His introduction, in which he makes a case for an “Austrian” reconstruction of economic history on the basis of a priori truths, is similar to the one which doomed Rothbard’s masterpiece America’s Great Depression to obscurity (although there is a bit of a Rothbardian revival going on). In it, Hoppe argues that economics, at its core, is more like a branch of logic than an empirical science. Hoppe argues that everyone, whether one admit it or not, sees history through a pre-conceived grid. Hoppe argues that his grid, the economic perspective shared by Menger, Mises, Rothbard, and less consistently by F. A. “squishy” Hayek, is the only sensible set of presuppositions. (This “Austrian” economic perspective has roots as far back as the Spanish scholastics of Salamanca. For more on the history of this tradition see Rothbard’s histories of economic thought or Jesus Huerta de Soto’s weighty tome Money, Bank Credit, and Economic Cycles, which devotes the first parts of the book to tracing a history of economic theory and policy in Spain.)

Hoppe argues that the rise and decline of civilization boils down to one primary issue: time preference, the way one compares the values of present and future goods. Though a formal economic approach is rather more complex, the basic contention is that economic arrangements with reward future-orientation (long-term thinking) will produce rising levels of prosperity, while present-orientation (short-term thinking) will lead to lowered standards of living and greater social decay.

Hoppe argues that genuinely hereditary-monarchic/aristocratic societies (hereinafter “monarchies”), though imperfect, tend toward future-orientedness. A monarch must keep taxes low to avoid revolts and must avoid choices which lower the long-term economic productivity of his tax base. High taxes, subsidies for poverty, large national debts, and large-scale social welfare projects are generally avoided by monarchs, lest they ruin their kingdom and their children’s inheritances.

On the other hand, in a democracic/collectivist order (hereinafter “democracy”), short-term thinking prevails. Term limits, which are in theory designed to reduce the power of elected representatives, have the perverse effect of leading politicians to think in terms of individual years rather than in decades or generations. Further, while a monarch maintains power by avoiding revolt through leaving people alone, a democratic politician (hereinafter “demagogue”) maintains power by expanding the base of voters to whom favors are given. Thus, while it is in the best interests of a monarch to have as little poverty as possible in his kingdom and to promote economic growth, it is in the best interests of a demagogue to have as large a class of government dependents as possible (thus social security, public schools, public healthcare, welfare, etc.). Democracy enrolls more and more people in an ever-growing social welfare society in order to buy votes. The increased perception of legitimacy that a democracy has (the myth of “rule by the people”) allows the democratic state, as a perceived guardian rather than rival of the people, to raise taxes to rates which monarchs only dream of. While hereditary monarchs must struggle to take in even 5-8% of the national production in taxes, democracies almost always take in over 40% and often over 50% of the nation’s economic output.

In warfare as well democracy compares poorly to monarchy. In monarchy-dominated ages, there existed a clear class consciousness in which the subjects and aristocrats were understood to have differing interests. Thus, the constant wars for territory were primarily inter-aristocratic battles which did not affect the common people in any way comparable to modern war. Conscription was irregular and poorly enforced when it did occur, and the low tax base did not allow for the maintenance of standing armies. Because monarchs were seeking to make a profit from wars, they invested a relatively small amount of money in them (compared to democracies). It was not until the rise of nationalism and democracy that warfare became the hellish thing it has been in modern times.

As democracy began to spread, war was thought of less and less as an battle between two sets of aristocrats and more and more as a showdown between two peoples. If the people, rather than the king, are considered the basic unit of government, it is the people as a whole who will fight. The first major democratic revolution, the French Revolution, also brought universal conscription. There is no need to recount the massive killings that occured over the next two centuries in the name of democratic or collectivist movements. Hoppe considers the various totalitarianisms of the twentieth century to be not reversions to the monarchic way and opposite to democracy, but rather unfortunate offshoots of the democratic people, taking majority rule to its tragic but logical conclusion by marginalizing and wiping out minorities for the “common good.”

It would be an entirely depressing book if Hoppe did not offer some way to remedy the current situation. He recommends decentralizing power whenever possible and delegitimizing democracy by undermining its foundational myth: the social contract. His alternative to both monarchy and democracy will please very few, as it relies on the total privatization of all government functions, including the provision of law and order. Though he makes a valiant effort to demonstrate that private law could work in theory, anarchism has never gone over well and for this reason the book is primarily useful for its critique of democracy’s weakness rather than as a realistic game plan.

His opinions intersect in important ways with some of the developments that modern libertarianism in its various forms has witnessed. For example, his chapter “On Conservatism and Libertarianism” argues that the only sensible game plan for conservatives is to back the radical reduction and decentralization of state power as a way to get it back into the hands of the central institutions of conservatism: family and church. The church gets little more than passing mention, as though it were more a side effect of the family than anything else and not an institution which radically challenged the family’s claims as in Matthew 10:35ff. (It is, incidentally, against such a patriarchal or clannish view of the world that Gary North wrote his polemic Baptized Patriarchalism.) Hoppe argues that it is conservative ways of doing things (marriage, larger families, localism) which thrive best in an unencumbered free market, and that it is government intervention and the welfare state which take money from the more economically successful organized families and hand it to people pursuing alternative lifestyles such as the single-parent home. He minces no words in his scathing critique of most of what the conservative right calls moral degeneracy, and attacks self-styled “libertarians” who use libertarianism as a means to disorganized and unrestricted behavior. He argues that it is the market above all other institutions which upholds a conservative order and that the key to a more strongly conservative society is not getting the right laws passed but getting government away from interfering.

Finally, Hoppe’s book is controversial for its take on immigration. Like Ron Paul, Hoppe believes that in a welfare state, unrestricted immigration is a form of subsidy which undercuts the previous occupants of a country and forces a larger welfare class upon them. Hoppe argues that immigration should be strictly controlled for intelligence, work skills, and cultural compatibility, and that poor immigrants should be kept out.

Regardless of where one comes down on some of Hoppe’s opinions, the book is valuable as a much-needed reexamination of the differences between democracy and monarchy, a view which does not ignore some of the finer achievements of monarchies such as the Habsburg Empire and which similarly does not whitewash the nationalist bloodbaths that filled the twentieth century as a strange anti-democratic aberration. For those who can get their hands on a copy, I recommend it as an imperfect but deeply insightful antidote to the simplistic view of monarchy and democracy that we learn in both public schools, Christian schools, and home schools.

This weekend I was at an obscure but important right-wing conference, and when I was speaking to one of the leaders of today’s right-wing youth movement, I asked him how many kids he had. His answer speaks volumes: “Just four.” In a world where a left-wing state like Vermont produces 1.57 babies per woman while a right-wing state like Utah produces 2.71, you don’t have to be a genius to figure out who’s on the winning side.This overall effect is only accelerated that the most educated liberals have even less children, while the most politically radical conservatives have even more children, so much so that in certain circles my father’s nine children are not all that surprising, and someone will refer to his brood as “just four.”

But I noticed something else listening to speakers and having late-night conversations with student activists and right-wing think-tank members and movement leaders. There is vast diversity on the American right: some want to impose conservative culture through law, while others simply want to quit subsidizing the breakdown of the family; some want to spread democracy throughout the world, while others want the US to prop up friendly dictators and some even want a non-interventionist foreign policy; and there is all sorts of division over other issues, especially in the continuing struggle between more “traditional conservative” and more “libertarian” elements for control of the American right wing. Even if you believe my claim that it is conservatives, and specifically religious conservatives, who must win the day when it comes to the culture wars, what is far less inevitable is the question of what sort of religious conservatives will win the day.

If I had to guess, I would say that the future belongs to religious conservatives who favor a less invasive foreign policy, who will either restrict or outlaw abortion, who will allow for freer markets, and who will leave most social issues to state and local governments rather than trying to force morality on the whole population at the Federal level. But I could be wrong — the race for control of the right wing is still wide open. If you want to try to influence the future, don’t put too much effort into trying to influence whether the right wing wins. We do. Instead, put your effort into deciding what sort of right wing control we should have. That’s the most important unanswered in long-term American politics.

http://fontwords.com/2011/05/23/mennonite-monday-on-that-mennonite-confession-article-5#comments

http://www.caseyresearch.com/cwc/doug-casey-phyles

Think about the idea, and then think of what Gary North sees in it. Yeah. The whole libertarian/reconstructionist alliance makes more sense now, don’t it?

1. Strict libertarianism, consisting either of an anarcho-capitalist order or a minimal state protecting only life, liberty and property.

2. Strict non-involvement, in which Christians avoid the use of aggression violence, and therefore of state action. This would require that Christians not participate in the government, and leave such things to unbelievers and simply accept the current state of affairs as ‘Gottes Wille’.

3. Theonomy. Like what Gary North advocates.

Nothing else has any sort of consistency, so far as I can see.

[1] With the most notable exception of abortion, which I am firmly opposed to. Both pro-life and pro-death positions on this issue have been characterized as libertarians, Walter Block being a ‘pure libertarian’ who promotes legalizing a woman’s choice to abort, and the pro-life ‘libertarian’ position being represented by Ron Paul. See Jakub Wisniewski’s recent essay in Libertarian Papers, 2:16 (2010), ‘A Critique of Block on Abortion and Child Abandonment‘.

He first tried to get something published at 17, first actually got something published at 30, first made enough money to support himself solely by writing at 52, and throughout this career has only written when he feels like it. He sounds like a free man. And by free man I mean something methodological.

Our nation, ostensibly based on a belief in individual freedom, is bound to recognize the freedom of both entrepreneurs who hire and employees. The way this principle may be extended to the workplace is simple. If you and I wish to enter into a professional relationship, we each have conditions. You, for example, may want to get your yard cleaned up for less that $20, and you may demand that I wear shoes with spikes in them while I work so as to aerate the soil in your lawn. I, on the other hand, may desire to do my work in the evenings, and may demand that you bring me a cool glass of lemonade every thirty minutes. If both of our demands coincide, we strike a bargain and work begins. But what if our demands do not coincide happily? You might decide that you are absolutely opposed to the drinking of lemonade because lemons are sentient beings, or I might not want to wear shoes with spikes because it interferes with the business-like look that makes me so charming. Unless we can work out some sort of satisfactory compromise arrangement, we are at an impasse. What happens next depends on what sort of society we live in. If we live in a free society, you and I simply go our separate ways, and seek other people to do our business with. If we live in a coercive society, the government shows up and demands that one or both of us participate in a deal that does not satisfy us. If our government is run by folks like me, the government might step in arguing that I have a legitimate legal right to your cool lemonade, and that you may not discriminate against me on the basis of my demands for lemonade. Or if the government is run by folks like you, the government might say that my insistence on only wearing military Oxfords is an affront to the lowly stature that is natural to lawn workers, and threaten to lock me up if I fail to show up in my spikes.

The right to conduct one’s own personal business free of governmental interference is so basic that in a more moral society it would be assumed. However, in the real world we live in both workers and business-people wish the government to step in and coerce other people into involuntary actions. One example of this is the set of coercive measures that are falsely named “collective bargaining rights” in our society. If collective bargaining rights meant nothing more than the right of a group of people to bargain collectively, the correct path to take in regards to the current union flare-ups in Ohio and Wisconsin would be simple: allow people to have their collective bargaining rights! Anything else would be wrong. This simplistic view of the issue is the one that the pro-union folks are currently pushing. The reality is somewhat more complicated. So, to elucidate what collective bargaining rights mean, let’s go back to our metaphor.

Let’s imagine that you have been blessed in everything your hand turns to, and that your yard has grown so large that I and my five brothers are now all employed by you. We work 40 hours a week and make $10 per hour cleaning your yard. You bring us glasses of cool lemonade every thirty minutes, and we wear spiky shoes to aerate your lawn. One day I and my brothers notice that the glasses of lemonade just don’t seem quite as cool as a cool glass of lemonade ought to be. We demand that you serve the cool lemonade with ice, and that these ice cubes be of sufficient size and coldness that on a hot day the outside of our glasses collects condensations. At this point, you tell us that our employment is ‘at will,’ and that while we certainly have the right to walk away if we do not like our working conditions, you just aren’t willing to negotiate the ice cube problem with us. So far, so good.

At this point, however, I call up my local law enforcement and accuse you of violating our collective bargaining rights by refusing to bargain. They come and force you to bargain, on threat of taking your yard. Then we form and union and spend hours singing songs on your sidewalk about solidarity. You threaten to fire us if we don’t stop singing outside our door. We call the local police and accuse you of violating our rights by retaliating against us for union-based activities. Finally, we decide to do something called ‘going on strike,’ which basically consists of not working in order to make you desperate enough to up our ice cube rations. You, being a bright fellow, notice that no one is showing up for work, and hire some Mexicans to do the work for $8 an hour with cool glasses of lemonade (un-iced) brought only once every hour. They do a great job. Finally, we decide that we’re ‘off strike’ and walk back to work. You point to the Mexicans and tell us that by not showing up for work we got ourselves fired. We sue you for coercively interfering with our collective bargaining rights, and a judge orders you that unless you hire us back at our previous wages, you are a union-busting monster.

This is, of course, an insane and immoral situation. But it is exactly the situation that we face now. This is why the set of tyrannical impositions that are called ‘collective bargaining rights’ have to be pulled down, especially when we’re dealing with people who, like public school teachers, are ‘bargaining’ for your forcibly extracted money. This is why to compare demonstrations in favor of coercion (the Wisconsin and Ohio protesters) with demonstrations against coercion (those who called for Mubarak to step down) not only cheapens the sacrifice of the Middle Eastern demonstrators, but is in fact an example of the crudest sort of doublespeak, a world of mental gymnastics in which coercion is called freedom.

This twisting of terms is the only reason that Joel Watts can sound reasonable when he writes,

Now, beyond that, I do not believe that it is ‘constitutional’, moral or ethical to strip anyone of their collective bargaining rights. . . . Now, with that said, I pray that the workers are successful.

If there’s one lesson we can learn from all this, it’s that whoever is allowed to control the terminology controls the discussion, and that if we are allowed to misuse language, we’ll sound sane while coming to insane conclusions. Take, for example, the double standard that has emerged around the word ‘violence’. In the post referenced above, Watts tells us ‘I do not support violent rhetoric.’ His recent posts have made it clear that not only does he disapprove of assassinations, he also disapproves of death threats, and even the putting of target-looking things on maps. But it is all to easy to forget that everything government does: every law, every tax, is done through violence or the threat of violence. To take a principled and fully consistent stand against violence and all that smells like it would make one into a libertarian. But now I’ve left the specific topic I started with and I’ve entered into a dangerously large subject, so I’ll call it quits now for this 1300-word post.

Are those voices I hear, howling in outrage? If so, it’s only because terms have become confused or history has been whitewashed to make him into a nice welfare-statist American-style moderate democratic socialist. Stuff and nonsense! Gandhi was opposed to all violence, which means he was an anarchist, and he was also wholeheartedly opposed to the use of violence for redistributing property, which means he was a capitalist in the same sense of the term. Some may say he was a socialist, but using this title to describe him is altogether misleading. Yes, he did believe in the sharing of resources — as do a great many libertarians. But he was fiercely opposed to using the power of the state — a force whose destructive nature and evil he certainly understood — for the bringing about of social justice. Anyone who uses Gandhi as a support for any kind of government intervention is twisting his message; though he used the words “socialism” and “communism” from time to time he was adamant that his support of “socialism” and “communism” were limited strictly to voluntary actions of sharing, and had nothing whatsoever to do with anything like the way “communism” and “socialism” are used today. He supported sharing as a personal decision, not a government policy.

Jeff Riggenbach has gone much further in depth explaining how Gandhi was a consistent, thorough, government-detesting libertarian anarchist capitalist political activist.

I will not try to explain the reasons behind what he did.  I can’t.  Morally, there is no excuse for what he did.  You know this, and I know this. But a few words for those working on processing these events.

Christ’s example in behavior toward government is instructive.  Though his values were opposed to the values of the Empire, and though he ridiculed Herod and refused to cooperate at trial, he did not lift a finger against the government.  Not only that:  he even stopped Peter’s attack on his killers and healed one of them.  And far from fading into obscurity, the message of Jesus Christ succeeded far beyond that of any warrior of his day, so outshining all else that two thousand years later, three billion people practice some form of religion that holds him in high esteem.

The governments of this world are filled through and through with evil, but the scriptures tell us that we are to cooperate with them.  We are to expose their evil and engage in what some smart guy called “Revolutionary Subordination.”  That is what we are here to do as Christians.  The governments of this world are deeply flawed agencies of justice, but even if we may go so far as to call them enemies, we must remember to love our enemies.

Now, I’m a libertarian, and as such, I’ve dealt with a lot of really, really frustrated people, people who want to create a more free world, people so passionate that they do not care about the morality of their actions, who believe that good ends justify any means.  Though I disagree with this outlook, I feel that I need to point something out, in case any angry libertarians are reading this.

Even if you’re so twisted as to think that it’s okay to just go and shoot down a Congresswoman and bystanders, think about how strategically stupid that is.  When you kill someone you make a martyr of them.  You also make it ten times harder for your ideas to be discussed.

Jared Loughner wanted the government to reinstate the gold standard.  Then he killed someone.  Now he is rightfully dismissed as a kook, and whatever coherent ideas may have existed in his dark head are also dismissed.  He worked against the government, against human civility, and against the cause he was working for.

But what about people who aren’t in any danger of going off and killing politicians?  How can they help to mend our nation and create a world where incidents like this are either non-existent or much rarer?

Well, if you live in the city or can get there, I recommend you find a group of people dedicated toward using non-violent means to solve our nation’s problems, like Agora Ministries.  Go spend time with inner-city youth.  If you want to fix the world, go learn the dysfunctions and terror that little kids are going through in your inner cities, and then start seeing what you can do to, one person at a time, to bring some light into the world.

You may help turn the next Jared Loughner around.

anarchism: the advocacy of the elimination of the state.  Generally the sort of anarchism I will discuss, on those odd occasions that anarchism comes up, is free market anarchism, which does believe in the rule of law, but does not believe in monopolistic rule of law.  I suggest For a New Liberty, by Murray Rothbard, as a primer in this sort of thinking.  Rothbardian anarchism is not anarchism in the sense of chaos (though some would argue it would eventually lead to it), nor is it anarchism in the sense of lack of law.  Though I’m not a Rothbardian anarchist myself, I respect Rothbardian anarchist theory and treat it as a theory worthy of examination.  The important thing to remember is that Rothbard-style anarchism, also called free market anarchism or anarcho-capitalism, is a call for an alternative sort of government, not a call for looting, rape, and pillage.

argument: The word “argument” is typically used in a negative sense, sometimes to point out to quarreling people that they’re taking their differences too much to heart, and sometimes just to make people shut up about their disagreements.  On this blog, however, the word “argue” is used in a conceptual sense.  Argument is nothing more than making an assertion and backing it up with reasons.  Argument is vital and desperately needed.

capitalism: In this blog, unless noted otherwise, I use capitalism to represent a system under which all are free to buy, sell, and give away their own labor, land, goods, and services at whatever prices they choose, to whomever they choose, whenever they choose, and in whatever quantity or state they chose.  When I call myself a capitalist, I am not giving any sort of blanket approval to big business, for example.  Capitalism does mean that I support Walmart’s right to sell cheap stuff.  It does not mean that I support zoning laws that crowd out smaller competitors, eminent domain that is used to seize private property and give it to Walmart, labor controls which give many people no options except working at Walmart, a welfare system which allows the public to bear part of the cost of Walmart’s labor, etc.  Indeed, all of those things are highly anti-capitalist, by this definition, despite the fact that they are done by a stereotypically capitalist organization.  Slavery is also anti-capitalist, by this definition, because it involves the selling of what is not one’s own.

child labor is nothing more than children working for money.  I’m generally okay with child labor, especially when no other alternatives exist for the families practicing it.  (Critics of the industrial revolution often conveniently ignore the fact that most rural children before the industrial age died before the age of 8).  However, I am against abusive child labor.  Yes, I know that can be a difficult line to draw.

libertarianism: a system of thought which opposes the use of government for solving problems.  Almost nobody is 100% libertarian.  I, for example, am okay with government punishing people who have sex with children.  Strictly speaking, that’s not very libertarian of me.  Some non-libertarian ideas reside in the brain of just about any libertarian, so I don’t use the term only to describe purists like Rothbard.  However, if someone supports our current welfare state or our current policy of continual warfare, it would be ridiculous to call them libertarian.  A libertarian, to deserve the title, must have a consistent opposition to statism.

welfare: I use the term broadly to describe a variety of wealth transfers done for social reasons.  Welfare includes food stamps, housing assistance, Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, public schooling, government loans and grants to college students, etc.

slavery: forcing one person to work for another.  Though private slavery has been outlawed throughout the world, it still continues illegally.  Government slavery also exists legally, but is called the draft.  I am opposed to legal private slavery, illegal private slavery, sex slavery, and the draft.

socialism: This is a term that’s almost impossible to pin down, but generally refers to a belief that government must manage the economy for the greater social good.

statism: irrational trust in the moral goodness or practical usefulness of government, and a corresponding irrational disregard for the problems caused by it.  I do not use statism as an opposite to anarchism.

sweatshops: places where people voluntarily work longer hours than Americans would, in conditions that Americans would refuse to work in, for far lower wages than Americans would accept.  The only reason people work in sweatshops is that the sweatshop is the best available work.  In Nike sweatshops, for example, workers earn double the wages of their fellow countrymen.  I am unabashedly pro-sweatshop.  I do not, however, support slavery or abusive child labor, which is another issue altogether.