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Written by Jordan Brown
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Friday, 31 October 2008 14:25 |
The Comprehensive Philosophy of the Statist
Few readers of this site need to be reminded that the foreign policy of the United States has strayed far from the peaceful approach prescribed by the Founding Fathers. The United States military is currently occupying Iraq and Afghanistan, leading strikes into Pakistan and Syria, and spoiling for war with Iran. Additionally, there are troops stationed in 131 other nations around the world, and key members of the military are calling for bigger, better nukes.
Those who start these conflicts supply ever-willing radio hosts and bloggers with the talking points for wartime apologia. Defeating radical Islam, spreading democracy, and winning the war on terror are offered up as reasons for invading small villages in Syria and bombing weddings in Afghanistan. But whether those who spout this rhetoric actually believe it is ethical to spread ‘democracy’ at gun point, or just use such explanations to excuse their greed for oil and defense contracts seems irrelevant: their actions speak louder than their words.
It is important to understand that the bankrupt philosophy of the statist recognizes no borders, and the atrocities we see in Iraq today will be increasingly visited upon the American people in the future if radical changes are not made. While such a doom and gloom pronouncement may seem excessive, a quick review of websites devoted to exposing government abuses will show that respect for the Constitution as a restraining document, and for the principles it embodies, have long been willfully abandoned.
So what are the core beliefs of many of those Washington, as exemplified by their foreign policy decisions, and to a lesser extent their domestic policies? The most obvious is that force can be used to achieve any goal. Brute force is the first resort of the statist, whether it’s bombing other countries or arresting people for consensual ‘crimes’ like smoking marijuana or driving without a seat belt. That the state’s cure for perceived ills is worse than the illness itself can be attested to by the huge number of non-violent offenders in the prison system or the over 1 million dead Iraqis now ‘free’ from Saddam Hussein’s tyranny.
The second belief is equally destructive to life, liberty, and property. Its adherents believe that it is morally acceptable to kill or maim innocents when pursuing criminals or enemy combatants. This is a right that was certainly never inherent to individuals and thus could never be conferred upon a government that supposedly derives its authority from the consent of the governed.
While pre-modern warfare, or even modern warfare prosecuted against an invading army could be restricted to killing aggressors only, the offensive wars of modern nation state cannot: swords, arrows, and even rifles can be directed at combatants, but bombs dropped from thousands of feet will kill innocent civilians.
Domestically, the mass arrests of peaceful protesters, broad application of asset forfeiture laws, various spying programs, and a 90% prosecution rate for criminal cases indicate the state’s willingness to restrict, surveil, imprison, and even kill innocents to get the alleged bad guys, which is an egregious violation of both the Constitution and in direct contradiction of the ethical code which the majority of individuals adhere to in their own lives.
As Murray Rothbard stated on page 224 of The Ethics of Liberty:
“To be more concrete, if Jones finds that his property is being stolen by Smith, Jones has the right to repel him and try to catch him, but Jones has no right to repel him by bombing a building and murdering innocent people or to catch him by spraying machine gun fire into an innocent crowd. If he does this, he is as much (or more) a criminal aggressor as Smith is.
“The same criteria hold if Smith and Jones each have men on his side, i-e. if "war" breaks out between Smith and his henchmen and Jones and his bodyguards. If Smith and a group of henchmen aggress against Jones, and Jones and his bodyguards pursue the Smith gang to their lair, we may cheer Jones on in his endeavor; and we, and others in society interested in repelling aggression, may contribute financially or personally to Jones's cause. But Jones and his men have no right, any more than does Smith, to aggress against anyone else in the course of their "just war": to steal others' property in order to finance their pursuit, to conscript others into their posse by use of violence, or to kill others in the course of their struggle to capture the Smith forces. If Jones and his men should do any of these things, they become criminals as fully as Smith, and they too become subject to whatever sanctions are meted out against criminality.”
A third belief evident in both the domestic and foreign policy of the statists is that the individual citizens of nation states can and should be treated as a collective whole. Wars are waged against entire populations based on the actions of a few of their leaders—leaders the interventionists love to remind us were not democratically elected—or the actions of a small minority of the population. The sins of individuals like Sadam Hussein and Osama bin Laden are inflicted on the vast majority of the populace through oppression and the continuation of centuries-long conflicts, and for another country to bomb those innocent civilians because they live within the same national borders as authoritarian rulers and terrorists is merely heaping more sorrow on the heads of the oppressed. This collectivist approach to foreign policy applies not only to military policy, but also trade policy, as entire populations are punished to make a political point and individuals are prohibited from trading with other one another because of national borders.
Domestically, this thinking has led to wealth-distribution programs, racial quotas, affirmative action, and various corporatist policies promoting one company or industry at the expense of others. The inherent worth and unique nature of individuals is disregarded, and convenient labels and groupings are applied to divide people by race, religion, sexual orientation, social status, and income.
A final belief of the statists is that aggressive preemption is permissible, and in some cases the only morally acceptable course of action. War against Iraq was sold as a necessary step to prevent Saddam Hussein’s use or sale of WMDs, and the case against Iran is being built on the same grounds. The hypocrisy of waging aggressive war to prevent aggressive war is apparently lost on many of those in Washington, but the point need not be belabored here.
In our own country, the same politicians enact countless laws to punish and restrict individuals who might, at some point in the future, cause damage to person or property. Examples of this abound, but a particularly poignant case was raised recently by Karen DeCoster on LewRockwell.com:
“On some Saturdays the feds fly their birds very low over the residential areas, back-and-forth - surely it's a show of force, but people, generally speaking, seem to like it. The worst flyover ever was before game #1 of the World Series at Comerica Park two years ago, which is right across the street from my office. I was on a conference call with colleagues from out-of-state, on the 21st floor, and these things came right between the downtown high rises and buzzed the building at a volume that was deafening. People on the other end of the line said it sounded like the building blew up. The message to take from this is that if I drink a couple of beers and get behind the wheel, I am a menace to society because I might be too impaired to drive safely, and therefore I might injure or kill someone. So arrest me and throw me in jail because I "could have" caused harm. If I drive way over the speed limit, the same concept applies: I might kill someone so I am deemed to be driving recklessly, and the penalty will be mega-fines. And on and on. But how do those situations compare to a band of jets doing ultra-risky flyovers between downtown high-rise buildings in a very populated city during the middle of a weekday?”
Domestic policy will mirror foreign policy, as the same people are determining both. A foreign policy of aggression should stand not only as a warning to freedom lovers about the horrors countries can wreak with warfare, but also the threat that the welfare/warfare state poses to its own people. |
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