DIR Return Create A Forum - Home
---------------------------------------------------------
WebWar
HTML https://webwar.createaforum.com
---------------------------------------------------------
*****************************************************
DIR Return to: Ιστορία κ&#...
*****************************************************
#Post#: 3915--------------------------------------------------
Μακιαβέλι ή
Ρόθμπαρντ,
του Lew Rockwell
DIR By: FringeElements
Date: December 1, 2012, 2:42 am
---------------------------------------------------------
[center]
HTML http://lewrockwell.com/rockwell/lew2012-175a.jpg[/center]
This talk was delivered on September 15, 2012, at a seminar
sponsored by the Columbia University Department of Italian in
association with the Ludwig von Mises Institute.
As libertarianism has acquired a higher profile in American life
over the past several years, the attacks on and caricatures of
libertarians have grown almost as rapidly. Libertarians, we
read, are antisocial, and prefer isolation over interaction with
others. They are greedy, and are unmoved if the poor should
starve. They are naive about our dangerous enemies, and refuse
their patriotic duty to support the government’s wars.
These caricatures and misconceptions can be put to rest by
simply defining what libertarianism is. The libertarian idea is
based on a fundamental moral principle: nonaggression. No one
may initiate physical force against anyone else.
There is nothing antisocial about that. To the contrary, it is
the denial of this principle that is antisocial, for it is
peaceful interaction that lies at the heart of civilized
society.
At first glance, hardly anyone can object to the nonaggression
principle. Few people openly support acts of aggression against
peaceful parties. But libertarians apply this principle across
the board, to all actors, public and private. Our view goes well
beyond merely suggesting that the State may not engage in gross
violations of the moral law. We contend that the State may not
perform any action that would be forbidden to an individual.
Moral norms either exist or they do not.
Thus we cannot abide State kidnapping, just because they call it
the draft. We cannot abide the incarceration of people who
ingest the wrong substances, just because they call it the war
on drugs. We cannot abide theft just because they call it
taxation. And we cannot abide mass murder just because they call
it foreign policy.
Murray Rothbard, who earned his Ph.D. from this very institution
in 1956 and went on to become known as Mr. Libertarian, said
that you could discover the libertarian position on any issue by
imagining a criminal gang carrying out the action in question.
In other words, libertarianism takes certain moral and political
insights shared by a great many people, and simply applies them
consistently.
For example, people oppose monopoly because they fear the
increase in prices, the decrease in product quality, and the
centralization of power that accompany it.
The libertarian applies this concern for monopoly to the State
itself. After all, private firms, which we are supposed to fear,
can’t simply charge whatever they want for their goods or
services. Consumers can simply switch from one supplier to
another, or from a particular product to a close substitute.
Firms cannot engage in quality deterioration without likewise
losing customers, who can find competitors offering better
products.
But the State may, by definition, charge the public whatever it
likes for the so-called services it supplies. Its subjects must
accept whatever level of quality the State should deign to
provide. And there can never, by definition, be any competitor
to the State, since the State is defined as the territorial
monopolist of compulsion and coercion.
With its wars, its genocides, and its totalitarian atrocities,
the State has proven itself by far the most lethal institution
in history. Its lesser crimes include the debt crises it has
caused, the self-perpetuating bureaucracies that feed off the
productive population, and the squandering of resources – which
might otherwise have improved the general standard of living
through capital formation – on arbitrary and politically
motivated projects.
Yet the State, despite its failures, is consistently given a
benefit of the doubt that no one would extend to actors and
firms in the private sector. For instance, educational outcomes
remain dismal despite vastly increased expenditures and far
lower class sizes than in the past. Had the private sector
presided over such a disaster, we would never hear the end of
all the denunciations of the malefactors of great wealth who are
keeping our children ignorant. When the government sector
performs so poorly, there is silence. Silence, that is,
interrupted by demands that the State be given still more
resources.
Years ago, when John Chubb of the Brookings Institution tried to
uncover how many bureaucrats were employed in New York City’s
public school system, it took six telephone calls to reach
someone who knew the answer – and that person was not allowed to
disclose the information. It took another half dozen calls to
find someone who both knew the answer and could reveal it. The
answer? Six thousand.
Chubb then called the Archdiocese of New York to find out how
many bureaucrats were employed in the administration of the
city’s Catholic schools, which educated one-sixth as many
students. When the first person he called didn’t know the
answer, he figured he was in for it again. But that person went
on to say, "Wait, let me count." It was twenty-six.
Imagine if the situation were reversed, and the top-heavy school
system had been the private one. There would be no end to the
investigations, the media reports, the public outrage. But when
the State is the guilty party, there is no interest in the story
at all, and no one even hears about it.
Likewise, when the government courts force innocent parties to
endure interminable delays and endless expense, there are no
investigations or cries for justice. When the rich and famous
are obviously favored by the system, people glumly accept it as
a fact of life. Meanwhile, private arbitration companies are
flourishing, quietly filling the gap left by the government’s
awful system – and hardly anyone notices or cares, much less
appreciates these improvements in our welfare.
The US government has carried out atrocities of an unspeakable
kind, just in the past ten years, and justified them with
propaganda claims that nobody around the world, apart from a
gullible sector of the American population, took seriously. If
K-Mart had somehow managed to do such a thing, everyone involved
would have been roundly condemned, and the perpetrators would
have been imprisoned, if not executed.
The government, on the other hand, persuades the people that
they and the government are the same thing, that the
government’s wars are their wars, that these conflicts involve
us against them. People’s moral compasses become blurred as they
begin to identify themselves and their own personal goodness, as
they see it, with the wars in which "their" government is
engaged.
In fact, for the libertarian, the government’s wars are not us
versus them. The wars are a case of them versus them.
The other side of the Austro-libertarian coin is, of course, the
Austrian School of economics.
The Austrian School has enjoyed a renaissance of sorts since the
Panic of 2008, since so many economists who belong to this
venerable tradition of thought predicted the crisis – in the
face of official assurances to the contrary, in the media, among
the political class, and from the Federal Reserve itself. Thanks
to the Internet, it was impossible for official opinion to black
out these dissident voices.
The Austrian School, which was born officially with Carl
Menger’s 1871 book Principles of Economics, is sometimes
conflated with other schools of thought loosely associated with
the free market. But in its method, its price theory, its
monopoly theory, its capital theory, its business-cycle theory,
and in so much else, it is distinct from those other schools of
thought, and often in direct opposition to them.
It is solidly realistic, and grounded in the individual actor
and his decisions and preferences. It seeks to understand
real-world prices, not the prices of a long-run equilibrium that
can never exist except in the minds of economists.
It was the Austrians who solved problems that had vexed the
classical economists, whose price theory could not account for
why water, so necessary to life, commanded virtually a zero
price on the market, while diamonds, a mere luxury, were so
dear.
And it is the Austrians who predicted the Great Depression at a
time when fashionable opinion claimed the business cycle had
been tamed forever, who predicted the dot-com crash when Fed
chairman Alan Greenspan was saying that perhaps booms didn’t
necessarily have to be followed by busts any longer, and who, as
I mentioned, predicted the most recent crisis when the
regulators whom we are supposed to trust to keep the economy
stable said there was no housing bubble and the fundamentals of
that market were sound.
A common caricature holds that supporters of the free market
believe the market yields a perfect social outcome, whatever
that is supposed to mean. In a world of uncertainty and constant
change, no system can yield a perfect result. No system can
ensure that the whole structure of production instantaneously
adjusts to precisely that allocation of capital goods that will
yield the exact array of types and quantities of consumer goods
that the public desires, while imposing the least cost in terms
of opportunities foregone.
Our point is that no competing system can do a better job than
the market. Only actors on the market can allocate resources in
a non-arbitrary way, because only on the market can someone
evaluate a course of action according to the economizing
principle of profit and loss. This is what the Austrians call
economic calculation.
This was the reason, economist Ludwig von Mises explained in
1920, that socialism could not work. Under socialism as
traditionally understood, the State owned the means of
production. Now if the State already owns all those things, then
no buying and selling of them takes place. Without buying and
selling, in turn, there is no process by which prices can arise.
And without prices for capital goods, central planners cannot
allocate resources rationally. They cannot know whether a
particular production process should use ten units of plastic
and nine units of lumber, or ten units of lumber and nine units
of plastic (if we are indifferent between the two combinations
from a technological point of view). Without market prices by
which to compare incommensurable goods like lumber and plastic,
they cannot know how urgently demanded each input is in
alternative lines of production. Multiply this problem by the
nearly infinite set of possible combinations of productive
factors, and you see the impossible situation the central
planning board faces.
Even the non-socialist State has a calculation problem. Since it
operates without a profit-and-loss feedback mechanism, it has no
way of knowing whether it has allocated resources in accordance
with consumer preferences and in a least-cost manner. To the
contrary, its decisions regarding what to produce and where, in
what quantities and using which methods are completely blind
from the point of view of social economizing. (By "social
economizing" I mean the process by which we attain higher-valued
ends with lower-valued means.)
Hence if we want to ensure that resources are not squandered or
spent arbitrarily, we must keep them out of the hands of the
State.
Strictly speaking, the Austrian School of economics has nothing
to do with libertarianism. Economics, insisted economist Ludwig
von Mises, is value-free. It describes rather than prescribes.
It does not tell us what we ought to do. It merely explains the
various phenomena we observe, from prices to interest rates, and
supplies the cause-and-effect analysis that permits us to
understand the consequences of coercive interference in the
voluntary buying and selling decisions of individuals.
All the same, the knowledge the Austrian School imparts to us
strongly implies that certain courses of action are more
desirable from the standpoint of human welfare than others.
Among other things, we learn from Austrian economics that the
State’s allocation decisions cannot be socially economizing. We
learn that the desires of consumers are best served by the free
price system, which directs production decisions up and down the
capital structure in accordance with society’s demands. And we
learn that the State’s interference with money, the commodity
that forms one-half of every non-barter exchange, gives rise to
the devastation of the boom-bust business cycle.
Austro-libertarianism, then, in the spirit of Rothbard, takes
the libertarian nonaggression principle and supplements it with
the Austrian School’s descriptions of the free and unhampered
market economy. The result is an elegant and compelling way of
understanding the world, which in turn conveys the moral and
material urgency of establishing a free society.
Now the seminar today asks us to consider questions of power and
the State from an Austro-libertarian perspective, but also in
light of Nicolo Machiavelli, the late fifteenth- and early
sixteenth-century historian, political theorist, and counselor
to princes. Most people know of Machiavelli for the views
expressed in his short manual The Prince, and not for his longer
and perhaps more substantial works, including his Discourses on
Livy and his history of Florence. I have drawn largely but not
exclusively from The Prince for my brief remarks today.
The Roman moralists of antiquity, and the Renaissance humanists
who followed them, had urged that rulers had to possess a
particular set of moral virtues. These were, first, the four
cardinal virtues – cardinal from the Latin meaning "hinge";
hence all other virtues hinge on these – of courage, justice,
temperance, and wisdom. Now all men were called to cultivate
these virtues, but princes in particular were called to still
others beyond these, such as princely magnanimity and
liberality. These themes are developed in Cicero’s De Officiis,
or On Duties, and in Seneca’s On Clemency and On Benefits.
The humanists anticipated the thesis Machiavelli would one day
bring forth, namely that there ought to be a division between
morality on the one hand and whatever happens to be expedient
for the prince on the other. They answered it by cautioning that
even if princely wickedness is not punished in this life, divine
retribution in the next life would be fearsome and certain.
What made Machiavelli stand out so starkly was his radical
departure from this traditional view of the prince’s moral
obligations. As the great Machiavelli scholar Quentin Skinner
points out, "When we turn to The Prince we find this aspect of
humanist morality suddenly and violently overturned."
The prince, says Machiavelli, must always "be prepared to act
immorally when this becomes necessary." And "in order to
maintain his power," he will – not just sometimes but often – be
forced "to act treacherously, ruthlessly, and inhumanely."
Most people will never interact with the prince themselves,
hence Machiavelli’s note to the prince that "everyone can see
what you appear to be" but "few have direct experience of what
you really are." "A skillful deceiver," he continued, "always
finds plenty of people who will let themselves be deceived." We
can surmise from this what kind of person the prince would have
to be.
It is customary to object at this point that Machiavelli
counseled that the prince pursue virtue when possible, and that
he should not pursue evil for its own sake. Machiavelli does
indeed make such an argument in chapter 15 of The Prince. But on
the other hand, Machiavelli says that conduct considered
virtuous by traditional morality and the general run of mankind
merely "seems virtuous," and that apparently wicked behavior
that maintains one’s power only seems vicious.
Skinner poses, and answers, the historian’s natural question
when faced with these moral claims:
But what of the Christian objection that this is a foolish as
well as a wicked position to adopt, since it forgets the day of
judgment on which all injustices will finally be punished? About
this Machiavelli says nothing at all. His silence is eloquent,
indeed epoch-making; it echoed around Christian Europe, at first
eliciting a stunned silence in return, and then a howl of
execration that has never finally died away.
Machiavelli’s view has sometimes been summarized as "the ends
justify the means." Such a distillation does not capture all
aspects of Machiavelli’s thought, and no doubt this pithy
summary irritates professors of political theory. But if the end
in mind is the preservation of the prince’s power, then "the
ends justify the means" is not an unfair description of
Machiavelli’s counsel.
This principle, in turn, is what the collectivist State now
appeals to in order to justify its own deviations from what
people would otherwise consider moral and good. F.A. Hayek
wrote, "The principle that the end justifies the means is in
individualist ethics regarded as the denial of all morals. In
collectivist ethics it becomes necessarily the supreme rule;
there is literally nothing which the consistent collectivist
must not be prepared to do if it serves ‘the good of the whole,’
because the 'good of the whole' is to him the only criterion of
what ought to be done." Collectivist ethics, he added, "knows no
other limit than that set by expediency – the suitability of the
particular act for the end in view."
Almost everyone now accepts, at least implicitly, the claim that
a different set of moral rules applies to the State, or that to
one degree or another the State is above morality as
traditionally understood. Even if they would not use some of the
verbal formulations of Machiavelli, at some level they believe
it is unreasonable to expect the State or its functionaries to
behave the way the rest of us do. The State may preserve itself
by methods that no private business, or household, or
organization, or individual would be allowed to employ for their
own preservation. We accept this as normal.
This is merely a more general statement of the phenomenon I
described earlier, whereby few people even bat an eye when the
State engages in behavior that would be considered a moral
enormity if carried out by any other person or entity.
Now it will be objected that the coercive apparatus of the State
is so important to the right ordering of society that we cannot
insist too strongly on libertarian purity when evaluating its
behavior. Sometimes the State just has to do what it has to do.
Every so-called service the State provides has in the past been
provided non-coercively. We are simply not encouraged to learn
this history, and the framework we unknowingly adopt from our
earliest days in school makes our imaginations too narrow to
conceive of it.
Machiavelli launched one revolution, on behalf of the State.
Ours is the revolution against it, and in favor of peace,
freedom, and prosperity.
[right]December 1, 2012[/right]
Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr. [mailto:lew@lewrockwell.com
send him mail], former editorial assistant to Ludwig von Mises
and congressional chief of staff to Ron Paul, is founder and
chairman of the Mises Institute
HTML http://www.mises.org/,
executor for the estate of Murray N.
Rothbard, and editor of LewRockwell.com. See his books
HTML http://www.lewrockwell.com/rockwell/rockwell-books.html.
Copyright © 2012 by LewRockwell.com. Permission to reprint in
whole or in part is gladly granted, provided full credit is
given.
*****************************************************
Page 1 of 1