Hence, it is necessary to combine the economic policies of the left and the nationalism and cultural conservatism of the right, to create "a new identity synthesizing both the economic interests and cultural-national loyalties of the proletarianized middle class in a separate and unified political movement."7 For obvious reasons this doctrine is not so named, but there is a term for this type of conservatism: It is called social nationalism or national socialism.
I will not concern myself here with the question whether or not Buchanan's conservatism has mass appeal and whether or not its diagnosis of American politics is sociologically correct. I doubt that this is the case, and certainly Buchanan's fate during the 1995 and 2000 Republican presidential primaries does not indicate otherwise. Rather, I want to address the more fundamental questions: Assuming that it does have such appeal; that is, assuming that cultural conservatism and social-socialist economics can be psychologically combined (that is, that people can hold both of these views simultaneously without cognitive dissonance), can they also be effectively and practically (economically and praxeologically) combined? Is it possible to maintain the current level of economic socialism (social security, etc.) and reach the goal of restoring cultural normalcy (natural families and normal rules of conduct)?
Samuel T. Francis, "From Household to Nation: The Middle American populism of Pat Buchanan," Chronicles (March 1996): 12-16; see also idem, Beautiful Losers: Essays on the Failure of American Conservatism (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1993); idem, Revolution from the Middle (Raleigh, N.C.: Middle American Press, 1997).
7Francis, "From Household to Nation, pp. 12-16.
Buchanan and his theoreticians do not feel the need to raise this question, because they believe politics to be solely a matter of will and power. They do not believe in such things as economic laws. If only people want something, and they are given the power to implement their will, everything can be achieved. The "dead Austrian economist" Ludwig von Mises, to whom Buchanan referred contemptuously during his campaign, characterized this belief as "historicism," the intellectual posture of the German Kathedersozialisten, the academic Socialists of the Chair, who justified any and all statist measures.
But historicist contempt and ignorance of economics does not alter the fact that inexorable economic laws exist. You cannot have your cake and eat it too, for instance. Or what you consume now cannot be consumed again in the future. Or producing more of one good requires producing less of another. No wishful thinking can make such laws go away. To believe otherwise can only result in practical failure. "In fact," noted Mises, "economic history is a long record of government policies that failed because they were designed with a bold disregard for the laws of economics."8 In light of elementary and immutable economic laws, the Buchananite program of social nationalism is just another bold but impossible dream. No wishful thinking can alter the fact that maintaining the core institutions of the present welfare state and wanting to return to traditional families, norms, conduct, and culture are incompatible goals. You can have one—socialism (welfare)—or the other—traditional morals—but you cannot have both, for social nationalist economics, the pillar of the current welfare state system Buchanan wants to leave untouched, is the very cause of cultural and social anomalies.
8Ludwig von Mises, Human Action: A Treatise on Economics, Scholar's Edition (Auburn, Ala.: Ludwig von Mises Institute, 1998), p. 67. "Princes and democratic majorities," writes Mises leading directly up to this verdict,
are drunk with power. They must reluctantly admit that they are subject to the laws of nature. But they reject the very notion of economic law. Are they not the supreme legislators? Don't they have the power to crush every opponent? No war lord is prone to acknowledge any limits other than those imposed on him by a superior armed force. Servile scribblers are always ready to foster such complacency by expounding the appropriate doctrines. They call their garbled presumptions "historical economics."
In order to clarify this, it is only necessary to recall one of the most fundamental laws of economics which says that all compulsory wealth or income redistribution, regardless of the criteria on which it is based, involves taking from some—the havers of something—and giving it to others—the non-havers of something. Accordingly, the incentive to be a haver is reduced, and the incentive to be a non-haver increased. What the haver has is characteristically something considered "good," and what the non-haver does not have is something "bad" or a deficiency. Indeed, this is the very idea underlying any redistribution: some have too much good stuff and others not enough. The result of every redistribution is that one will thereby produce less good and increasingly more bad, less perfection and more deficiencies. By subsidizing with tax funds (with funds taken from others) people who are poor (bad), more poverty will be created. By subsidizing people because they are unemployed (bad), more unemployment will be created. By subsidizing unwed mothers (bad), there will be more unwed mothers and more illegitimate births, etc.9
Obviously, this basic insight applies to the entire system of so-called social security that has been implemented in Western Europe (from the 1880s onward) and the U.S. (since the 1930s): of compulsory government "insurance" against old age, illness, occupational injury, unemployment, indigence, etc. In conjunction with the even older compulsory system of public education, these institutions and practices amount to a massive attack on the institution of the family and personal responsibility. By relieving individuals of the obligation to provide for their own income, health, safety, old age, and children's education, the range and temporal horizon of private provision is reduced, and the value of marriage, family, children, and kinship relations is lowered. Irresponsibility, shortsightedness, negligence, illness and even destructionism (bads) are promoted, and responsibility, farsightedness, diligence, health and conservatism (goods) are punished. The compulsory old age insurance system in particular, by which retirees (the old) are subsidized from taxes imposed on current income earners (the young), has systematically weakened the natural intergenerational bond between parents, grandparents, and children. The old need no longer rely on the assistance of their children if they have made no provision for their own old age; and the young (with typically less accumulated wealth) must support the old (with typically more accumulated wealth) rather than the other way around, as is typical within families. Consequently, not only do people want to have fewer children—and indeed, birthrates have fallen in half since the onset of modern social security (welfare) policies—but also the respect which the young traditionally accorded to their elders is diminished, and all indicators of family disintegration and malfunctioning, such as rates of divorce, illegitimacy, child abuse, parent abuse, spouse abuse, single parenting, singledom, alternative lifestyles, and abortion, have increased.10
9On the counterproductive nature of all interventionist policies see Ludwig von Mises, A Critique of Interventionism (New Rochelle, N.Y.: Arlington House, 1977); idem, Interventionism: An Economic Analysis (Irvington-on-Hudson, N.Y.: Foundation for Economic Education, 1998).
Moreover, with the socialization of the health care system through institutions such as Medicaid and Medicare and the regulation of the insurance industry (by restricting an insurer's right of refusal: to exclude any individual risk as uninsurable, and discriminate freely, according to actuarial methods, between different group risks) a monstrous machinery of wealth and income redistribution at the expense of responsible individuals and low-risk groups in favor of irresponsible actors and high-risk groups has been put in motion. Subsidies for the ill, unhealthy and disabled breed illness, disease, and disability and weaken the desire to work for a living and to lead healthy lives. One can do no better than quote the "dead Austrian economist" Ludwig von Mises once more:
being ill is not a phenomenon independent of conscious will. ... A man's efficiency is not merely a result of his physical condition; it depends largely on his mind and will. . . . The destructionist aspect of accident and health insurance lies a
bove all in the fact that such institutions promote accident and illness, hinder recovery, and very often create, or at any rate intensify and lengthen, the functional disorders which follow illness or accident.... To feel healthy is quite different from being healthy in the medical sense. ... By weakening or completely destroying the will to be well and able to work, social insurance creates illness and inability to work; it produces the habit of complaining—which is in itself a neurosis—and neuroses of other kinds As a social institution it makes a people sick bodily and mentally or at least helps to multiply, lengthen, and intensify disease.... Social insurance has thus made the neurosis of the insured a dangerous public disease. Should the institution be extended and developed the disease will spread. No reform can be of any assistance. We cannot weaken or destroy the will to health without producing illness.11
10See Allan C. Carlson, Family Questions: Reflections on the American Social Crisis (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Publishers, 1988); idem, The Swedish Experiment in Family Politics (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Publishers, 1990); idem, From Cottage to Work Station: The Family's Search for Social Harmony in the Industrial Age (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1993); Charles Murray, Losing Ground: American Social Policy 1950-1980 (New York: Basic Books, 1984).
I do not wish to explain here the economic nonsense of Buchanan's and his theoreticians' even further-reaching idea of protectionist policies (of protecting American wages). If they were right, their argument in favor of economic protection would amount to an indictment of all trade and a defense of the thesis that everyone (each family) would be better off if he (it) never traded with anyone else. Certainly, in this case no one could ever lose his job, and unemployment due to "unfair" competition would be reduced to zero. Yet such a full-employment society would not be prosperous and strong; it would be composed of people (families) who, despite working from dawn to dusk, would be condemned to poverty and starvation. Buchanan's international protectionism, while less destructive than a policy of interpersonal or interregional protectionism, would result in precisely the same effect. This is not conservatism (conservatives want families to be prosperous and strong). This is economic destructionism.12
In any case, what should be clear by now is that most if not all of the moral degeneration and cultural rot—the signs of decivilization—all around us are the inescapable and unavoidable results of the welfare state and its core institutions. Classical, old-style conservatives knew this, and they vigorously opposed public education and social security. They knew that states everywhere were intent upon breaking down and ultimately destroying families and the institutions and layers and hierarchies of authority that are the natural outgrowth of family based communities in order to increase and strengthen their own power.13 They knew that in order to do so states would have to take advantage of the natural rebellion of the adolescent (juvenile) against parental authority. And they knew that socialized education and socialized responsibility were the means of bringing about this goal. Social education and social security provide an opening for the rebellious youth to escape parental authority (to get away with continuous misbehavior). Old conservatives knew that these policies would emancipate the individual from the discipline imposed by family and community life only to subject it instead to the direct and immediate control of the state.14 Furthermore, they knew, or at least had a hunch, that this would lead to a systematic infantilization of society—a regression, emotionally and mentally, from adulthood to adolescence or childhood.
11Ludwig von Mises, Socialism: An Economic and Sociological Analysis (Indianapolis, Ind.: Liberty Fund, 1981), pp. 431-32.
12See Murray N. Rothbard, The Dangerous Nonsense of Protectionism (Auburn, Ala.: Ludwig von Mises Institute, 1988); also chap. 8 above.
13"From the conservative point of view," writes Robert Nisbet, "the abolition or sharp curtailment of intermediate associations in the social order spelled the creation of the atomized masses on the one hand and, on the other, increasingly centralized forms of political power" ("Conservatism," p. 100). During the Middle Ages, Nisbet explains elsewhere (quoting Pollard's study of Wolsey), power
was dilute, not because it was distributed in many hands, but because it was derived from many independent sources. There were the liberties of the church, based on law superior to that of the King; there was the law of nature, graven in the hearts of men and not to be erased by royal writs; and there was the prescription of immemorial local and feudal custom stereotyping a variety of jurisdictions and impeding the operation of a single will. (Community and Power [New York: Oxford University Press, 1962], p. 110)
In contrast, Buchanan's populist-proletarian conservatism—social nationalism—shows complete ignorance of all of this. Combining cultural conservatism and welfare-statism is impossible, and hence, economic nonsense. Welfare-statism—social security in any way, shape or form—breeds moral and cultural rot and degeneration. Thus, if one is indeed concerned about America's moral decay and wants to restore normalcy to society and culture, one must oppose all aspects of the modern social-welfare state. A return to normalcy requires no less than the complete elimination of the present social security system: of unemployment insurance, social security, medicare, medicaid, public education, etc. —and thus the near complete dissolution and deconstruction of the current state apparatus and government power. If one is ever to restore normalcy, government funds and power must dwindle to or even fall below their nineteenth century levels. Hence, true conservatives must be hard-line libertarians (antistatists). Buchanan's conservatism is false: it wants a return to traditional morality but at the same time advocates keeping the very institutions in place that are responsible for the perversion and destruction of traditional morals.
In distinct contrast,
[t]he moder n State is monistic; its authority extends directly to all individuals within its boundaries. So-called diplomatic immunities are but the last manifestation of a larger complex of immunities which once involved a large number of internal religious, economic, and kinship authorities. For administrative purposes the State may deploy into provinces, departments, districts, or "states," just as the army divides into regiments and battalions. But like the army, the modern State is based upon a residual unity of power.... Th[is] extraordinary unity of relationship in the contemporary State, together with its massive accumulation of effective functions, makes the control of the State the greatest single goal, or prize, in modern struggles for power. Increasingly the objectives of economic and other interest associations become not so much the preservation of favored immunities from the State as the capturing or directing of the political power itself. (Ibid, p. 103)
14On the role of public education in this see in particular Murray N. Rothbard, Education, Free and Compulsory: The Individual's Education (Wichita, Kans.: Center for Independent Education, 1972).
Ill
Most contemporary conservatives, then, especially among the media darlings, are not conservatives but socialists—either of the internationalist sort (the new and neoconservative warfare-welfare statists and global social democrats) or of the nationalist variety (the Buchananite populists). Genuine conservatives must be opposed to both. In order to restore social and cultural normalcy, true conservatives can only be radical libertarians, and they must demand the demolition—as a moral and economic perversion—of the entire structure of social securi ty. If conservatives must be libertarians, why must libertarians be conservatives? If conservatives must learn from libertarians, must libertarians also learn from conservatives?
First, a few terminological clarifications are in order. The term libertarianism, as employed here, is a twentieth-century phenomenon, or more accurately, a post-World War II phenomenon, with intellectual roots in both classical (eighteenth and nineteenth) century—liberalism and even older natural law philosophy. It is a product of modern (enlightenment) rationalism.15 Culminating in the work of Murray N. Rothbard, the fountainhead of the modern libertarian movement, and in particul
ar his Ethics of Liberty, libertarianism is a rational system of ethics (law).16 Working within the tradition of classical political philosophy —of Hobbes, Grotius, Pufendorf, Locke, and Spencer—and employing the same ancient analytical (conceptual) tools and logical apparatus as they do, libertarianism (Rothbardianism) is a systematic law code, derived by means of logical deduction from a single principle, the validity of which (and this is what makes it an ultimate principle, i.e., an ethical axiom, and the libertarian law code an axiomatic-deductive theory of justice) cannot be disputed without falling prey to logical-practical (praxeological) or performative contradictions (that is, without implicitly affirming what one explicitly denies). This axiom is the ancient principle of original appropriation: Ownership of scarce resources—the right of an exclusive control over scarce resources (private property)—is acquired through an act of original appropriation (by which resources are taken out of a state of nature and put into a state of civilization). If this were not so, no one could ever begin to act (do or propose anything); hence, any other principle is praxeologically impossible (and argumentatively indefensible). From the principle of original appropriation—the first-use-first-own principle—rules concerning the transformation and the transfer (exchange) of originally appropriated resources are derived, and all of ethics (law), including the principles of punishment, is then reconstructed in terms of a theory of property rights: all human rights are property rights, and all human rights violations are property rights violations. The upshot of this libertarian theory of justice is well-known in these circles: the state, according to the most influential strand of libertarian theory, the Rothbardian one, is an outlaw organization, and the only social order that is just is a system of private property anarchy.
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