Why
Be Libertarian?
by
Murray
N. Rothbard
Mises.org
This essay
is chapter 15 of the book Egalitarianism
As a Revolt Against Nature.
Why be libertarian,
anyway? By this we mean, what's the point of the whole thing?
Why engage in a deep and lifelong commitment to the principle
and the goal of individual liberty? For such a commitment, in
our largely unfree world, means inevitably a radical disagreement
with, and alienation from, the status quo, an alienation
which equally inevitably imposes many sacrifices in money and
prestige. When life is short and the moment of victory far in
the future, why go through all this?
Incredibly,
we have found among the increasing number of libertarians in this
country many people who come to a libertarian commitment from
one or another extremely narrow and personal point of view. Many
are irresistibly attracted to liberty as an intellectual system
or as an aesthetic goal, but liberty remains for them a purely
intellectual parlor game, totally divorced from what they consider
the "real" activities of their daily lives. Others are motivated
to remain libertarians solely from their anticipation of their
own personal financial profit. Realizing that a free market would
provide far greater opportunities for able, independent men to
reap entrepreneurial profits, they become and remain libertarians
solely to find larger opportunities for business profit. While
it is true that opportunities for profit will be far greater and
more widespread in a free market and a free society, placing one's
primary emphasis on this motivation for being a libertarian
can only be considered grotesque. For in the often tortuous, difficult
and grueling path that must be trod before liberty can be achieved,
the libertarian's opportunities for personal profit will far more
often be negative than abundant.
The consequence
of the narrow and myopic vision of both the gamester and the would-be
profit maker is that neither group has the slightest interest
in the work of building a libertarian movement. And yet it is
only through building such a movement that liberty may ultimately
be achieved. Ideas, and especially radical ideas, do not advance
in the world in and by themselves, as it were in a vacuum; they
can only be advanced by people and, therefore, the development
and advancement of such people and therefore of a "movement"
becomes a prime task for the libertarian who is really
serious about advancing his goals.
Turning from
these men of narrow vision, we must also see that utilitarianism
the common ground of free-market economists is unsatisfactory
for developing a flourishing libertarian movement. While it is true
and valuable to know that a free market would bring far greater
abundance and a healthier economy to everyone, rich and poor alike,
a critical problem is whether this knowledge is enough to bring
many people to a lifelong dedication to liberty.
In short,
how many people will man the barricades and endure the many sacrifices
that a consistent devotion to liberty entails, merely so that
umpteen percent more people will have better bathtubs? Will they
not rather set up for an easy life and forget the umpteen percent
bathtubs? Ultimately, then, utilitarian economics, while indispensable
in the developed structure of libertarian thought and action,
is almost as unsatisfactory a basic groundwork for the movement
as those opportunists who simply seek a short-range profit.
It is our
view that a flourishing libertarian movement, a lifelong dedication
to liberty can only be grounded on a passion for justice. Here
must be the mainspring of our drive, the armor that will sustain
us in all the storms ahead, not the search for a quick buck, the
playing of intellectual games or the cool calculation of general
economic gains. And, to have a passion for justice, one must have
a theory of what justice and injustice are in
short, a set of ethical principles of justice and injustice, which
cannot be provided by utilitarian economics.
It is because
we see the world reeking with injustices piled one on another
to the very heavens that we are impelled to do all that we can
to seek a world in which these and other injustices will be eradicated.
Other traditional radical goals such as the "abolition
of poverty" are, in contrast to this one, truly utopian,
for man, simply by exerting his will, cannot abolish poverty.
Poverty can only be abolished through the operation of certain
economic factors notably the investment of savings in capital
which can only operate by transforming nature over a long
period of time. In short, man's will is here severely limited
by the workings of to use an old-fashioned but still valid
term natural law. But injustices are deeds that
are inflicted by one set of men on another; they are precisely
the actions of men, and, hence, they and their elimination are
subject to man's instantaneous will.
Let us take
an example: England's centuries-long occupation and brutal oppression
of the Irish people. Now if, in 1900, we had looked at the state
of Ireland, and we had considered the poverty of the Irish people,
we would have had to say: poverty could be improved by the English
getting out and removing their land monopolies, but the ultimate
elimination of poverty in Ireland, under the best of conditions,
would take time and be subject to the workings of economic law.
But the goal of ending English oppression that could have
been done by the instantaneous action of men's will: by the English
simply deciding to pull out of the country.
The fact
that of course such decisions do not take place instantaneously
is not the point; the point is that the very failure is an injustice
that has been decided upon and imposed by the perpetrators of
injustice in this case, the English government. In the
field of justice, man's will is all; men can move mountains, if
only men so decide. A passion for instantaneous justice
in short, a radical passion is therefore not utopian, as
would be a desire for the instant elimination of poverty or the
instant transformation of everyone into a concert pianist. For
instant justice could be achieved if enough people so
willed.
A true passion
for justice, then, must be radical in short, it must at
least wish to attain its goals radically and instantaneously.
Leonard E. Read, founding president of the Foundation for Economic
Education, expressed this radical spirit very aptly when he wrote
a pamphlet I'd Push the Button. The problem was what
to do about the network of price and wage controls then being
imposed on the economy by the Office of Price Administration.
Most economic liberals were timidly or "realistically" advocating
one or another form of gradual or staggered decontrols; at that
point, Mr. Read took an unequivocal and radical stand on principle:
"if there were a button on this rostrum," he began his address,
"the pressing of which would release all wage and price controls
instantaneously, I would put my finger on it and push!"[1]
The true test,
then, of the radical spirit, is the button-pushing test: if we could
push the button for instantaneous abolition of unjust invasions
of liberty, would we do it? If we would not do it, we could scarcely
call ourselves libertarians, and most of us would only do it if
primarily guided by a passion for justice.
The genuine
libertarian, then, is, in all senses of the word, an "abolitionist";
he would, if he could, abolish instantaneously all invasions of
liberty, whether it be, in the original coining of the term, slavery,
or whether it be the manifold other instances of State oppression.
He would, in the words of another libertarian in a similar connection,
"blister my thumb pushing that button!"
The libertarian
must perforce be a "button pusher" and an "abolitionist." Powered
by justice, he cannot be moved by amoral utilitarian pleas that
justice not come about until the criminals are "compensated." Thus,
when in the early 19th century, the great abolitionist movement
arose, voices of moderation promptly appeared counseling that it
would only be fair to abolish slavery if the slave masters were
financially compensated for their loss. In short, after centuries
of oppression and exploitation, the slave masters were supposed
to be further rewarded by a handsome sum mulcted by force from the
mass of innocent taxpayers! The most apt comment on this proposal
was made by the English philosophical radical Benjamin Pearson,
who remarked that "he had thought it was the slaves who should have
been compensated"; clearly, such compensation could only justly
have come from the slaveholders themselves.[2]
Antilibertarians,
and antiradicals generally, characteristically make the point
that such "abolitionism" is "unrealistic"; by making such a charge
they are hopelessly confusing the desired goal with a strategic
estimate of the probable outcome.
In framing
principle, it is of the utmost importance not to mix in strategic
estimates with the forging of desired goals. First, goals must be
formulated, which, in this case, would be the instant abolition
of slavery or whatever other statist oppression we are considering.
And we must first frame these goals without considering the probability
of attaining them. The libertarian goals are "realistic" in the
sense that they could be achieved if enough people agreed
on their desirability, and that, if achieved, they would bring about
a far better world. The "realism" of the goal can only be challenged
by a critique of the goal itself, not in the problem of
how to attain it. Then, after we have decided on the goal, we face
the entirely separate strategic question of how to attain that goal
as rapidly as possible, how to build a movement to attain it, etc.
Thus, William
Lloyd Garrison was not being "unrealistic" when, in the 1830s, he
raised the glorious standard of immediate emancipation of the slaves.
His goal was the proper one, and his strategic realism came in the
fact that he did not expect his goal to be quickly reached. Or,
as Garrison himself distinguished:
Urge
immediate abolition as earnestly as we may, it will, alas!
be gradual abolition in the end. We have never said that slavery
would be overthrown by a single blow; that it ought to be,
we shall always contend.[3]
Actually,
in the realm of the strategic, raising the banner of pure and
radical principle is generally the fastest way of arriving at
radical goals. For if the pure goal is never brought to the fore,
there will never be any momentum developed for driving toward
it. Slavery would never have been abolished at all if the abolitionists
had not raised the hue and cry thirty years earlier; and, as things
came to pass, the abolition was at virtually a single blow rather
than gradual or compensated.[4]
But
above and beyond the requirements of strategy lie the commands of
justice. In his famous editorial that launched The Liberator
at the beginning of 1831, William Lloyd Garrison repented his previous
adoption of the doctrine of gradual abolition:
I seize
this opportunity to make a full and unequivocal recantation,
and thus publicly to ask pardon of my God, of my country,
and of my brethren, the poor slaves, for having uttered a
sentiment so full of timidity, injustice and absurdity.
Upon being
reproached for the habitual severity and heat of his language,
Garrison retorted: "I have need to be all on fire, for I have
mountains of ice about me to melt." It is this spirit that must
mark the man truly dedicated to the cause of liberty.[5]
Notes
[1]
Leonard E. Read, I'd Push the Button (New York: Joseph
D. McGuire, 1946), p. 3.
[2]
William D. Grampp, The
Manchester School of Economics (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford
University Press, 1960), p. 59.
[3]
Quoted in William H. and Jane H. Pease, eds., The
Antislavery Argument (Indianapolis: Robbs-Merrill, 1965),
p. xxxv.
[4]
At the conclusion of a brilliant philosophical critique of the
charge of "unrealism" and its confusion of the good and the
currently probable, Professor Philbrook declares:
Only
one type of serious defense of a policy is open to an economist
or anyone else: he must maintain that the policy is good.
True 'realism' is the same thing men have always meant by
wisdom: to decide the immediate in the light of the ultimate.
Clarence
Philbrook, "'Realism' in Policy Espousal," American Economic
Review (December, 1953): 859.
[5]
For the quotes from Garrison, see Louis Ruchames, ed., The
Abolitionists (New York: Capricorn Books, 1964), p. 31,
and Fawn M. Brodie, "Who Defends the Abolitionist?" in Martin
Duberman, ed., The
Antislavery Vanguard (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University
Press, 1965), p. 67. The Duberman work is a storehouse of valuable
material, including refutations of the common effort by those
committed to the status quo to engage in psychological smearing
of radicals in general and abolitionists in particular. See especially
Martin Duberman, "The Northern Response to Slavery," in ibid.,
pp. 406–13.
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