences? Have any of these questions been answered at all, much less sufficiently to take human life? If so, it has escaped my notice.

We must also credit the John Birch Society and its magazine, New American, which has been vehement in editorializing against the bloody operation. They point out that Saddam is just the kind of foreign enemy an empire on the march likes to have to justify its power. What a nice contrast with the blood-thirsty thirty-somethings at the Weekly Standard, who equate the slaughter of innocents with national greatness.

In fact, outside the Kristolians, I must say there has been a dearth of commentators on the right whooping it up for war. This is a great step. But even so, there has been far too much silence. National Review says nothing. The Cato Institute has said nothing. The Heritage Foundation called for Saddam’s head in November, and has said nothing since. Neither has R. Emmett Tyrrell.

It’s sad to say that the Monica Lewinsky matter, just as it has persuaded Clinton to embark on the war as many in his administration have wanted, has also provided a nice distraction for many people on the right to not talk about what is ultimately a far more important matter. Impeach Clinton, yes, but for what? For having a dalliance and lying about it, just like almost every other powerful man in Washington, or for conducting an unconstitutional military campaign against a starving country and risking, as Boris Yeltsin says, a new world war?

There are plenty of officers and enlisted men in the military who would like to see Clinton impeached for any reason at all. Sexual harassment is the biggest issue in the military today. Any officer who tried to do with his staff what Clinton has done with his would be strung up. Officers know this; it is a continuing threat. The trials that have led high-ranking people to court martial have traumatized an entire generation that thought the military and sexual license were a natural combination.

And now Clinton dares to contemplate sending troops into a ground war to Iraq? He dares tell them what to do? As anyone in the military can testify, the worst thing for morale is the perception that the decision-makers are exempt from the strictures that govern those who take orders. We must never forget, too, that Clinton is widely resented for having skipped out of the draft himself.

An additional difficulty is the interesting split in the US establishment itself. Bill Clinton, it has been noted quite often, is not a favorite of the Georgetown social set and is an infrequent visitor to the Council on Foreign Relations. His interest group is not the CFR but a younger and more reckless group of social planners, baby boomers who see government as their playground and global social democrats who care nothing about concepts like the long term. These are not the cautious diplomats and wise men of old, constructing the world order according to plan. They are ideologues who have little understanding that power has its limits.

In today’s issue of Foreign Affairs, the journal of the CFR, you are far more likely to see articles warning of the pitfalls of a global democratic outlook and US imperial power than in the past. Richard Betts, in his article “The New Threat of Mass Destruction,” warns that

US military and cultural hegemony—the basic threats to radicals seeking to challenge the status quo—are directly linked to the imputation of American responsibility for maintaining world order. Playing Globocop feeds the urge of aggrieved groups to strike back.” Betts warns that the US hegemon actually risks fueling an increase in domestic terrorism, and suggests the US needs to “tread more cautiously, especially in the middle east.

Thomas Friedman, writing in the New York Times, warns of another potential cost of unrestricted Middle East interventionism. He points out that if it’s nuclear proliferation that concerns us, we still have a problem with Russia. Why would we want to continue to irritate a country that has thousands of nuclear weapons floating around, unmanaged and unattended? Is nuclear war an acceptable risk to take simply to expand that part of the empire called Nato? Arabist or not, Russia is deeply resentful that the US wants to dictate the terms on which that country can trade with countries like Iran and Iraq.

The problem for the future of American liberty is that the type of domestic terrorism warned about here also provides a convenient excuse for further crackdowns on political dissidents and individual freedom at home. Finally, let me say a few words about the prospect that this entire Iraqi war is intended to distract from the Monica Lewinsky matter. The answer is exactly as the foreign press describes it: of course it is intended to distract. But that is not the same thing as saying that Lewinsky is the only reason the US is prepared to bomb.

At the Pentagon and the State Department, there are people who have long believed that without a major war of Manichaean proportions, the US empire will whither and die. It was the Lewinsky matter that persuaded Clinton to pay closer attention to them. If his poll ratings weren’t as high as they are, he might have begun bombing a month ago.

No one knows whether in the short run, the peacekeepers or the warmongers will prevail. But as bumpy as this road to war has been, it is more likely to harm the empire than beef it up. For the sake of American liberty, we must do everything in our power to stop this war, to oppose it now and even when the bombs start falling and the troops hit the Iraqi sands. Not for us is this line that there shall be no criticism of the president once the shooting starts. There’s no more important time to denounce war than in its midst.

Empire is contrary to the American ethos. The American people have made exceptions in this century: the Hitler threat and the Communist threat. But there is no threat on the world scene to our families and property greater than that posed by the US government itself.

In order to beat back the real threat, it will be necessary to expose the phony ones and put obstacles in the way of the empire’s global ambitions. Every voice raised in opposition contributes to a more peaceful world in the future, contributes to bringing down the US empire, and, therefore, contributes to the restoring of the liberty from government oppression that is our inheritance.

DOWN WITH THE PRESIDENCY

[This speech was delivered at a meeting of the John Randolph Club in Arlington, Virginia, October 5–6, 1996.]

The modern institution of the presidency is the primary evil Americans face, and the cause of nearly all our woes. It squanders the national wealth and starts unjust wars against foreign peoples that have never done us any harm. It wrecks our families, tramples on our rights, invades our communities, and spies on our bank accounts. It skews the culture toward decadence and trash. It tells lie after lie. Teachers used to tell schoolkids that anyone can be president. This is like saying anyone can go to Hell. It’s not an inspiration; it’s a threat.

The presidency—by which I mean the executive State—is the sum total of American tyranny. The other branches of government, including the presidentially appointed Supreme Court, are mere adjuncts. The presidency insists on complete devotion and humble submission to its dictates, even while it steals the products of our labor and drives us into economic ruin. It centralizes all power unto itself, and crowds out all competing centers of power in society, including the church, the family, business, charity, and the community.

I’ll go further. The US presidency is the world’s leading evil. It is the chief mischief-maker in every part of the globe, the leading wrecker of nations, the usurer behind Third-World debt, the bailer-out of corrupt governments, the hand in many dictatorial gloves, the sponsor and sustainer of the New World Order, of wars, interstate and civil, of famine and disease. To see the evils caused by the presidency, look no further than Iraq or Serbia, where the lives of innocents were snuffed out in pointless wars, where bombing was designed to destroy civilian infrastructure and cause disease, and where women, children, and the aged have been denied essential food and medicine because of a cruel embargo. Look at the human toll taken by the presidency, from Dresden and Hiroshima to Waco and Ruby Ridge, and you see a prime practitioner of murder by government.

Today, the president is called the leader of the world’s only superpower, the “world’s indispensable nation,” which is reason enough to have him deposed. A world with any superpower at all is a world where no freedoms are safe. But by invoking this title, the presidency attempts to keep our attention focused on foreign affairs. It is a diversionary tactic designed to keep us from noticing the oppressive rule it imposes right here in the United States.

As the presidency assumes ever more power unto itself, it becomes less and less accountable and more and more tyrannical. These days, when we say the federal government, what we really mean is the presidency. When we say, national priorities, we really mean what the presidency wants. When we say national culture, we mean what the presidency funds and imposes.

The presidency is presumed to be the embodiment of Rousseau’s general will, with far more power than any monarch or head of state in pre-modern societies. The US presidency is the apex of the world’s biggest and most powerful government and of the most expansive empire in world history. As such, the presidency represents the opposite of freedom. It is what stands between us and our goal of restoring our ancient rights.

And let me be clear: I’m not talking about any particular inhabitant of the White House. I’m talking about the institution itself, and the millions of unelected, unaccountable bureaucrats who are its acolytes. Look through the US government manual, which breaks down the federal establishment into its three branches. What you actually see is the presidential trunk, its Supreme Court stick, and its Congressional twig. Practically everything we think of as federal—save the Library of Congress—operates under the aegis of the executive.

This is why the governing elites—and especially the foreign policy elites—are so intent on maintaining public respect for the office, and why they seek to give it the aura of holiness. For example, after Watergate, they briefly panicked and worried that they had gone too far. They might have discredited the democratic autocracy. And to some extent they did.

But the elites were not stupid; they were careful to insist that the Watergate controversy was not about the presidency as such, but only about Nixon the man. That’s why it became necessary to separate the two. How? By keeping the focus on Nixon, making a devil out of him, and reveling in the details of his personal life, his difficulties with his mother, his supposed pathologies, etc.

Of course, this didn’t entirely work. Americans took from Watergate the lesson that presidents will lie to you. This should be the first lesson of any civics course, of course, and the first rule of thumb in understanding the affairs of government. But notice that after Nixon died, he too was elevated to godlike status. None other than Bill Clinton served as high priest of the cult of president-worship on that occasion. He did everything but sacrifice a white bull at the temple of the White House.

The presidency recovered most of its sacramental character during the Reagan years. How wonderful, for the sake of our liberties, that Clinton has revived the great American tradition of scorning tyrants. In some ways, he is the best president a freedom lover can hope for, more well known for his private parts than his public policies. Of course, someday, Clinton too will ascend to the clouds, and enter the pantheon of the great leaders of the free world.

The libraries are filled with shelf after shelf of treatises on the American presidency. Save yourself some time, and don’t bother with them. Virtually all tell the same hagiographic story. Whether written by liberals or conservatives, they serve up the identical Whiggish pap: the history of the presidency is the story of a great and glorious institution. It was opposed early on, and viciously so, by the anti-federalists, and later, even more viciously, by Southern Confederates. But it has been heroically championed by every respectable person since the beginning of the republic.

The office of the presidency, the conventional wisdom continues, has changed not at all in substance, but has grown in stature, responsibility, and importance, to fulfill its unique mission on earth. As the duties of the office have grown, so has the greatness of the men who inhabit it. Each stands on the shoulders of his forerunners, and, inspired by their vision and decisiveness, goes on to make his own contribution to the ever-expanding magisterium of presidential laws, executive orders, and national security findings.

When there is a low ebb in the accumulation of power, it is seen as the fault of the individual and not the office. Thus the so-called postage-stamp presidents between Lincoln and Wilson are to be faulted for not following the glorious example set by Abe. They had a vast reservoir of power, but were mysteriously reluctant to use it. Fortunately that situation was resolved, by Wilson especially, and we moved onward and upward into the light of the present day. And every one of these books ends with the same conclusion: the US presidency has served us well.

The hagiographers do admit one failing of the American presidency. It is almost too big an office for one man, and too much a burden to bear. The American people have come to expect too much from the president. We are unrealistic to think that one man can do it all. But that’s all the more reason to respect and worship the man who agrees to take it on, and why all enlightened people must cut him some slack.

The analogy that comes to mind is the official history of the popes. In its infancy, the papacy was less formal, but its power and position were never in question. As the years went on and doctrine developed, so too did the burdens of office. Each pope inherited the wisdom of his forbears, and led the Church into fulfilling its mission more effectively.

But let’s be clear about this. The church has never claimed that the papacy was the product of human effort; its spiritual character is a consequence of a divine, not human, act. And even the official history admits the struggles with anti-popes and Borgia popes (and someday Vatican II popes).

Catholics believe the institution was founded by Christ, and is guided by the Holy Spirit, but the pope can only invoke that guidance in the most narrow and rare circumstances. Otherwise, he is all too fallible. And that is why, although allegedly an absolute monarch, he is actually bound by the rule of law.

The presidency is seemingly bound by law, but in practice it can do just about anything it pleases. It can order up troops anywhere in the world, just as Clinton bragged in his acceptance speech at the Democratic convention. It can plow up a religious community in Texas and bury its members because they got on somebody’s nerves at the Justice Department. It can tap our phones, read our mail, watch our bank accounts, and tell us what we can and cannot eat, drink, and smoke.

The presidency can break up businesses, shut down airlines, void drilling leases, bribe foreign heads of state or arrest them and try them in kangaroo courts, nationalize land, engage in germ warfare, firebomb crops in Colombia, overthrow any government anywhere, erect tariffs, round up and discredit any public or private assembly it chooses, grab our guns, tax our incomes and our inheritances, steal our land, centrally plan the national and world economy, and impose embargoes on anything anytime. No prince or pope ever had this ability.

But leave all that aside and consider this nightmare. The presidency has the power to bring about a nuclear holocaust with the push of a button. On his own initiative, the president can destroy the human race. One man can wipe out life on earth. Talk about playing God. This is a grotesque evil. And the White House claims it is not a tyranny? If the power to destroy the entire world isn’t tyrannical, I don’t know what is. Why do we put up with this? Why do we allow it? Why isn’t this power immediately stripped from him?

What prevents fundamental challenge to this monstrous power is precisely the quasi-religious trappings of the presidency, which we again had to suffer through last January. One man who saw the religious significance of the presidency, and denounced it in 1973, was—surprisingly enough—Michael Novak. His study, Choosing Our King: Powerful Symbols in Presidential Politics, is one of the few dissenting books on the subject. It was reissued last year as—not surprisingly—Choosing Our Presidents: Symbols of Political Leadership, with a new introduction repudiating the best parts of the book.

Of course, none of the conventional bilge accords with reality. The US president is the worst outgrowth of a badly flawed Constitution, imposed in a sort of coup against the Articles of Confederation. Even from the beginning, the presidency was accorded too much power. Indeed, an honest history would have to admit that the presidency has always been an instrument of oppression, from the Whisky Rebellion to the War on Tobacco.

The presidency has systematically stolen the liberty won through the secession from Britain. From Jackson and Lincoln to McKinley and Roosevelt Junior, from Wilson and FDR to Truman and Kennedy, from Nixon and Reagan to Bush and Clinton, it has been the means by which our rights to liberty, property, and self-government have been suppressed. I can count on one hand the actions of presidents that actually favored the true American cause, meaning liberty. The overwhelming history of the presidency is a tale of overthrown rights and liberties, and the erection of despotism in their stead.

Each president has tended to be worse than the last, especially in this century. Lately, in terms of the powers they assumed and the dictates they imposed, Kennedy was worse than Eisenhower, Johnson was worse than Kennedy, Nixon was worse than Johnson, Carter was worse than Nixon, and Reagan—who doubled the national budget and permanently entrenched the warfare State—was worse than Carter. The same is true of Bush and Clinton. Every budget is bigger and the powers exercised more egregious. Each new brutal action breaks another taboo and establishes a new precedent that gives the next occupant of the White House more leeway.

Looking back through American history, we can see the few exceptions to this rule. Washington wrote an eloquent farewell address, laying out the proper American trade and foreign policy. Jefferson’s revolution of 1800 was a great thing. But was it really a freer country after his term than before? That’s a tough case to make. Andrew Jackson abolished the central bank, but his real legacy was democratic centralism and weakened states’ rights.

Andrew Johnson loosened the military dictatorship fastened on the South after it was conquered. But it is not hard to make the country freer when it had become totalitarian under the previous president’s rule. Of course, Lincoln’s bloody autocracy survives as the model of presidential leadership. James Buchanan made a great statement on behalf of the right of revolution. Grant restored the gold standard. Harding denounced US imperialism in Haiti. But overall, my favorite president is William Henry Harrison. He keeled over shortly after his inauguration.

There have been four huge surveys taken of historians’ views on the presidents: in 1948, in 1962, in 1970, and in 1983. Historians were asked to rank presidents as Great, Near Great, Average, Below Average, and Failure. In every case, number one is Lincoln, the mass murderer and military dictator who is the real father of the present nation. His term was a model of every despot’s dream: spending money without Congressional approval, declaring martial law, arbitrarily arresting thousands and holding them without trial, suppressing free speech and the free press, handing out lucrative war contracts to his cronies, raising taxes, inflating the currency, and killing hundreds of thousands for the crime of desiring self-government. These are just the sort of actions historians love.

The number two winner in these competitions is FDR. Moreover, Wilson and Jackson are always in the top five. The bottom two in every case are Grant and Harding. None bothered to rate William Henry Harrison.

What does greatness in the presidency mean? It means waging war, crushing liberties, imposing socialism, issuing dictates, browbeating and ignoring Congress, appointing despotic judges, expanding the domestic and global empire, and generally trying his best to be an all-round enemy of freedom. It means saying with Lincoln, “I have a right to take any measure which may best subdue the enemy.”

The key to winning the respect of historians is to do these things. All aspirants to this vile office know this. It’s what they seek. They long for crisis and power, to be bullies in the pulpit, to be the dictators they are in their hearts. They want, at all costs, to avoid the fate of being another “postage-stamp president.” Madison said no man with power deserves to be trusted. Neither should we trust any man who seeks the power that the presidency offers.

Accordingly, it is all well and good that conservatives have worked to discredit the current occupant of the White House. Call him a philanderer, a cheat, and a double-dealer if you want. Call him a tyrant too. But we must go further. The answer to restoring republican freedom has nothing to do with replacing Clinton with Lott or Kemp or Forbes or Buchanan. The structure of the presidency, and the religious aura that surrounds it, must be destroyed. The man is merely a passing occupant of the Holy Chair of St. Abraham. It is the chair itself that must be reduced to kindling.

It was never the intention of the majority of framers to create the mess we have, of course. After the war for independence, the Articles of Confederation had no chief executive. Its decisions were made by a five-member Confederation. The Confederation had no power to tax. All its decisions required the agreement of 9 of the 13 states. That is the way it should be.

Most of the delegates to the unfortunate Philadelphia convention hated executive power. They had severely restricted the governors of their states after their bitter experience with the colonial governors. The new governors had no veto, and no power over the legislatures. Forrest McDonald reports that one-quarter of the delegates to the convention wanted a plural executive, based loosely on the Articles model. But those who planned the convention—including Morris, Washington, and Hamilton—wanted a single, strong executive, and they out-maneuvered the various strains of anti-federalists.

But listen to how they did it. The people of the several states and their representatives were suspicious that Hamilton wanted to create a monarchy. Now, there’s much mythology surrounding this point. It’s not that the anti-federalists and the popular will opposed some guy strutting around in a crown. It was not monarchy as such they opposed, but the power the king exercised.

When they said they didn’t want a monarch, they meant they didn’t want a King George, they didn’t want a tyrant, a despot, an autocrat, an executive. It was the despotic end they feared, and not the royal means.

Indeed, formally, the Constitution gives few powers to the president, and few duties, most of them subject to approval by the legislature. The most important provision regarding the presidency is that the holder of the office can be impeached. It was to be a threat constantly hanging over his head. It was, most framers thought, to be threatened often and used against any president who dared gather more power unto himself than the Constitution prescribed.

In one famous outburst, Hamilton was forced to defend himself against the charge that the new office of the presidency was a monarchy in disguise. He explained the difference between a monarch and a president. But as you listen to this, think about the present executive. Ask yourself whether he resembles the thing Hamilton claimed to have created in the office of the presidency, or whether we have the tyrant he claimed to be repudiating.

Among other points, Hamilton said in “Federalist 69”:

The President of the United States would be liable to be impeached, tried, and, upon conviction ... removed from office; and would afterwards be liable to prosecution and punishment in the ordinary course of law. The person of the king of Great Britain is sacred and inviolable; there is no constitutional tribunal to which he is amenable; no punishment to which he can be subjected....

The President will have only the occasional command of such part of the militia of the nation as by legislative provision may be called into the actual service of the Union.... [The power] of the British king extends to the declaring of war and to the raising and regulating of fleets and armies—all which, by the Constitution under consideration, would appertain to the legislature....

The President is to have power, with the advice and consent of the Senate, to make treaties, provided two thirds of the senators present concur. The king of Great Britain is the sole and absolute representative of the nation in all foreign transactions. He can of his own accord make treaties of peace, commerce, alliance, and of every other description.... The President is to nominate and, with the advice and consent of the Senate, to appoint ambassadors and other public ministers.... The king of Great Britain is emphatically and truly styled the fountain of honor. He not only appoints to all offices, but can create offices. He can confer titles of nobility at pleasure ... and ... [even] make denizens of aliens....

[The President] can prescribe no rules concerning the commerce or currency of the nation; [the king] is in several respects the arbiter of commerce, and in this capacity can establish markets and fairs, can regulate weights and measures, can lay embargoes for a limited time, can coin money.... What answer shall we give to those who would persuade us that things so unlike resemble each other?

Well, we can debate all day whether Hamilton was naïve about the imperial office he was in fact creating, or whether he was a despicable liar. But the fact remains that in his writings, despite his reputation as a backer of the exalted presidency, he is by today’s standards a Congressional supremacist. For that matter, and in comparison with today’s presidency, so was the British king.

Most historians agree that there would have been no presidency apart from George Washington, who was trusted by the people as a true gentleman, and was presumed to understand what the American revolution was all about. But he got off track by attempting to suppress the Whisky Rebellion, although he at least acknowledged that his actions went beyond the strict letter of the Constitution. But though the presidency quickly spun out of control, at its antebellum worst it had nothing in common with today’s executive State.

In those days, you could live your life and never even notice that the presidency existed. You had no contact with it. Most people couldn’t vote anyway, thank goodness, and you didn’t have to, but certain rights and freedoms were guaranteed regardless of whoever took hold of this—by today’s standards—largely ceremonial position. The presidency couldn’t tax you, draft you, or regulate your trade. It couldn’t inflate your money, steal your kids, or impose itself on your community. From the standpoint of the average American, the presidency was almost invisible.

Listen to what de Tocqueville observed in 1831:

The President is ... the executor of the laws; but he does not really cooperate in making them, since the refusal of his assent does not prevent their passage. He is not, therefore, a part of the sovereign power, but only its agent.... The president is placed beside the legislature like an inferior and dependent power....

The office of president of the United States is

temporary, limited, and subordinate.... [W]hen he is at the head of government, he has but little power, little wealth, and little glory to share among his friends; and his influence in the state is too small for the success or the ruin of a faction to depend upon his elevation to power.... The influence which the President exercises on public business is no doubt feeble and indirect.

Thirty years later, all this would be destroyed by Lincoln, who fundamentally changed the nature of the government, as even his apologists admit. He became a Caesar, in complete contradiction to most of the framers’ intentions. As Acton said, he abolished the primary contribution that America had made to the world, the principle of federalism. But that is an old story.

Less well known is how Wilson revived Lincoln’s dictatorial predilections, and added to them an even more millennial cast. Moreover, this was his intention before he was elected. In 1908, while still president of Princeton, he wrote a small book entitled the President of the United States. It was a paean to the imperial presidency, and might as well have been the bible of every president who followed him. He went beyond Lincoln, who praised the exercise of power. Wilson longed for a Presidential Messiah to deliver the human race.

There can be no successful government, without leadership or without the intimate, almost instinctive, coordination of the organs of life and action.... We have grown more and more from generation to generation to look to the President as the unifying force in our complex system.... To do so is not inconsistent with the actual provisions of the Constitution; it is only inconsistent with a very mechanical theory of its meaning and intention.

The president must be a

man who understands his own day and the needs of the country, and who has the personality and the initiative to enforce his views both upon the people and upon Congress.... He is not so much part of its organization as its vital link of connection with the thinking nation ... he is also the political leader of the nation.... The nation as a whole has chosen him.... Let him once win the admiration and confidence of the country, and no other single force can withstand him, no combination of forces will easily overpower him. His position takes the imagination of the country. He is the representative of no constituency, but of the whole people ... the country never feels the zest of action so much as when its President is of such insight and caliber. Its instinct is for unified action, and it craves a single leader....

The President is at liberty, both in law and conscience, to be as big a man as he can. His capacity will set the limit ... he is the only spokesman of the whole people. [Finally, Presidents should regard] themselves as less and less executive officers and more and more directors of affairs and leaders of the nation—men of counsel and of the sort of action that makes for enlightenment.

This is not a theory of the presidency. It is the hope for a new messiah. That indeed is what the presidency has come to. But any man who accepts this view is not a free man. He is not a man who understands what constitutes civilized life. The man who accepts what Wilson calls for is an apostle of the total State and a defender of collectivism and despotism.

Conservatives used to understand this. In the last century, all the great political philosophers—men like John Randolph and John Taylor and John C. Calhoun—did. In this century, the right was born in reaction to the imperial presidency. Men like Albert Jay Nock, Garet Garrett, John T. Flynn, and Felix Morley called the FDR presidency what it was: a US version of the dictatorships that arose in Russia and Germany, and a profound evil draining away the very life of the nation.

They understood that FDR had brought both the Congress and the Supreme Court under his control, for purposes of power, national socialism, and war. He shredded what was left of the Constitution, and set the stage for all the consolidation that followed. Later presidents were free to nationalize the public schools, administer the economy according to the dictates of crackpot Keynesian economists, tell us who we must and who we must not associate with, nationalize the police function, and run an egalitarian regime that extols nondiscrimination as the sole moral tenet, when it is clearly not a moral tenet at all. Later conservatives like James Burnham, Wilmoore Kendall, and Robert Nisbet, understood this point too.

Yet who do modern conservatives extol? Lincoln, Wilson, and FDR. Reagan spoke of them as gods and models, and so did Bush and Gingrich. In the 1980s, we were told that Congress was the imperial branch of government because Tip O’Neill had a few questions about Reagan’s tax-and-spend military buildup, and his strategy for fostering global warfare while managing world affairs through the CIA. All this was bolstered by books by Harvey Mansfield, Terry Eastland, and dozens of other neoconservatives who pretended to provide some justification for presidential supremacy and its exercise of global rule. More recently even Pat Buchanan repeated the “Ask not ... “ admonition of John F. Kennedy, that we should live to serve the central government and its organizing principle, the presidency.

What the neocon logic comes down to is this: The US has a moral responsibility to run the world. But the citizens are too stupid to understand this. That’s why we can’t use democratic institutions like Congress in this ambition. We must use the executive power of the presidency. It must have total control over foreign affairs, and never bow to Congressional carping.

Once this point is conceded, the game is over. The demands of a centralized and all-powerful presidency and its interventionist foreign policy are ideologically reinforcing. One needs the other. If the presidency is supreme in global affairs, it will be supreme in domestic affairs. If it is supreme at home, there will be no states’ rights, no absolute property rights, no true liberty from government oppression. The continued centralization of government in the presidency represents the end of America and its civilization.

A key part of the theory of presidential supremacy in foreign affairs is the idea that politics stops at the water’s edge. If you believe that, you have given up everything. It means that foreign affairs will continue to be the last refuge of an omnipotent scoundrel. If a president can count on the fact that he won’t be criticized so long as he is running a war, he will run more of them. So long as he is running wars, government at home cannot be cut. As Felix Morley said, “Politics can stop at the water’s edge only when policies stop at the water’s edge.”

Sadly, the Congress for the most part cares nothing about foreign policy. In that, it reflects the attitude of the American voter. The exception is the handful of Congressmen who do speak about foreign issues, usually at the behest of the State Department, the CIA, the Pentagon, and the increasingly global FBI. Such men are mere adjuncts of presidential power.

In fact, it is the obligation of every patriot not only to denounce a president’s actions at home, but to question, harass, and seek to rein in the presidency when it has sent troops abroad. That is when the watchful eye of the citizenry is most important. If we hold our tongues under some mistaken notion of patriotism, we surrender what remains of our freedoms. Yet during the Gulf War, even those who had courageously opposed this intervention in advance mouthed the old clichés about politics and the water’s edge and “supporting the troops” when the presidency started massacring Iraqis. Will the same happen when the troops are sent to China, a country without a single aircraft carrier, in retaliation for some trumped-up incident in the tradition of the Maine, the Lusitania, Pearl Harbor, and the Gulf of Tonkin?

If there is ever a time to get behind a president, it is when he withdraws from the world, stops wars, and brings the troops home. If there is ever a time to trip him up, question his leadership, and denounce his usurpations, it is when he does the opposite. A bipartisan foreign policy is a Napoleonic foreign policy, and the opposite of that prescribed by Washington in his farewell address.

In the midst of America’s war against Britain in 1812, John Randolph wrote an open letter to his Virginia constituents, pleading with them not to support the war, and promising them he would not, for he knew where war led: to presidential dictatorship: “If you and your posterity are to become hewers of wood and drawers of water to the modern Pharaoh, it shall not be for the want of my best exertions to rescue you from cruel and abject bondage.”

Sixty years ago all conservatives would have agreed with him. But the neoconservative onslaught has purged conservatives of their instinctive suspicions of presidential power.

By the time 1994 had come around, conservatives had been thoroughly indoctrinated in the theory that Congress was out of control, and that the executive branch needed more power. The leadership of the 104th Congress—dominated to a man by neocons and presidential supremacists—bamboozled the freshmen into pushing for three executive-enhancing measures.

In one of the Congress’s first actions, it made itself subject to the oppressive civil rights and labor laws that the Executive enforced against the rest of the nation. This was incredibly stupid. The Congress was exempted from these for a reason. It prevented the Executive from using its own regulatory agencies to lord it over Congress. By making itself subject to these laws, Congress willingly submitted itself to implicit and explicit domination by the Department of Labor, the Department of Justice, and the EEOC. It imposed quotas and political correctness on itself, while any dissenters from the presidential line suddenly faced the threat of investigation and prosecution by those they were attempting to rein in.

The imposition of these laws against Congress is a clear violation of the separation of powers. But it would not be the last time that this Congress made this mistake. It also passed the line-item veto, another violation of the separation of powers. The theory was that the president would strike out pork, pork being defined as property taken by taxation and redistributed to special interests. But since pork is the entirety of the federal government’s $1.7 trillion budget, this has given the president wide latitude over Congress. It takes away from Congress the right to control the purse strings.

Also part of the Contract with America was term limits for Congress. This would represent a severe diminution of Congressional power with respect to the presidency. After all, it would not mean term limits for the permanent bureaucracy or for federal judges, but only for the one branch the people can actually control. Thank goodness the self-interest of the politicians themselves prevented it from coming into being.

After that initial burst of energy, this Congress surrendered everything to the Clinton White House: control of the budget, control of foreign affairs, and control of the Federal Reserve, and the FBI. The Justice Department operates practically without oversight, as does the Treasury, HUD, Transportation, Commerce, EPA, the SEC, the FTC, and the FDA.

Congress has given in on point after point, eventually even granting the presidency most of what it demanded in health-care reform, including mandated equal coverage of the mentally ill. Chalk it up to long-term planning. They came into office pledging to curb government, but are as infatuated with the presidency as Clinton himself. After all, they hope their party will regain the office.

Then the Republicans had the audacity to ask in bewilderment: why did the president beat Dole? What did we do wrong? The real question is what have they done right? James Burnham said that the legislature is useless unless it is curbing the presidency. By that measure, this Congress has been worthless. It deserves to lose its majority. And its party deserves to lose the presidency, whose powers they are so anxious to grab for themselves.

The best moments in the 104th Congress were when a few freshmen talked quietly of impeachment. Indeed it is their responsibility to talk loudly, openly, and constantly of impeachment. Today’s presidency is by definition in violation of the Constitution. Talk of impeachment ought to become routine. So should ridicule and humiliation. For if we care about liberty, the plebiscitory dictatorship must be reined in or tossed out.

John Randolph had only been a Senator for a few days when he gave an extraordinary speech denouncing John Quincy Adams. “It is my duty,” said Randolph,

to leave nothing undone that I may lawfully do, to pull down this administration.... They who, from indifference, or with their eyes open, persist in hugging the traitor to their bosom, deserve to be insulted ... deserve to be slaves, with no other music to soothe them but the clank of the chains which they have put on themselves and given to their offspring.

John Randolph said this in 1826. This was a time, writes de Tocqueville, when the presidency was almost invisible. If we cannot say this and more today, when the presidency is dictator to the world, we are not authentic conservatives and libertarians. Indeed, we are not free men.

WAR AND THE CAPITALIST PRESS

[This speech was given at the Center for Libertarian Studies and Rothbard-Rockwell Report Conference Against U.S. Aggression, San Mateo, California, June 12, 1999.]

To make a case against the Nato killers who have laid waste to Yugoslavia, it might be enough to simply quote Bill Clinton. “Our children are being fed a dependable daily dose of violence,” the president said. “And it sells.” Further, it “desensitizes our children to violence and to the consequences of it.”

But in these comments, presumably, he wasn’t revealing the essence of his war, and its convenient effect of eclipsing Monica as his legacy to the world and its dreadful consequence to imparting an example of violence and bloodshed to anyone who still looks to the government for moral example. Rather, it turns out, he was leveling an attack on the private sector, which entertains us with movies and video games. He says it is the movie and video-game industries, not real-life wars, that are corrupting morals.

And yet the violence being inflicted and the blood being spilled by the troops Clinton commands are real. It is foolish to believe that this does not have an effect on the children of this country. It is sadly true that the behavior of the president still has an undue influence on those who yet believe the civics-text lie that the office is the most morally exalted in the land. The most corrupt media mogul does far more good, and far less harm, than the president.

But for those who still believe in the modern civic religion, it is the president who sets the moral tone, and the boundaries of right and wrong. It is no wonder, then, that one of the killers at Columbine had widely proclaimed his desire to drop some bombs on Serbia. Neither should we forget that the man convicted of bombing the Oklahoma City federal building received his training in how to kill during the war on Iraq, ordered up by the last madman to hold the office.

But it is not only the killers themselves who must be held accountable. It is also those who would attempt to put the best possible spin on the killing machine, trying to make its actions morally justifiable, and putting in print calls for wartime escalation rather than peace. They serve as handmaids to the warfare state and as megaphones for the Leviathan State, and I don’t care if their politics are from the Left or the Right: they must be held to account.

Two unfortunate facts undergird the thesis and argument of this talk. First, the Wall Street Journal is seen the world over as the preeminent capitalist organ of opinion, one that is seen to speak for the American tradition of free enterprise. Second, of all leading publications, it has proven to be the most aggressive in its promotion of the blood-soaked war on Yugoslavia. Since the war began, the Journal has been unswervingly enthusiastic, tolerated no dissent of its pro-war position in its news, its editorial pages, or its op-ed pages. Its content wouldn’t have been different if the most hawkish division of the State Department had been exercising full editorial control.

How can these two disparate positions of free enterprise and imperialism be reconciled? The Left has a ready answer. In the Leninist tradition, Marx’s failure to predict the overthrow of capitalism can be explained by reference to the international policy of the capitalist nations. Once the capitalists had fully exploited the workers at home, they would seek out foreign markets to exploit and impose their will using war and imperialism.

Thus ran Lenin’s analysis in August 1915:

Imperialism is the highest stage in the development of capitalism, reached only in the twentieth century. Capitalism now finds that the old national states, without whose formation it could not have overthrown feudalism, are too cramped for it. Capitalism has developed concentration to such a degree that entire branches of industry are controlled by syndicates, trusts and associations of capitalist multimillionaires and almost the entire globe has been divided up among the “lords of capital” either in the form of colonies, or by entangling other countries in thousands of threads of financial exploitation.

Free trade and competition have been superseded by a striving towards monopolies, the seizure of territory for the investment of capital and as sources of raw materials, and so on. From the liberator of nations, which it was in the struggle against feudalism, capitalism in its imperialist stage has turned into the greatest oppressor of nations. Formerly progressive, capitalism has become reactionary; it has developed the forces of production to such a degree that mankind is faced with the alternative of adopting socialism or of experiencing years and even decades of armed struggle between the “Great” Powers for the artificial preservation of capitalism by means of colonies, monopolies, privileges and national oppression of every kind.

Now, before we all convert to Leninism, let’s admit that he was not wrong on the facts, but remember that he made a grave categorical error, as explained by Ludwig von Mises in his 1922 book Socialism. Free trade and free enterprise are not aggressive; they are the global font of cooperation and peace. When conflicts do arise in the free market, they are settled based on the terms of contract. So long as the State does not intervene, private property and free enterprise ensure peaceful cooperation among men and nations. What Lenin identified as attributes of capitalism were in fact attributes of the State, particularly the State which claims to be master of economic affairs. As Mises explained:

Military Socialism is the Socialism of a state in which all institutions are designed for the prosecution of war. It is a State Socialism in which the scale of values for determining social status and the income of citizens is based exclusively or preferably on the position held in the fighting forces. The higher the military rank the greater the social value and the claim on the national dividend.

The military state, that is the state of the fighting man in which everything is subordinated to war purposes, cannot admit private ownership in the means of production. Standing preparedness for war is impossible if aims other than war influence the life of individuals.... The military state is a state of bandits. It prefers to live on booty and tribute.

Pairing the Leninist with the Misesian position on the ideological basis of imperialism helps illuminate the crucial framework for understanding this war. As Hans-Hermann Hoppe has explained, the great intellectual error of classical liberalism was its Hobbesian concession in favor of what it believed could be a limited State. In reality, the State is far more dangerous in a productive, capitalist society than it is in an impoverished, socialized society, simply because it has far more private resources to pillage and loot for the State’s own benefit. Availing itself of the vast fruits of private production, the State engages in self-aggrandizement, expansion, and, inevitably, imperialism.

By way of illustration, in the US today, we have two economies, one free and one unfree. The free one has given us the great abundance of consumer goods, the widest distribution of wealth, and the fastest pace of technological innovation known in the history of man. The unfree one—characterized by the two trillion dollar federal budget and the more than one-quarter of that spent on apparatus that builds and administers weapons of mass destruction—has produced what we have been reading about in the headlines for the last two months. Military Socialism, which exists by pillaging the free economy, is responsible for a brutal and immoral war on a civilian population halfway around the world—the destruction of hospitals, churches, nursing homes, residential neighborhoods, and town squares.

In an ideal world, the daily newspaper focusing on American economic life would celebrate the free economy, which the Wall Street Journal does on occasion, but also condemn the unfree one, which the Wall Street Journal does not. There is a reason why this is not the case. The horrible reality is that the unfree economy may be murderous and wasteful but it also makes many people very rich. The stocks of the companies that build the bombs and enjoy the booty after the war is over, are publicly traded, in the same manner as the stocks of real capitalist companies. When the Journal celebrates this war, it is speaking on behalf of the companies that stand to benefit from the war.

But that doesn’t inoculate the newspaper from moral responsibility for backing the bloodshed. And it doesn’t shield it from open displays of confusion, as when the paper’s support for free enterprise conflicts with its support for Military Socialism. For example, the paper recently editorialized about the Clinton administration’s drafting of pilots and technicians in the form of an order prohibiting their leaving. Think of it as the nationalization of talent, or simply a stopgap measure to stop the drain from the public to the private sector.

Incidentally, not only should the pilots in the armed forces be allowed to resign for the private sector anytime they want to, actually, these pilots have a moral obligation to resign. They must not use their considerable flying talents to commit the war crimes they are being ordered to commit. They have a moral obligation not to murder and destroy property, a moral obligation not to aggress. By prohibiting them from changing jobs, Clinton is coercing these pilots into committing gravely evil acts.

But somehow, even though pilot resignations would benefit the private sector, the editors at the Wall Street Journal couldn’t bring themselves to condemn Clinton’s tyrannical action. Instead, it suggested various incentive programs that would cause pilots to be less likely to abandon their nation-building, or nation-destroying actions. The paper suggested higher pay and a greater clarity of mission. In this case where the interests of the free and unfree economies collide, the Wall Street Journal sides with War Socialism.

And just so we are clear on how bad things have gotten at the Journal, let’s sample some of the analysis that it has printed over the last several months. No journalist today has provided analysis of the high-tech world as trenchant as that of the Journal’s regular columnist George Melloan. When he writes about the free economy, he is usually level-headed and morally sound. But on the matter of war, he has epitomized the capitalist-imperialist mode denounced by Lenin.

Melloan writes that the purpose of this war is “something far more ambitious than pacification. It is trying to civilize Serbia.” If this be civilizing, God save us from barbarism, and from warfare statists masquerading as advocates of free enterprise.

What about the US bombing of the Chinese embassy, which would have been perceived as a world-historic crime and act of war if a US embassy had been the target? “The [embassy] bombing,” Melloan writes, “was clearly the kind of accident that happens in war.” Besides, he further opined, “the Chinese government clearly gives aid and comfort to the Serbian barbarian, Slobodan Milosevic. It has joined with Russia to try to sway United Nations Security Council votes in his favor.”

Well, clearly then, murder and destruction are just what the State orders for anyone who would give aid and comfort to the Serbian barbarian. In fact, can’t we say that anyone who isn’t on board with this war is giving aid and comfort to the enemy? Shouldn’t their voices be quelled? Can we really say they don’t deserve to be bombed? It’s all part of the civilizing process.

The day after the bombing, there was no time for regrets at the Wall Street Journal. No, the editorial page used the occasion to spread the war fever. After all, the Journal said of the bombed embassy, “War is dangerous, and while Nato has sought to avoid civilian casualties, clearly people have died on the ground. [Catch the responsibility-shedding passive voice?] An obvious question may dawn on Chinese people eventually,” the Journal continued, “Why, in the middle of such a war, did their government choose to keep all those people in its embassy and potentially in harm’s way?”

Imagine that. The US has never declared war on Belgrade. The State Department never demanded that all diplomats leave the city. It promised at the outset only to hit military targets of the Yugoslav army. And yet when the US bombs the Chinese embassy, according to the Journal, it is the fault of the Chinese diplomats in Belgrade.

Along these lines, imagine further the future of death coverage in the Journal. Those kids in the Littleton High School: what were they doing there anyway? Don’t they know that school can be dangerous? Those people murdered by an immigrant on the Long Island Railroad: didn’t they know the New York metropolitan area is a place not unfamiliar with killing?

This is the moral reasoning of a blunted conscience, one no longer struck by the pain of human suffering and the evil of violence except when affecting the appearance of shock serves a political purpose. This illustrates a broader point: in American public life today, there are two kinds of death. Death caused by the US government is justifiable, as Madeleine Albright tells us about the death of children in Iraq. Only death caused by enemies of the US government is considered an atrocious and intolerable act that cries out for vengeance. The operating principle here is not the sanctity of life but the sanctity of the nation-State that determines which kind of life is valuable and which is not.

And yet this cannot be the entire answer to the mystery of why bloodshed would be overlooked by the Journal. We’ve all been struck by the mystery of how otherwise sensible people could come to support a holocaust to achieve their own view of political utopia. I can’t say I have the answer. How were US communists able to reconcile themselves with the mass bloodshed wrought by the Bolshevik revolution and its aftermath? How were German intellectuals and religious leaders able to justify in their own minds the bloodshed wrought by the Nazi dictatorship? How were US citizens able to observe the bombings of Dresden, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki, and the mass ethnic cleansing of German civilians after World War II, and call it patriotism in action?

It will always be something of a mystery, but if you want to see the same moral blindness at work right now, look no further than the early column by Max Boot, whose usual beat is the litigation explosion. Writing on the Journal’s op-ed page, which he edits, he praised this war on grounds that “humanitarianism truly is in the driver’s seat.” He speaks for many in the pundit class, who regard this war as uniquely motivated by a moral end. Similarly, Robert Samuelson wrote in the Washington Post the other day that “Kosovo may represent the first war in US history that has been undertaken mostly for moral reasons.”

There are several problems with this theory, aside from the fact that the families of the 2,000 civilians killed do not likely consider their deaths the consequence of humanitarianism. First, the Clinton regime has made an appeal, not only to the well-being of the Kosovars, but to American interests as well. Clinton himself says we all have an interest in a stable world where Europe is not embroiled in war. On Memorial Day, he even vaguely suggested that if we don’t stop Milosevic now, he and his armies will someday come attacking US shores.

Second, no one can convince me that charity and love are the driving forces behind a war in which tens of billions may eventually be transferred from taxpayers to the merchants of death. Perhaps greed also plays a role?

Third, every war I can think of, as far back as you look in US history or world history, has been justified under some moral theme. The enemy must always be demonized and the home government sanctified, if only to provide a necessary ethical coating to the nasty business of mass murder. The pundits who say the moral themes of this war are unique are only displaying their historical ignorance.

Finally, Boot’s phrase about humanitarianism reminds me of Isabel Paterson’s brilliant chapter in her book, the God of the Machine entitled “The Humanitarian With the Guillotine.” She argued that the great evils of holocausts and mass slaughter could not thrive anywhere in the world unless they were given a benevolent public face.

Certainly the slaughter committed from time to time by barbarians invading settled regions, or the capricious cruelties of avowed tyrants, would not add up to one-tenth the horrors perpetrated by rulers with good intentions.

She pointed to the example of Stalin:

we have the peculiar spectacle of the man who condemned millions of his own people to starvation, admired by philanthropists whose declared aim is to see to it that everyone in the world has a quart of milk.

In a similar way, we are rattled on a daily basis by the atrocities committed by our own government, justified in the name of ending atrocities. Asked about the mounting civilian casualties—first denied, then called mistakes, later dubbed military targets—Nato spokesman Jamie Shea finally, if implicitly, admitted the existence of the bloodshed that has shocked the world. “There is always a cost to defeat an evil,” he responded. “It never comes free, unfortunately.”

Doing evil so that good may come of it, using evil means to accomplish good ends—these are condemned by the Western religious tradition, particularly in light of the rethinking of public morality after the rise and fall of totalitarianism. Hence, many around the world are already comparing the US with Hitler’s army, including Alexander Solzhenitsyn. I wonder why. Perhaps because General William Odom, director of the National Security Agency under Reagan, urged copying German military tactics in a ground invasion of Belgrade. Also, writing—where else?—in the Wall Street Journal, the general praised the Nazis who “swept down this corridor in World War II, taking the whole of Yugoslavia in a couple of weeks.”

The Journal editors were similarly jingoistic as the prospect of peace raised its ugly head. They raise the horrible prospect, only recently considered an essential feature part of the democratic system, that Milosevic “will remain in power unless his own people throw him out.” The Journal just presumes that it is somehow up to the US to decide who gets to be president in faraway sovereign countries.

One wonders how it is possible that in wartime, all the normal rules of civilized life, all the lessons learned from history, all the checks on power that have been established over the centuries, are thrown onto the trash heap. It’s a question to ask Carlos Westendorp, who calls himself the “High Representative of the International Community for the Civil Implementation of the Dayton Peace Accords.” Also writing in the Wall Street Journal, he says that after the Serbs have been defeated “a full international protectorate is required. It may last for a few years. Yes, this disregards the principles of sovereignty, but so what? This is not the moment for post-colonial sensitivities.”

There we have it. It is not just democracy, the very principle of sovereignty itself that is reduced to a mere “sensitivity” not suitable in emergency times such as these. Thus the Wall Street warriors were among the first to call for arming anyone but Serbs, and, in this war, demanding that the US put together an invasive army to conquer the country and overthrow the government—a plan now summed up as “ordering up ground troops.” By calling for ground troops, and criticizing anyone who might be skeptical of the idea, the Journal is able to maintain its anti-Clinton posture and appeal to what it believes is the latent hawkishness of its readership.

On the very day that the New York Times reported progress in the desperate attempt by non-British European governments and Russia to broker something of a peace agreement, the Journal at last conceded that too many innocents were dying in this war. “Of its nature, war is about suffering,” the comfy editors typed into their word processors.

Modern war, the editors continued, is particularly irritating because “we now live in an age in which television brings the inevitable ruins of war into everyone’s living room every night.” This has forced a national conversation about whether blowing up civilian infrastructure is morally wise. Further, the publicity given to civilian killings—no thanks to the Journal here—is “creating divisions inside Nato itself.” Interesting how the Journal can muster more moral pathos over divisions within an aggressive military pact than over the death of 2,000 innocents, and the destruction of the property of millions.

So how does this bit of soul searching on the part of the editors end? With—you guessed it—another call for ground troops, which they now claim would have prevented civilian casualties. “What the American people do not want are casualties for no purpose,” says the Journal. Besides, “going to Belgrade and throwing out a war criminal is not going to lose elections. And while it would involve casualties, it would bring the destruction and killing to an end.”

The use of language here is strange: note the supposed distinction between mere casualties and killing. That one sentence is a case study in the language of imperialist propaganda. Opposite the editorial page on the same day, a pollster named Humphrey Taylor mulls over the question of popular support for the war, noting that this one has been seriously lagging in that area. The reason, he concludes, is that there have actually been too few casualties on our side. He ends with this stirring call to arms: “It’s quite possible that casualties could strengthen, not weaken, American resolve to defeat Slobodan Milosevic.”

Yes, it’s true. This sentence appeared in a respectable newspaper, the voice of capitalism in our times. Thank goodness for the pollsters and their advice!

You know, I’ve been thinking. Clinton says he needs to draft pilots to conduct his war, but this is bad for morale. Shouldn’t those who are most enthusiastic for ground troops be the first ones forced into combat? If we are to reinstate the draft, I say let’s start by drafting the people who write this drivel and give them the opportunity to become the war heroes they so badly want to be. Let’s institute another Lincoln Brigade, staffed by the Journal’s own editors, that will make all the necessary sacrifices to save the world for social democracy.

I’ve only scratched the surface of the Journal’s two-month-long campaign for US war. True, I have left out the pretentious prattle of a certain Margaret Thatcher, who wrote on its pages in favor of “the destruction of Serbia’s political will, the destruction of its war machine and all the infrastructure on which these depend.” She could have just summed it up by calling for a wholesale ethnic cleansing of Serbs from Serbia.

Also, I have left out the ridiculous parodies written by some British fellow calling himself Winston Churchill, Jr., who appears to be trying, without success, to turn some history-making phrase. In sum, let me say that in these last 70 days, the only truthful statement on the war from the Journal’s editorial page came on May 13: “Propaganda, especially in wartime, knows no bounds.”

All this war propaganda might be expected from the likes of the New Republic. But for the Journal to beat the drums louder than anyone does great damage to the cause of free enterprise. It links capitalism and imperialism in the public mind, and fans the flames of Leninist theory in the academy and abroad. This damage is deepened by the broader problem that it is not just the Journal that is perceived to be a defender of economic freedom; the US itself, particularly at the end of the Cold War, was, until recently, perceived to be the standard bearer of liberalism.

Here is where this war has been so costly. Liberal reform movements in China, Romania, Greece, Serbia, and many other places in the world, have suffered serious blows to their credibility, because their cause is treated under the general rubric of Americanization. The bombs that fall on innocents have the indirect effect of fanning the flames of anti-Americanism, which translates into antiliberalism. To the extent that America still represents the hope of freedom in the world, this war is very harmful to the cause of liberty, free trade, and human rights.

How can such a result benefit Wall Street? Well, there’s another side effect of the defeat of liberal reform movements in such places as Serbia and other European and Asian states. The end result of this war is likely to be the rearming of the world, after a period in which it appeared that we were in for a long period of disarmament. You can only imagine yourself as the head of any State that has had difficult relations with the US in the past—and that is most. You might draw from this experience the crucial lesson that States without nuclear weapons, such as Yugoslavia, are vulnerable to the most brutal forms of imperial assault.

The only way to forestall this result would be for Congress to take a drastic step and eviscerate the military budget, refusing to pay for this or any future war. But this will not happen, due to a deep intellectual incoherence at the heart of the Republican party. It was only days after the GOP voted not to endorse the war that it voted to double the fiscal outlay to pay for the war. But this is no different from scolding the local gang for their pillaging while giving it the key to a weapons stockpile. If the warfare State has funding and armaments, it is naturally going to go looking for enemies on which to use them. Every bureaucrat knows that he must justify this year’s budget in order to position himself for next year’s budget battles.

Isn’t it time the Republicans fundamentally rethink their pro-military bias? Hardly a day goes by when I don’t hear some conservative spokesman, GOP presidential hopeful, or right-wing commentator complain about how Clinton has supposedly gutted our defenses. But look at the facts. The US will spend more than $300 billion on the military this year. The second highest military spending in the world comes from Russia, which spends the equivalent of $60 billion. Scary imperialist China spends $37 billion. Just from looking at these numbers, the US could slash the military budget by two-thirds, and still spend well more than any other country.

The conservative attachment to militarism has doomed the program to cut government in the entire postwar period. The Journal’s own editorial position—favoring huge tax cuts and equally huge spending increases—illustrates the problem. This view is rightly denounced as hypocritical by the Left who point out that the American Right is only for limiting government spending when it goes to the wrong people, but all for the tax-and-spend agenda when it buys military hardware.

The usual response to this in the past is that defense is a legitimate constitutional function, whereas welfare redistribution is dubious at best. But there is nothing constitutional about the biggest and most destructive cache of weapons of mass destruction ever held by a single government, much less controlled by a single man we call the president.

The original constitutional vision was of states that protected themselves from invasion through local militias. The function of the federal government was to intervene only when this proved insufficient in the case of an invasion. There is no more constitutional justification for the warfare state than the welfare state.

In the past, we have been able to count on a large peace movement to oppose US foreign policy adventures. But for reasons that are still not entirely clear to me, the soft Left has gone AWOL in its responsibilities, leaving only the truly principled Left and the truly principled Right to stand up against the massive nuclear arsenal of the world’s biggest power. But it can be done, provided we don’t shrink from our responsibilities.

Some people have complained that in condemning the US intervention in the Balkans, the antiwar movement has ignored the atrocities of Milosevic. In the first place, it is very difficult to verify claims in wartime, though since Milosevic is both a nationalist and an avowed socialist of the old school, not to mention an elected politician, I can readily believe he is capable of doing all that he is accused of doing.

Similarly, I am also quite willing to believe the worst that is said about the US head of state. People in power are not like the rest of us. In their careers, the ordinary vices and evils are rewarded as political successes, an incentive structure that tends to insure that the higher you go in politics, the less you believe you are bound by the moral tenets of the mortal class.

At the same time, I do not believe that we, as Americans, have an obligation to denounce all tyrants with equal moral passion. No foreign tyrant ever killed anyone while invoking my name and my heritage. But a long string of American presidents have done so, and one is doing so now.

As citizens of this country, as a part of our civic duty, if not as the sum total of our civic duty, we must do our best to denounce and restrain our own tyrants. We cannot stop bloodshed in Rwanda or ethnic conflict in Turkey, but our voices can make a real difference in what our own government is allowed to get away with. When a regime that rules in our name engages in any form of mass killing, the primary question that will be asked of us is: did you speak out against it? Did you do all that you could do to stop it? Or did you remain silent?

Near the turn of the last century, two months into the US war on Spain, Charles Eliot Norton of Harvard gave an address that ended this way:

My friends, America has been compelled against the will of all her wisest and best to enter into a path of darkness and peril. Against their will she has been forced to turn back from the way of civilization to the way of barbarism, to renounce for the time her own ideals. With grief, with anxiety must the lover of his country regard the present aspect and the future prospect of the nation’s life. With serious purpose, with utter self-devotion he should prepare himself for the untried and difficult service to which it is plain he is to be called in the quick-coming years.

Two months ago America stood at the parting of the ways. Her first step is irretrievable. It depends on the virtue, on the enlightened patriotism of her children whether her future steps shall be upward to the light or downward to the darkness.