Category Archives: Founding Fathers

Happy Birthday, Pat Buchanan

America, Conservatism, Foreign Policy, Founding Fathers, History, IMMIGRATION

Tom Piatak writes a great column about a great American (with whom I’ve disagreed, a fact that has nothing to do with the man’s prescience and patriotism): “Pat Buchanan At 70: ‘He Told You So, You F****ing Fools!’” Read it on VDARE.COM, naturally:

“Both Bush and McCain swallowed the neoconservative line whole. Both see the mission of the United States as using its blood and treasure to spread’ ‘global democratic capitalism.’ Both welcome the mass immigration that is radically transforming the United States. … neither views America as a real country at all, but as the embodiment of an abstract political creed—the ‘first universal nation.’

Buchanan long ago warned that allowing neoconservatives to set the agenda would be calamitous for conservatives. His warning was unmistakably vindicated when the Republicans lost Congress in 2006. And if the American electorate rejects Bush and McCain next Tuesday, it will be rejecting neoconservatism, pure and simple.

Of course, Buchanan opposed the Iraq War that has cast its shadow over Bush’s presidency. He foresaw that removing Saddam Hussein would greatly strengthen Tehran and that an occupation of Iraq would be both costly and deadly.

More generally, Buchanan recognized that the end of the Cold War meant that America must begin reexamining its global commitments and pursuing a foreign policy in line with the one recommended by the Founders—and that failure to do so would be costly.”

The complete column on VDARE.COM.

A July Fourth Toast To Thomas Jefferson—And The Anglo-Saxon Tradition

Founding Fathers, Government, History, IMMIGRATION, Liberty, Natural Law, The West

I’m delighted to inform you that I will be joining the valorous VDARE.COM family with a regular monthly column.

Here is an excerpt from the first. It’s titled “A July Fourth Toast To Thomas Jefferson—And The Anglo-Saxon Tradition”:

“…Jefferson’s muse for the ‘American Mind’ is even older.”

“The Whig tradition is undeniably Anglo-Saxon. Our founding fathers’ political philosophy originated with their Saxon forefathers, and the ancient rights guaranteed by the Saxon constitution. With the Declaration, Jefferson told Henry Lee in 1825, he was also protesting England’s violation of her own ancient tradition of natural rights. As Jefferson saw it, the Colonies were upholding a tradition the Crown had abrogated.”

“Philosophical purist that he was, moreover, Jefferson considered the Norman Conquest to have tainted this English tradition with the taint of feudalism. ‘To the Whig historian,’ writes Mayer, ‘the whole of English constitutional history since the Conquest was the story of a perpetual claim kept up by the English nation for a restoration of Saxon laws and the ancient rights guaranteed by those laws.'”

“If Jefferson begrudged the Normans’ malign influence on the natural law he cherished, imagine how he’d view our contemporary cultural conquistadors from the South, whose customs preclude natural rights and natural reason! …”

Read the rest on VDARE.COM.

Updated: Against Anarchism

Classical Liberalism, Constitution, Founding Fathers, Justice, Law, libertarianism, Political Philosophy, The State, The West

At the beginning of 2004, David J. Heinrich’s responded on the Mises.org Blog to the article titled “The Criminal’s Theoretical Enabler” (WorldNetDaily, January 9). In reply, I penned the comments posted below. The links to our exchange have since expired. But readers will glean from my reply the gist of my difficulties with anarchism. Anarchism is sexy. I used to think of myself as an anarchist. But after careful consideration, I forfeited sexy for the solid position of classical liberalism.

Read “The Criminal’s Theoretical Enabler” first, and then my reply to David:

David wrote that: “What proportional restitution and punishment are would have to be up to the victim to decide, and his or her decisions would be binding…” [End quote]

I have no objections to leaving it up to the victim to forfeit—or choose his own form of—redress for certain misdemeanors. Many legal solutions are a result of mediation and other perfectly private solutions to non-violent offenses.

I object to leaving punishment for violent crime to the vicissitudes of the victim or his proxies. The possibility that a victim or her proxies choose to let a rapist/murderer go free in favor of financial restitution, for instance, is a reality David concedes (although he says it will be rare, which is not the point. It should never happen, not under the state and not under anarchy). Does the forfeiture of just retribution (which is what this arrangement amounts to, in my opinion) not imply, in the case of murder, that the right to life is a right that the victim’s proxies can choose to alienate or relinquish at will? How else does one construe this position?

The danger of reducing justice in cases of such crimes to a negotiated deal strikes me as moral relativism if not a recipe for nihilism. Again: A belief in the immutability of natural justice has prompted me to rethink the wisdom of the private production of defense.

Also ignored, as I say in the column, it that a violent offender presents a clear and present danger to others, and so his fate, at least in a civilized society, is not only the prerogative of the victim.

Libertarian anarchists, and David makes this point, will rightly argue that under a minimal state and certainly under the state today, criminals could and do get away with murder. This is because the justice system is badly broken.

This fact doesn’t strike me as a sufficient reason to support a state of affairs where, as a matter of principle, proportional, moral retribution will not necessarily be the goal of justice. (The kind of justice sought would depend on the victim, right? It is indeed unlikely that she will support unconditional love as an antidote to violent crime, but if she’s of the Left, then it’s a possibility.)

David writes: “If a woman was raped, she could demand proportional restitution (e.g., whatever fines on the criminal necessary for the emotional harm caused her, castration, and the unexpected forced rape of the criminal)”… The criminal would simply be enslaved to the victim (or her punishment agency, more likely, if she didn’t want to deal with him) until repayment had been met…if a court deems that for restitution, the rapist is to pay the victim $1million and be violently raped, and then as punishment is to be executed…” [End quote]

What if the offender dies due to the castration or the forced rape? Is that proportional justice? I don’t conceal my preference for western tradition, nor the positive view I have of the accretive genius of the common law. What David describes here is primitive victim vigilantism. Indeed personalized retaliatory ‘justice’ can and will take the form of vendetta, not justice. Civilized moral retribution should aim to avoid such barbarism. Under anarchism, David’s proposals can be adopted as a matter of principle rather than as an aberration to be rectified.

David says that “The criminal would simply be enslaved to the victim or her punishment agency…” [End quote]

Well, again 1) victims could demand disproportionate punishment, and the enforcement agency would comply. 2) Some victims will not be covered by a “punishment agency.” Who sees to it that justice is achieved in the case of those who cannot afford or don’t want to contract with a private firm? There is no incentive for an agency to pursue a dangerous offender who has not harmed a client. Do we rely on a bunch of good neighbors who will take up arms and hunt the man/woman down? Or do we as a society, through the law, make a public declaration of the few abiding and immutable values we wish to uphold (i.e., he must be brought to justice and tried in a court of law).

To the extent possible, there must be a commitment, however imperfect, to justice for all and not only for those who’ve contracted with an agency.

That’s why, while David and I agree entirely that the criminal justice system is egregious in its attitude to victims, his definition of the private production of defense as “victim-centered” is, I think, misleading.

On David’s comment about (his) anarchy vs. (my) minarchy. I started out as an anarchist. But I had certain doubts about the private production of justice. To date, they have not been addressed. The main issue, and I spoke of it first in a talk I gave to a Libertarian Party convention last year, is that fundamentally different and competing views of justice (right and wrong) will arise in anarchy. It’s inevitable. How does one reconcile this with a view of the immutability of the natural law and the emphasis on the search for truth as the ultimate value of justice? Since my understanding of justice is based on such a view (applied realistically, of course, to facts and context), I can’t accept this.

Again, that we suffer these pitfalls under the state is not a sufficient argument for making this a perfectly appropriate, ‘principled’ option, which would be the case under anarchy.

David alludes to the gap between his position and mine and puts it down to the anarchy/minarchy divide. As I look at it, better to distinguish good from bad arguments than to separate anarchist from minarchist positions. The goal should be to advance just, rights-based positions. If reality is twisted into pretzels so as to fulfill the requirement for theoretical virginity, then, while clever, the argument isn’t necessarily good. (And sometimes maybe the theory itself needs to be questioned.)

—Written by Ilana Mercer, January 10, 2004

Update (May 2, 2008): Are competition and so-called natural co-operation sufficient to keep human venality and evil in check? My experience in the world—and in a community of relatively elevated people, libertarians—would indicate not. While some anarchists are and were profound thinkers, like Murray Rothbard, Lysander Spooner, Hans-Hermann Hoppe, the Tannehills, the contemporary garden variety anarchist is not a serious thinker. In anarchy, many have simply adopted a rah-rah, fist-in-the-air, I’m-so-sexy stance.

Speaking of profound thinkers I’m privileged to know: Can I neglect what economist George Reisman has observed about anarchy? About “competing governments,’ or the purchase and sale of such government services as police, courts, and military in a free market,” Reisman says this:

“As the result of Ayn Rand’s criticisms, I came to the conclusion that the case was untenable, if for no other reason than that it abandoned the distinction between private action and government action and implicitly urged unregulated, uncontrolled government action, i.e., the uncontrolled, unregulated use of physical force. This was the logical implication of treating government as a free business enterprise. I had to conclude that government in the form of a highly regulated, tightly controlled legal monopoly on the use of force, was necessary after all, in order to provide an essential foundation for unregulated, uncontrolled private markets in all goods and services, which would then function totally free of the threat of physical force. This indeed represented nothing more than a return to my starting point. It was what the government established by the United States’ Constitution had represented, and which I had so much admired.”

CONSIDER 9/11. When libertarian anarchists declare that, and I quote, “the proper authority to exercise a right of self defense against an aggressor is the individual whose rights have been violated, or a designated agent,” however charitably one interprets this, the realistic translation is that innocent victims have no rights against terrorists.

Coming from libertarians, most of whom have adopted anarchism, suggestions such as these translate, in reality, as follows: In essence, the aggressor has all the rights because he places himself outside natural and positive, national and international law. The victim, being law-abiding, has no rights, because his only recourse to justice is through the state. Since the state is illegitimate, or rather, since libertarian anarchists see anything the state does as illegitimate (a logical flaw), the realistic application of this cynical sleight of hand is to wave the victim’s right to have any protection or restitution, however inefficient and insufficient. These are the implications of their words. There is no other interpretation.

Against such abstruseness, one cannot avoid wondering how over 2000 people, whose right to life was sundered, go about nominating a proxy to act on their behalf in a manner that will satisfy libertarian legalities. AND IN THIS DYSTOPIAN WORLD, NOT IN UTOPIA. Remember Ayn Rand’s warning about the “sin of abstraction.” About her beliefs, Chris Sciabarra has written: “No human value can be separated from the conditions that make its achievement possible.”

Once again, in practice, the anarchist libertarian ideas of a just war, which I would agree with in theory, ruled out any action against al Qaida after 9/11. Roy A. Childs Jr. came to the same conclusion as I have come and recanted anarchism in his last years. “It has led too many libertarians away from reality,” he wrote, “and, indeed, seen them on a collision course with it.”

This nation has the proudest of histories. America hails from classical liberalism. We need to distance the current Third-Way social democracy from the long-lost republic and, in that way, revive classical liberalism. As a strategy for going forward, I suggest we draw on this history. Right now, with the influence of anarchists, there is a kind of destructive, infantile anti-authoritarian attitude toward this history.

Many anarchists like to say that there’s nothing libertarian about the U.S. Constitution. I’ll admit to preferring the Articles of Confederation, which were usurped in favor of the Constitution at the Philadelphia convention. But I prefer to say this: To the extent that the Constitution is compatible with the natural law, it’s good; to the extent it isn’t, it’s not. There is a lot wrong with the Constitution, as Rand, a minarchist, also conceded.

Still, disparaging the greatest revolutionaries—politically and philosophically—ever, the American Revolutionaries, is yet another element of a stark, ahistoric worldview rife among many libertarians. Our hope for restoring liberty in the US rests not on obscure references to anarchy and utopia, but on the great tradition from which this nation has sprung.

Anarchists currently make their case with wacky references to examples of anarcho-capitalism in small homogeneous societies—Medieval Viking Age Iceland. Or, even less convincingly among some murderous tribes in Africa. For some loopy reason, they prefer this no-man’s la-la land to the followers of John Locke. This tendency to go off the deep end is precisely what I mean when I equate anarchism with the triumph of sexy and showy.

Machan/Mercer Exchange

Founding Fathers, Government, IMMIGRATION, libertarianism, The State

Tibor Machan posted a brief reply to “The Work Open-Border Libertarians Won’t Do” in the Comments Section of Barely a Blog. The meat of Machan’s reply:

“Refusing to extend welfare to illegal immigrants will amount to an arbitrary, indeed mean-minded policy based on nothing more than nationalism or even worse, such as preference for members of one’s own race or age group or some such nonsense.”

Machan’s line of reasoning proceeds from the premise that limiting the size and scope of the Welfare State no matter how is not necessary the most urgent—and hence the most ethical and moral—imperative. Rather, according to Tibor’s reasoning, given the reality of the Transfer State, apportioning welfare based on egalitarian, “fair,” and consistent criteria is the most pressing matter.

The premise of Machan’s reply seems to be that egalitarian treatment (of the world) is the proper purpose of policy. As a strict propertarian, I could not disagree more; As I see it, the imperative of policy is to limit theft, not extend its spoils fairly.

I also wonder about the worldview held by libertarians. The founders clearly recognized that some people were the responsibility of a limited, American, republican government; others not. What, after all, did John Quincy Adams mean when he counseled that America not go abroad in search of monsters to destroy, but remain the well-wisher of the freedom and independence of all, but the champion and vindicator only of her own?

Machan’s reply, on the other hand, seems to suggest that “We Are the World”—that since we have the misfortune of laboring under the transfer state, we are obliged to extend its “benefits” to all who enter its orbit.