"The plans differ; the planners are all alike..."
– Frederic Bastiat
Peace
It is often been claimed that war is good because it brings out the human traits of courage, bravery, and patriotism. War makes for exciting times, stretches our endurance, and allows us to achieve our destiny. War can even get us out of economic depressions! Nothing could be further from the truth. War is what animals do to each other. It is deadly and destructive. It prevents us from building and achieving our goals, and brings man down to the level of the brute animal. It destroys cooperation and trade, and substitutes force for peaceful, voluntary interaction. Personal and family bonds are broken while property rights are ignored and trampled upon. Tasteful art, literature, music, and culture in general are pushed asunder or replaced with primitive and barbaric substitutes. Police power, economic interventionism, and nationalism thrive. Inflation is what makes war possible, but it makes normal economic life a nightmare. War is for the health of the State, not the wellbeing of humanity.
Mises Circle in Houston, 24 January 2009.
This article was published in December 1994; Volume 12, Number 12 of the Free Market Magazine. "Peace on Earth" should be more than a holiday cliché. The costs of war and its perpetual threat are immense, and threaten freedom and civilization itself. Even with the end of the Cold War, the U.S. finds itself in an endless series of military squabbles, including Panama, Iraq, Somalia, and Haiti, with prospects for future involvement in Korea, This policy must be re-evaluated, especially by those concerned about the fate of American liberty. In his 1994 book War and the Rise of the State, historian
Thomas Jefferson spoke for the founders and all our early presidents when he stated: "peace, commerce, and honest friendship with all nations, entangling alliances with none..." which is, "one of the essential principles of our government." The question is: Whatever happened to this principle and should it be restored? We find the 20th Century was wracked with war, peace was turned asunder, and our liberties were steadily eroded. Foreign alliances and meddling in the internal affairs of other nations became commonplace. On many occasions, involvement in military action occurred through UN resolutions or a presidential executive order, despite the fact that the war power was explicitly placed in the hands of Congress.
The libertarian movement has been chided by William F. Buckley, Jr., for failing to use its "strategic intelligence" in facing the major problems of our time. We have, indeed, been too often prone to "pursue our busy little seminars on whether or not to demunicipalize the garbage collectors" (as Buckley has contemptuously written), while ignoring and failing to apply libertarian theory to the most vital problem of our time: war and peace. There is a sense in which libertarians have been utopian rather than strategic in their thinking, with a tendency to divorce the ideal system which we envisage from the realities of the world in which we live. In short, too many of us have divorced theory from practice, and have then been content to hold the pure libertarian society as an abstract ideal for some remotely future time, while in the concrete world of today we follow unthinkingly the orthodox "conservative" line. To live liberty, to begin the hard but essential strategic struggle of changing the unsatisfactory world of today in the direction of our ideals, we must realize and demonstrate to the world that libertarian theory can be brought sharply to bear upon all of the world's crucial problems. By coming to grips with these problems, we can demonstrate that libertarianism is not just a beautiful ideal somewhere on Cloud Nine, but a tough-minded body of truths that enables us to take our stand and to cope with the whole host of issues of our day. |
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