Some people might see an internal contradiction between Hoppe’s repeated use of the term “dominated” to describe the role of certain privileged segments of society, and the idea that “libertarian” ideas were formulated by societies based on domination.

But obviously Hoppe does not, since he makes little effort to hide his salivation at the prospect that his avowedly principled belief in self-ownership, non-aggression and rules of initial acquisition will have the effect — just coincidentally, of course — of perpetuating the domination of these same white heterosexual males. So the primary beneficiaries of the ideas of liberty that straight white men invented will be those same straight white men.

Feed 44:

• http://www.c4ss.org/
• http://www.youtube.com/user/c4ssvideos
• https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/c4ss-media/id872405202?mt=2
• http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/smash-walls-radio/c4ss-media?refid=stpr
• https://twitter.com/C4SSmedia

Bitcoin tips welcome:

• 1N1pF6fLKAGg4nH7XuqYQbKYXNxCnHBWLB

The Left… is convinced of the fundamental equality of man, that all men are “created equal.” It does not deny the patently obvious, of course: that there are environmental and physiological differences, i.e., that some people live in the mountains and others on the seaside, or that some men are tall and others short, some white and others black, some male and others female, etc.. But the Left does deny the existence of mental differences or, insofar as these are too apparent to be entirely denied, it tries to explain them away as “accidental.”…

In fact the Left (or at least most members of it) does not deny that there are differences in individual ability and intellect. But never mind that. Hoppe isn’t satisfied to stop there:

…[The right libertarian] realistically notices that libertarianism, as an intellectual system, was first developed and furthest elaborated in the Western world, by white males, in white male dominated societies. That it is in white, heterosexual male dominated societies, where adherence to libertarian principles is the greatest and the deviations from them the least severe (as indicated by comparatively less evil and extortionist State policies). That it is white heterosexual men, who have demonstrated the greatest ingenuity, industry, and economic prowess. And that it is societies dominated by white heterosexual males, and in particular by the most successful among them, which have produced and accumulated the greatest amount of capital goods and achieved the highest average living standards.

Some people might see an internal contradiction between Hoppe’s repeated use of the term “dominated” to describe the role of certain privileged segments of society, and the idea that “libertarian” ideas were formulated by societies based on domination.

But obviously Hoppe does not, since he makes little effort to hide his salivation at the prospect that his avowedly principled belief in self-ownership, non-aggression and rules of initial acquisition will have the effect — just coincidentally, of course — of perpetuating the domination of these same white heterosexual males. So the primary beneficiaries of the ideas of liberty that straight white men invented will be those same straight white men.

Hoppe is fond of arguing that every single bit of naturally scarce property should be assigned to “some specified individual.” From there, in a typical restatement of his stock argument, he goes on to assume the universal appropriation of all land within a country. And with all land in the entire country, including roads, under individual ownership, it follows that nobody can enter the country or travel along any stretch of road without the permission of some private landowner or landowners. This, at one stroke, solves the “problem” of immigration, since — although national borders as such do not exist — no one but an invited employee or bracero can enter a universally appropriated America without trespassing on somebody’s land. It also solves the gay rights “problem” since, the country being composed overwhelmingly of God-fearing Christian folk like Hoppe himself, nobody will want “those people” on their property. If you find the libertarianism of Thomas Paine and William Godwin hard to stomach, through the miracle of universal appropriation you (assuming you’re a straight white propertied male) can make your own “free” neo-feudal society in the image of The Handmaid’s Tale.

Maybe everybody else who’s not straight, white or male will benefit from having those smart straight white men managing them for their own good.

Hoppe’s ideas of universal appropriation don’t seem to hold up so well, though, at least from the perspective of someone without Herr Doktor Professor Hoppe’s Mount Rushmore-sized brain. Even among right-libertarians, the usual standard of legitimacy in private appropriation of land is that of John Locke and Murray Rothbard: actual occupancy and use. A piece of land that is undeveloped and unaltered is, by definition, unowned. And the vast majority of land in the United States, as no less a libertarian than Albert Jay Nock noted, is vacant and unimproved. The only way — now and in the foreseeable future — that land could ever be universally appropriated is through what Franz Oppenheimer called “political appropriation” and Nock called “law-made property.” This is the same thing that Rothbard — a name you’d think would carry some weight with Hoppe — called engrossment: the enclosure of land not yet occupied or developed, in order to collect tribute from its rightful owners, the first people to occupy it and put it to use.

Leaving aside Hoppe’s views on the universal appropriation of land and exclusion therefrom of “undesirables,” he also neglects the fact that the benevolent, naturally libertarian white men in the “civilized” West spent a few centuries robbing, pillaging and enslaving the non-European parts of the world that it colonized, before they decided to share the blessings of liberty with them. In the process of doing so, they also destroyed an awful lot of preexisting civilization and gutted a lot of civil society — and wealth — there.

Jawaharlal Nehru argued with some plausibility that Bengal was the poorest part of India because that was its first site of infection by the disease of British colonialism, via Warren Hastings. The British systematically stamped out the Indian textile industry as a competitor with Manchester, and also (starting with Hastings’ Permanent Settlement) robbed most of the population of their property in land and turned local elites into wealth extraction conduits for Empire.

And when these good-hearted white Western males they finally did get around to sharing these nifty new ideas of liberty with the people of color they ruled, they kept all the stuff they’d looted in the meantime — as a reward, I suppose, for their selflessness in inventing liberty for the good of all those brown and black people who would otherwise never have heard of it.

It almost makes you wonder, though, if there wasn’t some other, less costly way those unfortunate people of color might have acquired ideas of liberty.

Speaking of which, I almost forgot David Graeber’s account of consensus-based decision-making as an almost universal phenomenon throughout history, as opposed to Hoppe’s idea of “human rights” and “democracy” being some unique creation of the White Male Canon that required a Manhattan Project-level of effort and genius to come up with. Western conservatives (of whom Hoppe is one) typically see human liberty and self-government as the kind of advance ideas that only white males in places like Periclean Athens or Philadelphia ca. 1787 could come up with. On this assumption, Graeber comments:

Of course it’s the peculiar bias of Western historiography that this is the only sort of democracy that is seen to count as “democracy” at all. We are usually told that democracy originated in ancient Athens — like science, or philosophy, it was a Greek invention. It’s never entirely clear what this is supposed to mean. Are we supposed to believe that before the Athenians, it never really occurred to anyone, anywhere, to gather all the members of their community in order to make joint decisions in a way that gave everyone equal say? That would be ridiculous. Clearly there have been plenty of egalitarian societies in history — many far more egalitarian than Athens, many that must have existed before 500 BCE — and obviously, they must have had some kind of procedure for coming to decisions for matters of collective importance. Yet somehow, it is always assumed that these procedures, whatever they might have been, could not have been, properly speaking, “democratic.”

* * *

The real reason for the unwillingness of most scholars to see a Sulawezi or Tallensi village council as “democratic” — well, aside from simple racism, the reluctance to admit anyone Westerners slaughtered with such relative impunity were quite on the level as Pericles — is that they do not vote. Now, admittedly, this is an interesting fact. Why not? If we accept the idea that a show of hands, or having everyone who supports a proposition stand on one side of the plaza and everyone against stand on the other, are not really such incredibly sophisticated ideas that they never would have occurred to anyone until some ancient genius “invented” them, then why are they so rarely employed? Again, we seem to have an example of explicit rejection. Over and over, across the world, from Australia to Siberia, egalitarian communities have preferred some variation on consensus process. Why?

The explanation I would propose is this: it is much easier, in a face-to-face community, to figure out what most members of that community want to do, than to figure out how to convince those who do not to go along with it. Consensus decision-making is typical of societies where there would be no way to compel a minority to agree with a majority decision—either because there is no state with a monopoly of coercive force, or because the state has nothing to do with local decision-making. If there is no way to compel those who find a majority decision distasteful to go along with it, then the last thing one would want to do is to hold a vote: a public contest which someone will be seen to lose. Voting would be the most likely means to guarantee humiliations, resentments, hatreds, in the end, the destruction of communities. What is seen as an elaborate and difficult process of finding consensus is, in fact, a long process of making sure no one walks away feeling that their views have been totally ignored.

* * *

“We” — whether as “the West” (whatever that means), as the “modern world,” or anything else — are not really as special as we like to think we are; …we’re not the only people ever to have practiced democracy; …in fact, rather than disseminating democracy around the world, “Western” governments have been spending at least as much time inserting themselves into the lives of people who have been practicing democracy for thousands of years, and in one way or another, telling them to cut it out.

Those poor brown folks also arguably had more respect for the idea of “property” than their white instructors, when you consider that the white men selflessly extending the benefits of Western civilization to the rest of the world had already robbed the great majority of their own domestic population of their property (e.g. the Enclosures in England) before they decided that property rights were sacred. And that they went on to loot most of the property of the people in the Third World before they finally adjudged the locals as capable of enjoying the blessings of liberty without white supervision. But by that point, again, the commandment “Thou shalt respect property rights — starting NOW!” wasn’t retroactive — it didn’t apply to the enormous mass of wealth those white men and their ancestors had already looted, and continued to sit on. So the primary effect of those Western ideas about “property rights” was to protect the property rights of landed elites and transnational corporations who retained possession of all the land and mineral resources that previous generations of libertarian Western white men had looted for them under colonialism.

So as it turns out, ordinary people throughout the world had already somehow managed to find ways of dealing with each other as equals and settling their differences peacefully without white Western males thinking up libertarianism for them, and when white Western males finally came around with their new and improved idea of Capital-L Liberty they killed, enslaved or robbed most of the human race as compensation for their benevolence.

There’s a great line in Cool Hand Luke that applies here. One of the guards at the prison farm tells Luke that the clanking of the irons he’s wearing will “remind you of what I’ve been telling you — for your own good.” And Luke responds: “Wish you’d stop bein’ so good to me, Cap’n.”

Although the post-Soviet thaw in former Eastern Bloc countries was warped and perverted by neoliberal “disaster capitalism,” by the corporate enclosure of the former state economies, and by the incorporation of those countries into the global corporate system, the events of 1989-91 were still on the whole a great victory for the people of the Soviet Bloc. For the rest of the world, not so much.

However bloody and authoritarian the Soviet system of power was within the USSR and its Warsaw Pact satellites — and it was very much so — when it came to external military aggression and subversion it was entirely in the shadow of the United States and the American bloc. As Noam Chomsky once said, the Cold War — as a first approximation — amounted to a war by the USSR against its satellites and by the US against the Third World.

There was also a direct superpower dynamic at work, but it was comparatively weak. The general outlines of the post-war order — the IMF and World Bank integrating national economies under the control of American corporate capital, and the US armed forces (under UN Security Council figleaf) operating as enforcer against any national defection from global corporate rule — functioned exactly as they had been designed to in US planning circles from 1944 on, as if the USSR had never existed.

The Soviet Union did indeed sometimes act as a spoiler outside its bloc, when it could aid a national liberation movement at relatively low risk to itself and increase the costs of Empire to the United States. And even the outside possibility of direct military confrontation with a nuclear superpower probably deterred some American actions on the margin (like an invasion of Iran or the introduction of ground troops in the 1973 Arab-Israeli War).

But on the whole the USSR was only a lacuna or blank space — labelled “Here Be Commies” — on the map of the neoliberal Pax Americana. Outside that encapsulated regional system of domination, America acted as the largest and most aggressive imperial power in human history, directly invading or subverting and overthrowing more governments than any empire that came before it. The “Black Book of Communism” is a bloody track record indeed. But the Black Book of American Imperialism would include the millions of deaths inflicted on Indochina after the US took over France’s role maintaining a landed oligarchy in power in Saigon, the hundreds of thousands (conservative estimate) killed by Suharto after the US-sponsored coup in Indonesia and the much larger death toll from Mobutu after the assassination of Lumumba, the countless deaths in Indonesia’s genocidal assault on East Timor, the hundreds of thousands or millions killed by Central American death squads since the overthrow of Arbenz, the victims tortured by military dictators in Brazil, Chile, and the other South American countries swept by Operation Condor, and the millions starved or bombed to death in Iraq since 1990.

The fall of the USSR as even a partial counterweight resulted in totally unrivalled and unchecked US domination in the quarter century since. In that time, not only has the US-backed global system of power consolidated and increased in authoritarianism, but American domestic authoritarianism has ratcheted upwards with it.

But even more important than the scale and aggressiveness of the American empire, compared to the Soviet one, is the nature of the society it serves. As with the Soviet Union and its satellites, the foreign policy of the US and its major allies serves the interests of a domestic system of class power.

The American corporate-state system of power, like the old Soviet bureaucratic state socialist, hinges on the control of information. In the Soviet bloc, this meant censoring the press and licensing the use of photocopiers to prevent the free flow of information that would challenge the regime’s framing of events or undermine its claims to legitimacy. In the American bloc, this means corporate control of the replication and distribution of information in order to extract profit from it.

Globally, this means that so-called “intellectual property” is central to the profit models of all the dominant sectors of the world corporate economy. Some of the most profitable sectors — entertainment and software — depend on the direct sale of proprietary information that could reproduced virtually free of charge. Others — drugs, electronics, genetically modified seeds — depend on patents on product designs or production processes. Others — virtually all offshored manufacturing — depends on the use of patents and trademarks to offshore actual production to Third World sweatshops while retaining a legal monopoly on the sole right to purchase and dispose of the product. These global corporate sectors would probably collapse without the draconian “intellectual property” standards being exported by the US in the form of “Free Trade Agreements” (which are obviously nothing of the kind).

Since the fall of the USSR the United States has acted aggressively not only to punish challenges to its status as hegemon (in Iraq and the Balkans), but has created a legal framework of treaties and statutes (NAFTA, the Uruguay Round of GATT, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, and assorted “Free Trade Agreements” that essentially integrate most of the planet into its model of corporate capitalism).

Domestically, corporate power’s central reliance on information control has meant the use of DRM to make movies, music, and software uncopyable, the legal prohibition of developing or disseminating techniques for breaking DRM, and the increased use of lawless, extrajudicial powers like direct executive seizure of websites without charge or trial based on allegations of hosting “pirated” content. Joe Biden personally supervised — from Disney Headquarters! — a Justice Department task force that took down dozens of such websites in violation, in total violation of the Fourth and Fifth Amendments. Internet Service Providers have assumed the role of policing their own paying customers on behalf of the movie and music industry, discontinuing service based on uninvestigated complaints of infringement. The global trade agreements mentioned above are pushing worldwide adoption of the US’s harsh new “intellectual property” law.

Meanwhile, the domestic security state in the US — already mushrooming out of control with Drug War-related militarization of SWAT teams and Clinton’s 1996 Counter-Terrorism law — grew by further leaps and bounds after 9/11. The TSA airport screening infrastructure and its industrial contractors, NSA’s illegal telephone and Internet surveillance and the ISPs and social networks that cooperate with it, and the intersection with increasing police militarization with military-style suppression of protests like Occupy and Ferguson, have coalesced into a Security-Industrial Complex worth tens of billions of dollars and a law enforcement establishment operating almost totally outside the bounds of law.

So Western-style corporate capitalism, and the global economy legally integrated into it (with the ultimate backing of the US armed forces), amounts to a DRM Curtain.

Of course IP isn’t the only form of state authoritarianism involved in maintaining corporate rule. Another central purpose of US foreign policy is to uphold neocolonial control of land and natural resources throughout the Third World by transnational corporations. Western capital, in alliance with domestic ruling elites, perpetuates the original theft of those resources by European colonial empires. Going back to the Spanish and English in the New World and Warren Hastings in Bengal, these empires enclosed land and evicted peasants by the millions, converting their former holdings to cash crop agriculture. They seized mineral deposits and worked them with slave labor. The heirs to this robbery — the transnational mining and oil corporations, and native landed oligarchies in collusion with global agribusiness companies — continue to loot hundreds of billions of dollars in wealth from the Global South. And they rely on the US military and CIA to intervene when the people of those countries try to take back what is rightfully theirs (as with the overthrow of Arbenz in Guatemala).

Between the Drug War and the War on Terror (which are really a war on the Fourth, Fifth and Sixth amendments), and the current expansion of their enforcement and surveillance into the War on IP Piracy, the US has a brutal gulag system with a larger share of its population imprisoned than any other country except North Korea.

Perhaps most ironic, the American corporate economy is even challenging the old Soviet system in the one area that was its pride and joy — central planning and bureaucratic ossification. Since the rise of a stable corporate economy a century ago, with major manufacturing industries dominated by a handful of oligopoly firms, the large American corporation has been a centrally planned bureaucracy much like the old Soviet industrial ministries. They ignore or punish the people on the spot with actual knowledge of the situation, recklessly interfere with their judgement by diktat, irrationally misallocate billions in capital investment, and use an internal transfer pricing system about as divorced from reality as that of Gosplan. And since the neoliberal revolution and the rise of Cowboy Capitalism in the 80s, corporations have been taken over internally by a self-perpetuating oligarchy of self-dealing MBAs virtually indistinguishable from the Soviet nomenklatura. They are able to survive despite their gross inefficiency and corruption for the same reason the Soviet planned economy did for so long: they exist within a larger, statist system of power that protects them from outside competition.

So in place of the world of 25 years ago, with a really bad global superpower partially constrained by a really bad regional superpower enforcing centrally planned bureaucratic oligarchy on a portion of the Eurasian landmass, what we have today is a single, unconstrained really horrible global superpower enforcing centrally planned monopoly finance capitalism on the entire planet. In the place of an Iron Curtain across central Europe and the Korean peninsula policed by barbed wire and machine gun towers, we have a global Empire with a DRM Curtain policed by drones and carrier groups. The USSR is dead. Long live the USSR.

But I can’t leave it at that. This new system of power is no more inevitable, or even sustainable, than the one that collapsed twenty-five years ago. It does an even poorer job, in actual practice, of controlling information than the Soviet regime did. The Soviets learned that locking up photocopiers couldn’t stop the circulation of Samizdat literature, but their efforts to do so were a resounding success compared to how their American successors have fared against The Pirate Bay, Chelsea Manning, Wikileaks, Anonymous and Edward Snowden. The enforcement technologies that “intellectual property” depends on are being — have been — rapidly undermined by libertarian technologies of circumvention. Area denial technologies for challenging American military power projection are many times cheaper, and have an innovation cycle far more rapid, than American technologies for military aggression. The days of this Evil Empire, like the earlier one, are numbered.

Herbert Spencer, the great English libertarian philosopher of the late 19th and early 20th century, eloquently expressed radical liberalism’s antipathy to war and militarism. His writings are full of warnings about the dangers of war and conquest. Young Spencer saw and cheered the rise of the industrial type of society, which was displacing what he called the militant type. The industrial type was founded on equal freedom, consent, and contract, the militant on hierarchy, command, and force. Yet he lived long enough to see a reversal, and his later writings lamented the ascendancy of the old militant traits. We have a good deal to learn from the much-maligned Spencer, who is inexplicably condemned as favoring the “law of the jungle.” This is so laughably opposite of the truth that one couldn’t be blamed for concluding that the calumny is the product of bad faith. As Auburn University philosopher Roderick Long writes,

The textbook summary is absurd, of course. Far from being a proponent of “might makes right,” Spencer wrote that the “desire to command is essentially a barbarous desire” because it “implies an appeal to force,” which is “inconsistent with the first law of morality” and “radically wrong.” While Spencer opposed tax-funded welfare programs, he strongly supported voluntary charity, and indeed devoted ten chapters of his Principles of Ethics to a discussion of the duty of “positive beneficence.”

Spencer jumped on the issues of war and peace right out of the gate. His first book, Social Statics (1851), contains a chapter, “Government Colonization,” that examines the effects of imperialism on both the home and subjugated populations. While formal colonization has gone out of style, many of its key characteristics have been preserved in a new form; thus Spencer’s observations are entirely pertinent.

He starts by pointing out that the “parent” country’s government must violate the rights of its own citizens when it engages in colonial conquest and rule. Spencer advocated just enough government to protect the freedom of the citizens who live under it (although the first edition of his book included the chapter “The Right to Ignore the State,” which he removed from later editions), and he claims that the money spent on colonies necessarily is money not needed to protect that freedom. He writes,

That a government cannot undertake to administer the affairs of a colony, and to support for it a judicial staff, a constabulary, a garrison, and so forth, without trespassing against the parent society, scarcely needs pointing out. Any expenditure for these purposes, be it like our own some three and a half millions sterling a year, or but a few thousands, involves a breach of state-duty. The taking from men property beyond what is needful for the better securing of their rights, we have seen to be an infringement of their rights. Colonial expenditure cannot be met without property being so taken. Colonial expenditure is therefore unjustifiable.

Spencer proceeds to demolish the argument that foreign acquisitions increase the wealth of the parent society, as though such acquisitions are analogous to voluntary trade relations. He writes,

Experience is fast teaching us that distant dependencies are burdens, and not acquisitions. And thus this earliest motive for state-colonization — the craving for wider possessions — will very soon be destroyed by the conviction that territorial aggression is as impolitic as it is unjust.

Any true economic benefits from dealing with foreign populations can be obtained through free trade, he says. He invokes the law of comparative advantage to argue that the parent society loses, not gains, when the government coercively creates artificial foreign markets for products the society can’t produce as efficiently as others can.

As for those on the receiving end of colonial policy, Spencer was blunt: “We … meet nothing but evil results. It is a prettily sounding expression that of mother-country protection, but a very delusive one. If we are to believe those who have known the thing rather than the name, there is but little of the maternal about it.” While the worst practices, he adds, were less common in his time, “kindred iniquities are continued.”

We have but to glance over the newspapers published in our foreign possessions, to see that the arbitrary rule of the Colonial Office is no blessing. Chronic irritation, varying in intensity from that of which petitions are symptomatic, to that exhibited in open rebellions, is habitually present in these forty-six scattered dependencies which statesmen have encumbered us with.

He condemns “the pitiless taxation, that wrings from the poor ryots nearly half the produce of the soil” and “the cunning despotism which uses native soldiers to maintain and extend native subjection — a despotism under which, not many years since, a regiment of sepoys was deliberately massacred, for refusing to march without proper clothing.”

Down to our own day the police authorities league with wealthy scamps, and allow the machinery of the law to be used for purposes of extortion. Down to our own day, so-called gentlemen will ride their elephants through the crops of impoverished peasants; and will supply themselves with provisions from the native villages without paying for them. And down to our own day, it is common with the people in the interior to run into the woods at sight of a European!

Spencer wonders,

Is it not, then, sufficiently clear that this state-colonization is as indefensible on the score of colonial welfare, as on that of home interests? May we not reasonably doubt the propriety of people on one side of the earth being governed by officials on the other? Would not these transplanted societies probably manage their affairs better than we can do it for them?

No one can fail to see that these cruelties, these treacheries, these deeds of blood and rapine, for which European nations in general have to blush, are mainly due to the carrying on of colonization under state-management, and with the help of state-funds and state-force.

Spencer was keenly aware that such criticism of the government was regarded as unpatriotic. In 1902, near the end of his life, he turned his attention to that charge.

In an essay titled “Patriotism,” included in his collection Facts and Comments, he begins, “Were anyone to call me dishonest or untruthful he would touch me to the quick. Were he to say that I am unpatriotic, he would leave me unmoved.”

England may have done things in the past to advance freedom, Spencer says, but “there are traits, unhappily of late more frequently displayed, which do the reverse.”

Contemplation of the acts by which England has acquired over eighty possessions — settlements, colonies, protectorates, &c. — does not arouse feelings of satisfaction. The transitions from missionaries to resident agents, then to officials having armed forces, then to punishments of those who resist their rule, ending in so-called “pacification” — these processes of annexation, now gradual and now sudden, as that of the new Indian province and that of Barotziland, which was declared a British colony with no more regard for the wills of the inhabiting people than for those of the inhabiting beasts – do not excite sympathy with their perpetrators.… If because my love of country does not survive these and many other adverse experiences I am called unpatriotic — well, I am content to be so called.

“To me the cry — ‘Our country, right or wrong!’ seems detestable,” he continues.

Spencer gave no ground on this matter, which he made obvious with a story he relates toward the end of his essay.

Some years ago I gave my expression to my own feeling — anti-patriotic feeling, it will doubtless be called — in a somewhat startling way. It was at the time of the second Afghan war, when, in pursuance of what were thought to be “our interests,” we were invading Afghanistan. News had come that some of our troops were in danger. At the Athenæum Club a well-known military man — then a captain but now a general — drew my attention to a telegram containing this news, and read it to me in a manner implying the belief that I should share his anxiety. I astounded him by replying — “When men hire themselves out to shoot other men to order, asking nothing about the justice of their cause, I don’t care if they are shot themselves.” [Emphasis added.]

Spencer was second to none in his antimilitarism and anti-imperialism, that is, his love of universal individual liberty and all forms of voluntary social cooperation. With heads held high, libertarians can claim him as one of their own.

In un suo sorprendente articolo, Daniel McCarthy, il lodevole direttore di The American Conservative (TAC), scrive: “L’impero britannico prima, e quello americano poi,crearono e mantennero un ordine mondiale in cui il liberalismo [classico] poté fiorire.” In altre parole, come scrive in Why Liberalism Means Empire, “Liberalismo e impero si rafforzano reciprocamente in vari modi.” Dunque, se vogliamo costruire una società liberale e democratica che duri nel tempo, dobbiamo riconoscere la necessità di un impero globale imposto dagli Stati Uniti.

Dico che l’articolo è sorprendente perché da anni TAC rappresenta il luogo in cui è possibile trovare critiche fondate alla politica estera interventista del tipo di George W. Bush e Barack Obama. Questo, però, è un richiamo al globalismo americano, anche se non del tipo che Bush e Obama accetterebbero.

Mentre libertari e liberali classici storicamente vedono gli imperi come nemici della libero mercato e della libertà in patria, per non parlare della libertà e della tranquillità di chi è soggetto ad un governo coloniale, McCarthy ne approfitta per rivedere questa posizione. Senza uno spazio protetto fornito da un impero liberale, prima britannico e ora americano, le democrazie liberali non avrebbero potuto emergere e fiorire, insiste. Il fatto, però, è che la dipendenza del liberalismo dall’esistenza di un impero è sempre stata incompresa. Molti pensatori pro-libertà considerano il coinvolgimento britannico in Europa nel 1914-18, e quello americano nel 1941-45, due errori terribili. Sbagliato, dice McCarthy. Gli interventi erano necessari per mantenere libertà e prosperità in patria:

Oggi i liberali antimperialisti, che siano libertari o progressisti, commettono lo stesso errore dei pacifisti britannici e dei non-interventisti americani tra le due guerre: credono che la complessità ideologica del mondo, così come determinata dallo stato che meglio riesce a proiettare la propria potenza, non abbia necessariamente a che fare con i loro valori e le loro abitudini a casa. Credono possibile un liberalismo senza impero.

Ma scarseggiano le prove storiche.

McCarthy non è un wilsoniano, né un neoconservatore amante delle crociate volte alla conversione al liberalismo democratico; capisce che il liberalismo è il prodotto di una lenta evoluzione sociale. Non ha tempo da perdere con chi nutre “l’ambizione napoleonica di liberare il pianeta con la rivoluzione.”

E poi scrive: “l’imperialismo liberale non è diretto alla conquista per la conquista ma al mantenimento di un ambiente con conduca al liberalismo.”

E avverte:

Così come alcuni idealisti negano che il potere sia alla base dell’ordine pacifico su cui poggia una democrazia liberale, altri, più pericolosi, negano che il potere sia un bene limitato, che non può semplicemente esistere perché lo si desidera. Questo punto di vista è caratteristico dei neoconservatori…

Il suo, al contrario, è un impero molto più modesto, un impero che cerca solo di mantenere l’ordine globale proteggendoi traffici commerciali, tra le altre cose, e impedendo l’ascesa di una tirannia che miri ad estendere il proprio potere. Questo impero vuole “difendere le condizioni in cui, per felice caso fortuito, il liberalismo può sopravvivere e crescere, se cresce, attraverso un lento processo di assimilazione.”

McCarthy pensa che si possano combinare antimperialismo e antiliberalismo, e cita Pat Buchanan e George Kennan come esempi: “vorrebbero che l’America somigliasse più a Sparta che ad Atene.” Ma l’americano moderno rifiuta questo punto di vista: “Dopo duecento anni, il liberalismo è penetrato troppo in profondità nelle fibre del carattere nazionale americano perché un nuovo percorso verso l’autosufficienza nazionale possa riscuotere approvazione popolare.”

Dunque il liberalismo è qui e ci resterà, e McCarthy crede che liberalismo e antimperialismo siano logicamente incoerenti per natura. Lui non celebra questa “amara verità del liberalismo dalle caratteristiche imperiali.” È che è così e basta.

Così lui opta per un “realismo conservatore” che riconosce “che l’America ancora per molto tempo non potrà diventare qualcosa di diverso da un paese largamente liberale e democratico, e pensa che una democrazia liberale richieda un sistema di sicurezza internazionale delicatamente equilibrato retto da un impero o da una potenza egemonica”. Ovvero, almeno per il futuro immaginabile, gli Stati Uniti.

Il punto chiave delle tesi di McCarthy è che “il potere sta alla base dell’ordine pacifico su cui poggia la democrazia liberale.” Scrive: “La democrazia liberale è innaturale. È un prodotto del potere e della sicurezza, non fa parte degli istinti sociali dell’uomo. È peculiare piuttosto che universale, accidentale piuttosto che teologicamente preordinato.”

Questo mette McCarthy in contrasto con il cuore della tradizione liberale, che individuava il seme della libertà individuale e della cooperazione volontaria nella natura sociale e razionale del genere umano. Adam Smith parla di “libertà naturale”. Thomas Paine scrive in Rights of Man che “gran parte” dell’ordine sociale non è il prodotto del potere, ovvero lo stato, ma della “interdipendenza e dell’interesse reciproco”. Secondo le teorie liberali, è la tirannia ad essere innaturale.

Spero di aver descritto onestamente la posizione di McCarthy. Ora, cosa possiamo dire al proposito?

Sulle prime ho pensato che McCarthy possiede una nozione piuttosto liberale del liberalismo; così liberale da includere l’illiberale stato corporativo, quello che Albert Jay Nock chiamava lo “stato mercante”; ovvero un potente regime politico-legale volto soprattutto allo sviluppo di un sistema economico al servizio dei padroni, tanto per usare le parole di Adam Smith. Il libertario Thomas Hodgskin, non Marx, fu il primo ad accusare i “capitalisti” di servirsi dello stato per conquistare una posizione di sfruttamento e privilegio.

Se per liberalismo intendiamo invece quello che avevano in mente, nonostante le differenze marginali, Adam Smith, J. B. Say, Frédéric Bastiat, Hodgskin, Herbert Spencer o Benjamin Tucker, è difficile immaginare un impero britannico, o americano, culla e protettore del liberalismo. Se McCarthy sostenesse che il capitalismo (di stato, politico o clientelare) ha bisogno di un impero, niente da ridire. Ma dove sono le prove storiche del fatto che un liberalismo radicale di libero mercato necessiti dell’ala protettrice di un impero globale? In realtà, le società considerate liberali si sono allontanate dal liberalismo radicale mantenendo allo stesso tempo quella protezione.

Il ragionamento di McCarthy poggia in larga misura sull’affermazione secondo cui il “complesso ideologico mondiale, determinato dallo stato che meglio riesce ad allargare il proprio potere”, ha buone probabilità di influenzare i “valori e gli usi” nazionali. Questo significa che una società non può mantenersi liberale a lungoin un mondo illiberale. Così come gli Stati Uniti adottarono misure illiberali dopo la Rivoluzione Bolscevica e dopo l’espansione sovietica nell’Europa dell’est dopo la seconda guerra mondiale, scrive, così un’America liberale e non interventista si allontanerebbe sempre più dal liberalismo se un potere tirannico estendesse il proprio potere al resto del mondo.

Forse sì e forse no. Dipende da fattori che non sono stati analizzati, soprattutto dalla fiducia ideologica della popolazione nella libertà (vedi l’eccellente confutazione di Robert Murphy alle teorie pseudo-keynesiane di McCarthy riguardo l’America, la seconda guerra mondiale e il totalitarismo).

McCarthy insiste a dire che “il potere è alla base dell’ordine pacifico su cui poggia la democrazia liberale” e che “con il tempo, i sentimenti liberali crebbero così forti all’interno dell’impero britannico che i suoi esponenti cominciarono a perdere di vista il contesto, in termini di sicurezza, che rese possibile il liberalismo. Idealisti e pacifisti, figli privilegiati dell’impero, credevano che la pace fosse un prodotto non del potere ma delle buone intenzioni.”

Ma McCarthy sbaglia a pensare che sia il potere, ovvero la forza, a governare il mondo. C’è qualcosa di più forte: le idee. Come dice Jeffrey Rogers Hummel in The Will to Be Free: The Role of Ideology in National Defense, “in ultima istanza sono le idee che determinano contro chi e che cosa [il popolo] deve impugnare le proprie armi e se deve impugnarle.”

“Tutti gli stati di successo possiedono legittimazione,” scrive Hummel.

Nessuno stato, non importa quanto tiranno, può governare a lungo con la sola forza bruta. Deve esserci un numero sufficiente di persone che accettino il suo potere come necessario o desiderabile perché la sua legge sia ampiamente applicata e rispettata. Ma lo stesso consenso sociale che legittima lo stato allo stesso tempo lo ingabbia. Perciò l’ideologia diventa la mina vagante che spiega perché esiste un movimento di massa dotato di senso civico che rinuncia ai benefici per ottenere significativi cambiamenti alla politica governativa. … Ecco quindi che le idee di successo possono alterare le dimensioni, lo scopo e l’invadenza dello stato.

Se questo vale per lo stato che fa soffrire il proprio popolo, sostiene Hummel, vale anche per quegli stati stranieri che rappresentano una minaccia potenziale. In altre parole, non c’è differenza sostanziale tra proteggersi da uno stato straniero e proteggersi dal proprio stato. Quelle stesse forze ideologiche che impediscono al “proprio” stato di diventare più aggressivo, forze necessarie a smorzarne il potere, riescono anche a tenere lontane le aggressioni esterne. Scrive Hummel:

Molte delle conquiste [coloniali] sono state ottenute grazie all’intermediazione delle locali classi di governo, che mantengono la legittimità presso la popolazione soggetta… Più problematico è il dominio da parte di aspiranti conquistatori in possesso della superiorità militare, che però devono affrontare l’ostilità implacabile di una popolazione ideologicamente unita. Proprio per questa ragione, la presa degli inglesi sull’Irlanda fu sempre debole, e casi simili si possono trovare anche ai tempi nostri.

McCarthy considera la “forza militare di una superpotenza” come virtualmente irresistibile. Che dire allora del Vietnam opposto agli Stati Uniti? O dell’Afganistan opposto ai britannici, sovietici e poi agli americani? La superiorità militare fallisce soprattutto a causa delle motivazioni e dell’impegno ideologico delle popolazioni indigene.

Un’apparente debolezza di questo ragionamento è che l’impegno ideologico, l’eterna vigilanza, sono difficili da mantenere. È vero, e Hummel riconosce che non esistono garanzie. Ma la stesso si può dire delle tesi di McCarthy. Cosa ci fa credere che l’amministrazione di un “impero liberale” resterà tale? L’articolo di McCarthy stranamente non parla delle rendite di posizione (l’acquisto dei vantaggi politici da parte di chi ha buone connessioni), della piaga dei benefici concentrati nelle mani dei gruppi di interesse e dei costi diffusi tra le masse, e di quel fenomeno che Hayek riassumeva nell’espressione “perché i peggiori arrivano in alto”. Il complesso industriale militare, ad esempio, difficilmente può essere definito un beneficiario passivo della politica governativa.

Conosciamo lo stato abbastanza bene da capire che anche le migliori intenzioni hanno buone probabilità di creare benefici per gli interessi particolari (“l’imperialismo di libero mercato”), e che le persone più inclini all’inganno, quelle che più si trovano a loro agio al comando del macchinario della violenza, sono anche quelle che più sono attratte dal potere politico e più hanno la capacità di procurarselo. Cosa impedisce all’apparato imperiale di cadere nelle mani di quei politici che vedono nella guerra e nella conquista la via che porta non solo alla pace ma anche alla gloria, alla virilità e alla grandezza nazionale?

Dunque se, come scrive McCarthy, “il liberalismo… tende a dipendere interamente dalla protezione liberalizzatrice di qualche grande impero,” questo significa che il liberalismo poggia su un piedistallo traballante. Basta dare uno sguardo alla storia.

Abbiamo molte altre ragioni per dubitare della solidità del liberalismo in mani imperiali. Una di queste è quello che Hayek chiamava “il problema della conoscenza”. Come i pianificatori economici, anche i meglio intenzionati pianificatori centrali di livello internazionale sono ignari delle preferenze locali in una società estera, e questo impedisce loro di svolgere il loro compito (vedi Iraq, Afganistan, ecc.). In breve, sono destinati al fallimento, seppure schivando le conseguenze.

Secondo McCarthy “occorre agire con discernimento e distinguere tra conflitti indispensabili (come la guerra fredda e la seconda guerra mondiale), assolutamente superflui (come l’Iraq) e ambigui come la prima guerra mondiale.” Ma anche ammettendo con McCarthy di sapere cosa è essenziale, superfluo e ambiguo, niente ci fa credere che l’amministrazione agirà bene. Dopotutto, ogni amministratore opera dietro incentivi perversi: spende denaro altrui e ha poche responsabilità personali. E anche quando sembra agire bene, la legge delle conseguenze involontarie causa tragedie… agli altri. Gli errori più comuni possono avere conseguenze catastrofiche. “Gli esperti di politica estera hannonelle loro predizioni una fiducia che non avrebbero il diritto di avere,” scrive Bryan Caplan.

Gli imperi sono maledettamente costosi. Anche un impero “liberale” avrebbe bisogno di spendere in deficit (chi si offre per pagare le tasse?) e di una banca centrale che faciliti i prestiti governativi. Tutto ciò porta ai mali che conosciamo bene, compresi i periodi di boom artificiale seguiti da altrettanti crolli e disoccupazione di lungo termine.

Le crisi economiche, come la guerra, sono la salute dello stato. Man mano che le crisi si ripetono sempre più profonde, cresce l’ansietà, e la gente comincia a credere ai politici che promettono un alleviamento nell’immediato e la stabilità nel lungo termine. Così, anche se un impero nasce senza uno stato sociale, con il tempo ci arriva. Randolph Bourne e Robert Higgs hanno spiegato perché. Per inciso, la richiesta di un migliore stato sociale e di quadri normativi arrivarono sulla scia dei privilegi particolari concessi alle élite economiche, come anche Grover Cleveland capì nel 1888. Una lezione che si può ricavare dalla storia americana è che l’impero corporativo è l’incubatrice dello stato sociale.

McCarthy dipinge l’impero britannico come essenzialmente benigno, più o meno un’area di libero scambio, e arriva anche a portare Ludwig von Mises dalla sua (Murphy ha corretto la fonte). Ma Mises non si faceva illusioni circa la natura del colonialismo, che, ricordiamolo, era diretto al controllo delle risorse, alla razzia del territorio, allo sfruttamento della manodopera a buon mercato e alla creazione di mercati a cui vendere i prodotti finiti. Come dice Mises in Liberalismo (1927):

Nessun capitolo di storia è più insanguinato della storia del colonialismo. Sangue inutile e insensato. Terre fiorenti furono devastate; interi popoli distrutti e sterminati. Non esistono scuse o giustificazioni. … È l’esatto contrario di tutti i principi liberali e democratici, e non c’è dubbio che dobbiamo lottare tutti per la sua abolizione.

Come era possibile credere che il liberalismo potesse fiorire in patria quando si era così illiberali all’estero? Herbert Spencer sapeva che era impossibile. Mentre,tra ottocento e novecento, le forze americane sterminavano i filippini che si opponevano al colonialismo, in patria accelerava l’interventismo progressista. Non a caso. Ai progressisti piaceva quella unità d’intenti creata dalla guerra e dall’imperialismo, e c’era tra loro chi si auspicava che questa unità potesse essere raggiunta senza spargimenti di sangue, ovvero tramite “l’equivalente morale della guerra”.

E arriviamo alle questioni di sicurezza interna a cui è esposto un impero, questioni che, come ben sappiamo, forniscono il pretesto per la soppressione delle libertà civili: perquisizioni senza mandato, spionaggio, e altro. Gli imperi creano nemici (oggic’è bisogno di dirlo?) e i nemici chiedono vendetta. La paura diffusa e l’opportunismo politico mettono a rischio le libertà civili, questo è sicuro.

La realtà non offre alcuna garanzia di sicurezza. Una società radicalmente libera priva di mezzi di offesa potrebbe essere conquistata da una potenza maligna nonostante il proprio affidamento alla libertà, alla ricchezza e al vantaggio tecnologico. Sul lato opposto, però, come abbiamo visto, ci sono le buone intenzioni imperiali che portano con sé il germe della tirannia.

Traduzione di Enrico Sanna.

I say the article is startling because for years TAC has been the place to find solid critiques of George W. Bush/Barack Obama-style interventionist foreign policy. But this is a call for American global policing, albeit not as Bush or Obama would have it.

Where libertarians and classical liberals historically have viewed empire as inimical to domestic freedom and free markets, not to mention the freedom and well-being of those ruled by colonial powers, McCarthy makes a historical case for reconsidering this position. Without the secure space provided by a liberal empire — first British, now American — liberal democracy could not have emerged and flourished, he insists. But the dependence of liberalism on empire has been unappreciated, leading many pro-freedom thinkers to believe erroneously that British involvement in Europe, 1914-18, and U.S. intervention in Europe, 1941-45, were terrible blunders. Wrong, he says. Intervention was necessary for the maintenance of domestic liberty and prosperity:

Liberal anti-imperialists today, whether libertarian or progressive, make the same mistakes Britain’s pacifists and America’s interwar noninterventionists once did: they imagine that the overall ideological complexion of the world, as determined by the state most capable of projecting power, need not affect their values and habits at home. They believe that liberalism is possible without empire.

There is little historical evidence for this.

McCarthy is no Wilsonian or neoconservative who longs for crusades to convert others to democratic liberalism; he understands that liberalism is a product of a slow social evolution. He has no time for those with “Napoleonic ambitions to liberalize the planet through revolution.”

Moreover, he writes, “Liberal imperialism is not directed toward gratuitous conquest but toward maintaining a global environment conducive to liberalism.”

He cautions,

Just as there are idealists who deny that power is the basis of the peaceful order upon which liberal democracy rests, there are other, more dangerous idealists who deny that power is a limited commodity that cannot simply be wished into existence by a feat of will. This is a view characteristic of neoconservatives….

In contrast, his is a far more modest empire, one that seeks merely to maintain global order by, among other things, keeping trade routes open and preventing the rise of a power-projecting tyranny. It aims to “preserve conditions in which the happy accident of liberalism can survive and grow, if at all, by a slow process of assimilation.”

McCarthy thinks one can coherently combine anti-imperialism and anti-liberalism — he cites Pat Buchanan and George Kennan as examples: “they would like America to be more like Sparta than Athens.” But this outlook is unacceptable to modern Americans: “After 200 years, liberalism has soaked too deep into the fiber of America’s national character for a new path of national self-sufficiency to hold much popular appeal.”

So liberalism is here to stay, and McCarthy believes that in the nature of things, liberal anti-imperialism is incoherent. He does not celebrate this “bitter truth about liberalism and its imperial character.” That’s just how it is.

So he opts for a “conservative realism,” which recognizes “that America will not be anything other than broadly liberal and democratic for a long time to come, and liberal democracy requires a delicately balanced system of international security upheld by an empire or hegemon” — namely, for the foreseeable future at least, the United States.

Key to McCarthy’s thesis is that “power is the basis of the peaceful order upon which liberal democracy rests.” He writes, “Liberal democracy is unnatural. It is a product of power and security, not innate human sociability. It is peculiar rather than universal, accidental rather than teleologically preordained.”

This puts McCarthy at odds with the core of the liberal tradition, which found the seeds of individual liberty and voluntary cooperation in the social and reason-based nature of the human race. Adam Smith referred to the “system of natural liberty.” Thomas Paine wrote in Rights of Man that “the great part” of social order is not the product of power — i.e., government — but of “mutual dependence and reciprocal interest.” It is tyranny that is unnatural, according to liberalism.

I hope that fairly describes McCarthy’s position. Now, what can be said about it?

My first reaction was that McCarthy has a rather liberal notion of liberalism — so liberal that it includes the illiberal corporate state, or what Albert Jay Nock called the “merchant-state,” that is, a powerful political-legal regime aimed first and foremost at fostering an economic system on behalf of masters, to use Adam Smith’s term. (The libertarian Thomas Hodgskin, not Marx, was the first to disparage “capitalists” for their use of the state to gain exploitative privileges.)

If by liberalism we mean instead what Adam Smith, J.B. Say, Frédéric Bastiat, Hodgskin, Herbert Spencer, or Benjamin Tucker had in mind (despite their marginal differences), it is hard to see how the British and American empires were good at nurturing and protecting it. Had McCarthy argued that empire is indispensable to (state, political, or crony) capitalism, he’d get no argument here. But where is the historical evidence that radical free-market liberalism required the protective umbrella of a global empire? The fact is that societies regarded as liberal have in essential ways moved ever further from radical liberalism while enjoying that protection.

McCarthy’s case relies in large measure on his claim that the “ideological complexion of the world, as determined by the state most capable of projecting power,” is likely to influence domestic “values and habits.” That is, a society won’t long remain liberal in an increasingly illiberal world. Just as the U.S. government adopted illiberal measures after the Bolshevik Revolution and after the Soviet Union ended up in eastern and central Europe after World War II, he writes, so a liberal noninterventionist America would have moved ever further from liberalism had a tyrannical power-projecting state ruled the rest of the world.

Maybe, but maybe not. It would depend on factors left undiscussed, most especially the population’s ideological commitment to freedom. (See Robert Murphy’s excellent rebuttal of McCarthy’s Keynesian-style argument concerning America, World War II, and the totalitarian powers.)

McCarthy insists that “power is the basis of the peaceful order upon which liberal democracy rests” and writes that “in time, liberal sentiment grew so strong within imperial Britain that its exponents began to lose sight of the security context that made liberalism possible. Idealists and pacifists — the privileged children of empire — fancied that the peace was a product not of power but of good intentions.”

But McCarthy is wrong in thinking that power, that is, force, rules the world. There is something stronger: ideas. As Jeffrey Rogers Hummel puts it in “The Will to Be Free: The Role of Ideology in National Defense,” “Ideas ultimately determine in which direction [people] wield their weapons or whether they wield them at all.”

“All successful States are legitimized,” Hummel writes.

No government rules for long through brute force alone, no matter how undemocratic. Enough of its subjects must accept its power as necessary or desirable for its rule to be widely enforced and observed. But the very social consensus that legitimizes the State also binds it. Ideology therefore becomes the wild card that accounts for public-spirited mass movements overcoming the free-rider problem and affecting significant changes in government policy.… Successful ideas therefore can induce alterations in the size, scope, and intrusiveness of government.

If this is the case with respect to the government a population labors under, Hummel argues, then it is also the case with respect to potentially threatening foreign governments. In other words, protecting ourselves from other governments is not essentially different from protecting ourselves from the government in our midst. The same ideological forces that keep “one’s own” government from aggressing even more than it does, and that are required to roll back that government’s power, are also suited to keeping foreign governments away. Hummel writes,

Much successful State conquest has been intermediated through local ruling classes, who remain legitimized among the subject population.… The effective dominance of would-be conquerors who possess military superiority but face the implacable hostility of an ideologically united population is more problematic. The English hold on Ireland was, due to this factor, always tenuous, and one can find similar instances in the modern day.

McCarthy sees the “military force of a superpower” as virtually irresistible. But what about Vietnam versus the United States? How about Afghanistan against the British, Soviets, and Americans? Superior force failed in large measure because of the motivation and ideological commitment of the indigenous populations.

An apparent weakness in this argument is that ideological commitment — eternal vigilance — will be hard to maintain. It’s a fair point, and Hummel agrees there are no guarantees. But a similar challenge can be posed to McCarthy. Why should we believe that the administrators of a “liberal empire” will remain liberal? McCarthy’s article is strangely void of references to rent-seeking (the buying of political advantages by the well-connected), the plague of concentrated benefits for interest groups and dispersed costs for the masses, and Hayek’s “why the worst get on top” phenomenon. The military-industrial complex is hardly a passive beneficiary of government policy.

We’ve had enough experience with government to know that even well-intended policies will likely be turned to the benefit of special interests (“free-trade imperialism”) and that the people most adept at deception and most comfortable with administering the machinery of violence will be most attracted to political power and best at procuring it. What’s to keep the imperial apparatus from falling into the hands of politicians who see war and conquest as the keys not just to security but also to glory, manliness, and national greatness?

Thus if, as McCarthy writes, “liberalism … tends to be entirely contingent on the liberalizing security conditions established by some great empire,” then it stands on shaky grounds indeed. History seems to illustrate this.

We have many other reasons to doubt that liberalism is safe in imperial hands. One of them is the Hayekian “knowledge problem.” Even well-intended central planners of the international order, like central planners of an economy, will necessarily lack the local knowledge of foreign societies they would need to do their job. (See Iraq, Afghanistan, etc.) In short, they will screw up (but without personally suffering the consequences).

McCarthy says that “judgment must be exercised to discern essential conflicts (like the Cold War and World War II) from absolutely inessential ones (like Iraq) and relatively ambiguous ones like World War I.” But even if we agree with McCarthy on what’s essential, inessential, and ambiguous, we have no grounds for believing that the administrators will get it just right. After all, they operate under perverse incentives, spending other people’s money and facing few personal consequences. And even when they appear to get it right, the law of unintended consequences will usually bring grief — to others. Easily made mistakes can be catastrophic. “Foreign policy experts are much more certain of their predictions than they have any right to be,” Bryan Caplan writes.

Empires are bloody expensive. Even a “liberal” empire would require deficit spending — who would be willing to pay so much in taxes? — and a central bank to facilitate government borrowing. And with those things come all the evils we are well familiar with, including artificial booms and resulting busts with long-term unemployment.

Economic crises, like war, are the health of the state. As repeated and deeper crises engender public anxiety, people will be receptive to politicians’ promises to provide immediate relief and long-term stability. So even if an empire does not have a full-blown welfare state at first, in time it will get there. Randolph Bourne and Robert Higgs have explained why. (The demand for ameliorative welfare and regulatory programs came in the wake of special privileges for the economic elite, as even Grover Cleveland understood in 1888.) One lesson of American history is that corporatist empire is the incubator of the welfare state.

McCarthy portrays the British empire as essentially benign — more or less a free-trade zone — and even attempts to enlist Ludwig von Mises in his cause. (Murphy corrects the record.) But Mises was under no illusions about the nature of colonialism, which, let’s recall, was directed at controlling resources, grabbing land, conscripting cheap labor, and creating markets for manufactured products. As Mises wrote in Liberalism (1927):

No chapter of history is steeped further in blood than the history of colonialism. Blood was shed uselessly and senselessly. Flourishing lands were laid waste; whole peoples destroyed and exterminated. All this can in no way be extenuated or justified.… It stands in the sharpest contrast to all the principles of liberalism and democracy, and there can be no doubt that we must strive for its abolition.

Who could be confident that liberalism would remain secure at home with such illiberalism practiced abroad? (Herbert Spencer knew it would not.) When U.S. forces were slaughtering Filipinos resisting colonialism at the turn of the 20th century, Progressive intervention at home was accelerating in America. This was no accident. Indeed, Progressives loved the unity of national purpose that war and imperialism created and some of them only wished such unity could be achieved without the blood, that is, through “the moral equivalent of war.”

Finally, as we well know, domestic-security concerns faced by an empire provide the pretext for suppressing civil liberties: warrantless searches and surveillance, etc. Empires make enemies — does this really have to be said today? — and enemies want vengeance. Public fear and political opportunism assure that civil liberties will be imperiled.

Reality offers no security guarantees. A radically free society that had no means to threaten other societies might be conquered by a malevolent power, despite its ideological commitment to freedom, its wealth, its technological advantages. On the other hand, as we’ve seen, even a well-intended empire holds the seeds of domestic tyranny.

Translations for this article:

• Italian, La Libertà Ha Bisogno di Imperi?.

Article 22 of the Covenant of the League of Nations declared that former colonies of the defeated powers “are inhabited by peoples not yet able to stand by themselves under the strenuous conditions of the modern world.” These included the Arabs (and others) in Mesopotamia (Iraq) and the Levant (today’s Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, and Palestine/Israel). Because they were not ready for independence and self-government, the covenant stated, their “well-being and development” should be “entrusted to advanced nations who … can best undertake this responsibility.”

In other words, the losers’ colonies would become the winners’ colonies. British and French politicians would judge when the Arabs (and Kurds) were fit to govern themselves. Until then, they would remain under the loving care of enlightened Europeans. On the few occasions when Arabs failed to appreciate their good fortune and resisted, their benefactors had to punish them with tough love in the form of aerial bombardment and other means of modern warfare. It was for the natives’ own good, of course.

Or that’s had the imperialists told it. Only a cynic could believe that their economic and political interests lay behind this neocolonialist system.

We might keep this history in mind as we view with increasing horror what is taking place in the newly declared Islamic State (formerly ISIL or ISIS) in large parts of British- and French-created Iraq and Syria.

No one can say how the Middle East would have turned out if the Western powers had butted out after the Great War and let the Arabs, Kurds, and others find their own way in the modern world. But treating the indigenous populations like children cannot have advanced the cause of peaceful civilization.

It’s no exaggeration to say that virtually every current problem in the region stems at least in part from the imperial double cross and carve-up that took place after the war. And the immediate results of the European betrayal were then exacerbated by further acts of intervention and neocolonialism, most recently: President George H. W. Bush’s Gulf War and embargo on Iraq; President Bill Clinton’s continued embargo and bombing of Iraq; President George W. Bush’s invasion and occupation of Iraq and overthrow of the secular regime of Saddam Hussein (al-Qaeda, of which the Islamic State is an offshoot, was not in Iraq before this); President Barack Obama’s support (until recently) for the corrupt, autocratic Shi’ite government in Baghdad; and Obama’s throwing in with those seeking to oust secular Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, which made that country a magnet for radical Sunni jihadis, the same who are now threatening genocide against Shi’ites, Christians, and Yazidis in Iraq. (Thus Obama’s policy is at war with itself.)

History alone does not tell us what, if anything, outside powers should do now; there’s no going back in time. But we can say that without foreign interference, even a violent evolution of the region might have been far less violent than it has been during the last century. At least, the violent factions would not be seeking revenge against Americans.

The rise of the brutal Islamic State, with its unspeakable violence against innocents, is an appalling but unsurprising outcome of the last 100 years, including seven decades of neocolonialist American intervention. This suggests that U.S. intervention at this stage will only come to grief by boosting anti-American jihadi recruitment and even encouraging the targeting of Americans at home. Wars never go as planned. After all this time, any so-called “humanitarian” intervention will be interpreted in imperialist terms — and should be.

The U.S. government must get out of Iraq (etc.). Intervention not only violates the rights of Americans; it is sure to exacerbate the violence in that pitiable region.

This reminder is unsurprising. Throughout Iraq’s history, western powers have always stood over its shoulders, issuing their own demands for their own purposes. Ever since its birth, Iraq has been a prime example of why foreign interventions almost always create more problems than they solve.

For instance, the current chaos in Iraq is a direct result of the 2003 invasion that toppled Saddam Hussein. Going further back, Saddam Hussein’s crimes were aided by a US government that sold him chemical weapons, which he then infamously used against the Kurds. In fact, much of the nation’s ethnic tensions can be blamed on the arbitrary borders drawn by the British after defeating the Ottoman Empire in the First World War.

Obama assures us that he “will not allow the United States to be dragged into another war in Iraq,” acknowledging that “there’s no American military solution to the larger crisis in Iraq.” Yet as his actions show, what counts as a solution will be determined by terms laid down by him and the government he represents.

Even if he keeps his word and does not issue another full-scale invasion, he still presumes the right to dictate Iraq’s future. Iraq is still the property of the United States.

A second unspoken message has been the disregard for whatever human life happens to be in the way of operations carried out by the United States military. Obama is right to condemn the truly horrifying crimes committed by ISIL in the harshest terms possible. Even so, this is not an excuse for his administration to begin slaughtering innocents on its own through the inevitable collateral damage.

No matter how precisely “targeted” these strikes really are, completely innocent people will be a part of the body count. Of course, those deaths come as a regretted, unintentional, undesired side-effect of the strikes, which are aimed at ISIL combatants. However, because modern warfare is such that these deaths will not be of an insubstantial number, and because they can be predicted to happen with near certainty, it is not overstating things to say that this is still murder.

Just as the news of continued American hegemony is no shock, no one should be surprised to learn that the United States government will incinerate innocents in large numbers without impunity. While asserting its claim to strike wherever it wants whenever it wants, the United States government has killed over 2,400 people in the past five years alone with its drone program.

There is another thing that Obama opted not to say, but can be heard loud and clear from his actions, of which the American people should take special note. No matter what commendable values you think a politician holds, you can count on power to push them elsewhere.

The United States government’s long campaign of chaos in Iraq has been a thoroughly bi-partisan project. Under Democrat John F. Kennedy, the CIA took actions to overthrow unfriendly leaders. Republicans Ronald Reagan and George Herbert Walker Bush sold Saddam Hussein the weapons he would use against his own people, before Bush invaded the country in the First Gulf War. Democrat Bill Clinton spent the 90s starving children with sanctions, dropping bombs, and officially changing United States’s Iraq policy to one of regime change.

In 2003, Republican George Walker Bush actualized that policy, by initiating the Second Gulf War. As Americans grew to hate that war more and more, two Democratic Presidential candidates in a row ran campaigns that heavily capitalized off calls for peace.

Now those candidates are in positions to actually decide U.S. policy in Iraq: John Kerry as Secretary of State, and Barack Obama as President. With that power, they have decided to send in military personnel, drop bombs, and maintain American dominance.

Having heard all this, the American people must start to make a statement of their own. They must refuse to fight.

Knowing that the United States military will be used for aggression and domination, no matter who controls it, they must refuse to join. Moreover, they must do all they can to work toward the day when Presidents and Secretaries of State are deprived of the voice they need to make their threats and stake their claims.

Curiously, along with the usual “more and faster, please!” screams from the likes of Senators Lindsey Graham and John McCain, another current of pro-war advocacy has bubbled up: They claim a “Responsibility To Protect,” spun as a debt incurred from the 2003 Iraq invasion and its fallout.

The train of thought is that the U.S.’s (continued) involvement in Iraq is owed because the emergence of sectarian warfare is, after all, the fault of the US post-Saddam. The arrogantly militaristic Can Do spirit at use here is clear enough already, but this also inherently comes with a rather clipped understanding of basic history. The story of western interference in Iraq does not start with the falsehoods of the “W” Bush Administration. In fact, the modern nation of Iraq itself was stitched together originally as a protectorate under the British, from pieces of the Ottoman Empire broken up after World War One. After the passing of the torch of hegemony from Britain to the U.S., one of the first things the U.S. government did in Iraq was back a coup by the Baathists — including one Saddam Hussein — in 1963. Later on, the CIA would aid Saddam’s regime in chemical weapons attacks.

Turning on the US’s own creation in the ’90s brought more war, sanctions that clearly hit Iraqi civilians much harder than anyone in the regime, and then the invasion and subsequent installation of yet another western client government.

Looking back at the “debt” rationale for new intervention in light of the full record of the past, the naive nature of it is blinding. Following it to the letter effectively places a debt going back nearly a hundred years. However, the currency being proposed for exchange is not the profuse apology & restitution that would take place on the level of non-state individuals, but bombs, missiles, and manipulation. That these make up the initial damage reveals the “offer” of supposed benevolent empire to be a sick joke. What is owed to the Iraq people by the U.S. government, after all this time of bloodshed and lies, is admission of guilt, followed by an exit from the world stage, head held low in shame.

In a nod to recent history, the beginning strikes in this ongoing chapter of empire were launched from the aircraft carrier USS George H.W. Bush. Without the end of U.S. hegemony, attainable only via the end of the state itself, news viewers may be greeted in 2044 by headlines about President Sasha Obama launching airstrikes on Iraq from the USS John Ellis Bush.

Cominciamo dall’idea di una tassazione progressiva come rimedio alla diseguaglianza economica, e all’ingiusta distribuzione della ricchezza, prendendo Bill Gates come esempio illustrativo. Quasi tutto il prezzo del software Microsoft, probabilmente 99 centesimi per ogni dollaro che entra nelle sue tasche, corrisponde ad un furto. Tutta la fortuna di Gates è un bottino, rendita monopolistica estratta dalle tasche dei consumatori grazie alle leggi sulla “proprietà intellettuale” (sic). Se non fosse per il copyright e il monopolio dei brevetti sui suoi sistemi operativi e altri prodotti, Gates avrebbe potuto diventare, giusto come possibilità, milionario vendendo servizi di supporto e di personalizzazione di software di per sé gratis (il modello imprenditoriale di Linux). Anche accumulando 10 milioni di dollari, raggiungerebbe lo 0,01% del suo reddito massimo raggiunto, che è di 100 miliardi. Se pensiamo che Gates non avrebbe mai potuto acquisire quel bottino senza l’aiuto delle leggi federali, sembra ragionevole supporre che l’obiettivo della giustizia potrebbe essere raggiunto solo tassando il reddito di Gates al 100%. Altrimenti, lo stato sta semplicemente aiutando Gates a derubarti per poi renderti una frazione del bottino tanto per rendere l’ingiustizia meno destabilizzante.

Lo stesso principio si applica a tutta la “tassazione progressiva” della ricchezza dei plutocrati. Il compito primario dello stato consiste nell’imporre diritti di proprietà artificiali e scarsità artificiali da cui la classe economica dominante può estrarre rendita. Aspetto molto secondario, una piccolissima porzione di questa rendita viene data ai più poveri tra i poveri, così da evitare che la fame e la disperazione raggiungano un livello politicamente destabilizzante talmente alto che la popolazione potrebbe fare a pezzi tutto il macchinario dello sfruttamento. Questa ricchezza serve anche a dare alla classe media qualche diritto acquisito, come la Social Security (il sistema pensionistico pubblico americano, ndt), sebbene questo sia finanziato quasi interamente dalle deduzioni non progressive in busta paga. La spesa sociale serve a mantenere il potere d’acquisto abbastanza alto da impedire al ciclo economico di boom e crollo di diventare troppo aspro. Tornando alla questione, tutte queste forme di assistenza sociale per i più poveri e diritti acquisiti per la classe media impallidiscono di fronte alla ricchezza che i plutocrati rubano alla popolazione con l’aiuto dello stato.

Anche tassare i plutocrati al 100% e dare tutto alla popolazione sotto forma di reddito garantito sarebbe profondamente stupido. Sarebbe come prendere con una mano e rendere con l’altra, mangiando metà del denaro con i costi amministrativi. Sarebbe molto più sensato che lo stato smettesse di aiutare i ricchi a derubarci in primo luogo: Abolite brevetti e copyright, diritti di proprietà su terre possedute e inutilizzate, barriere d’ingresso imposte alle piccole aziende, costrizioni normative sui lavoratori autonomi e chi lavora a casa e compete con attività fatte di capannoni e uffici, e altro simile. Ma voi sapete che lo stato non lo farà, perché imporre il sistema di sfruttamento è la sua ATTIVITÀ.

E tutte quelle autostrade, strade, scuole, “difesa” nazionale e altri simili? Bè, in linea generale, tutte le volte che lo stato fornisce “servizi pubblici” sottocosto a beneficiarne di più sono le grandi imprese il cui modello d’impresa dipende fortemente da questi aiuti di stato. I principali beneficiari del sistema autostradale interstatale (messo su sotto la supervisione del segretario al dipartimento del dipartimento della difesa Charles “Quello che è bene per la General Motors è bene per l’America” Wilson, ex amministratore delegato della General Motors), ad esempio, sono i comparti del trasporto su strada, le grosse catene commerciali, le industrie conserviere, le grosse birrerie, che hanno fatto fuori i negozi, le conserviere e le birrerie locali, e hanno trasformato la provincia in un deserto.

La scuola classifica, seleziona e trasforma gli esseri umani in “risorse umane” piegate e deformate per renderle adatte ai bisogni delle grandi imprese, per farne macchine burocratiche obbedienti e acritiche. Il sistema stradale locale, promosso dall’industria automobilistico-stradale e da quella immobiliare, serve principalmente a trasformare l’automobile in una necessità per la povera gente, che un tempo avrebbe usato i piedi, la bicicletta o il tram per andare al lavoro o a fare la spesa.

Quanto alla “difesa nazionale”, il suo scopo principale è l’imposizione del dominio corporativo su tutto il pianeta. Tra “difesa”, ruolo militare dalla Nasa e della Sicurezza Nazionale, e debiti delle guerre del passato, i militari (in pratica, poliziotti a noleggio che terrorizzano il mondo per costringerlo ad accettare il dominio corporativo) prendono più della metà del bilancio americano.

Questo è il genere di “civiltà” che stiamo finanziando.

Traduzione di Enrico Sanna.