What Should Freedom Lovers Do?

Tue Apr 20 06:13:15 PDT 2004

<http://www.mises.org/fullstory.asp?control=1499>http://www.mises.org/fullstory.asp?control=1499

by Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr.

[Posted April 20, 2004]

 How can one combine professional life with the advancement of liberty? Of
course it is presumptuous to offer a definitive answer since all jobs and
careers in the market economy are subject to the forces of the division of
labor. Because a person focuses on one task doesn't mean that he or she
isn't great at many tasks; it means only that the highest productive gains
for everyone come from dividing tasks up among many people of a wide range
of talents.

So it is with the freedom movement. The more of us there are, the more we
do well to specialize, to cooperate through exchange, to boost our impact
by dividing the labor. There is no way to know in advance what is right for
any person in particular. There are so many wonderful paths from which to
choose (and which I will discuss below). But this much we can know. The
usual answergo into governmentis wrongheaded. Too many good minds have
been corrupted and lost by following this fateful course.

If often happens that an ideological movement will make great strides
through education and organization and cultural influence, only to take the
illogical leap of believing that politics and political influence, which
usually means taking jobs within the bureaucracy, is the next rung on the
ladder to success. This is like trying to fight a fire with matches and
gasoline. This is what happened to the Christian right in the 1980s. They
got involved in politics in order to throw off the yoke of the state.
Twenty years later, many of these people are working in the Department of
Education or for the White House, doing the prep work to amend the
Constitution or invade some foreign country. This is a disastrous waste of
intellectual capital.

It is particularly important that believers in liberty not take this
course. Government work has been the chosen career path of socialists,
social reformers, and Keynesians for at least a century. It is the natural
home to them because their ambition is to control society through
government. It works for them but it does not work for us.

To become a bureaucrat to fight bureaucracy, to join the state in order to
roll it back, makes as much sense as fighting fire with matches and
gasoline.

In the first half of the 20th century, libertarians knew how to oppose
statism. They went into business and journalism. They wrote books. They
agitated within the cultural arena. They developed fortunes to help fund
newspapers, schools, foundations, and public education organizations. They
expanded their commercial ventures to serve as a bulwark against central
planning. They became teachers and, when possible, professors. They
cultivated wonderful families and focused on the education of their
children.

It is a long struggle but it is the way the struggle for liberty has always
taken place. But somewhere along the way, some people, enticed by the
prospect of a fast track to reform, rethought this idea. Perhaps we should
try the same technique that the left did. We should get our people in power
and displace their people, and then we can bring about change toward
liberty. In fact, isn't this the most important goal of all? So long as the
left controls the state, it will expand in ways that are incompatible with
freedom. We need to take back the state.

So goes the logic. What is wrong with it? The state's only function is as
an apparatus of coercion and compulsion. That is its distinguishing mark.
It is what makes the state the state. To the same extent that the state
responds well to arguments that it should be larger and more powerful, it
is institutionally hostile to anyone who says that it should be less
powerful and less coercive. That is not to say that some work from the
"inside" cannot do some good, some of the time. But it is far more likely
that the state will convert the libertarian than for the libertarian to
convert the state.

We've all seen this a thousand times. It rarely takes more than a few
months for a libertarian intellectual headed for the Beltway  to "mature"
and realize that his or her old ideals were rather childish and
insufficiently real world. A politician promising to defang Washington
later becomes the leading expert in applying tooth enamel. Once that
fateful step is taken, there are no limits. I know a bureaucrat who
helped run martial law in Iraq who once swore fidelity to Rothbardian
political economy.

The reason has to do with ambition, which is not normally a bad impulse.
The culture of Washington, however, requires that ambition work itself out
by paying maximum deference to the powers that be. At first, this is easy
to justify: how else can the state be converted except by being friendly to
it? The state is our enemy, but for now, we must pretend to be its pal. In
time, the dreams are displaced by the daily need to curry favor. Eventually
the person becomes precisely the kind of person he or she once despised.
(For Lord of the Rings fans, it's like being asked to carry the ring for a
while; you don't want to give it up.)

It is far more likely that the state will convert the libertarian than the
libertarian will convert the state

I've known people who have gone this route and one day took an honest look
in the mirror, and didn't like what they saw. They have said to me that
they were mistaken to think it could work. They didn't recognize the subtle
ways in which they themselves were being drawn in. They recognize the
futility of politely asking the state, day after day, to permit a bit more
liberty here and there. Ultimately you must frame your arguments in terms
of what is good for the state, and the reality is that liberty is not
usually good for the state. Hence, the rhetoric and finally the goal begin
to change.

The state is open to persuasion, to be sure, but it usually acts out of
fear, not friendship. If the bureaucrats and politicians fear backlash,
they will not increase taxes or regulations. If they sense a high enough
degree of public outrage, they will even repeal controls and programs. An
example is the end of alcohol prohibition or the repeal of the 55 mph speed
limit. These were pulled back because politicians and bureaucrats sensed
too high a cost from continued enforcement.

The problem of strategy was something that fascinated Murray Rothbard, who
wrote several important articles on the need for never compromising the
long-run goal for short-term gain through the political process. That
doesn't mean we should not welcome a 1 percent tax cut or repeal a section
of some law. But we should never allow ourselves to be sucked into the
trade-off racket: e.g., repeal this bad tax to impose this better tax. That
would be using a means (a tax) that contradicts the goal (elimination of
taxation).

The Rothbardian approach to a pro-freedom strategy comes down to the
following four affirmations: 1) the victory of liberty is the highest
political end; 2) the proper groundwork for this goal is a moral passion
for justice; 3) the end should be pursued by the speediest and most
efficacious possible means; and 4) the means taken must never contradict
the goal"whether by advocating gradualism, by employing or advocating any
aggression against liberty, by advocating planned programs, by failing to
seize any opportunities to reduce State power, or by ever increasing it in
any area."

Libertarians are not the first people who have confronted the question of
strategy for social advance and cultural and political change. After the
Civil War, a large part of the population of the South, namely former
slaves, found themselves in a perilous situation. They had a crying need to
advance socially within society, but lacked education, skill, and capital.
They also bore the burden of pushing social change that permitted them to
be regarded as full citizens who made the most of their new freedom. In
many ways, they found themselves in a position somewhat like new immigrants
but with an additional burden of throwing off an old social status for a
new one.

The Reconstruction period of Union-run martial law invited many blacks to
participate in politics as a primary goal. This proved to be a terrible
temptation for many, as the former Virginia slave Booker T. Washington
said. "During the whole of the Reconstruction period our people throughout
the South looked to the Federal Government for everything, very much as a
child looks to its mother." He rejected this political model because "the
general political agitation drew the attention of our people away from the
more fundamental matters of perfecting themselves in the industries at
their doors and in securing property."

The state chews up and either eats or spits out those with a passion for
liberty.

Washington wrote that "the temptations to enter political life were so
alluring that I came very near yielding to them at one time" but he
resisted this in favor of "the laying of the foundation of the race through
a generous education of the hand, head and heart." Later when he visited
DC, he knew that he had been right. "A large proportion of these people had
been drawn to Washington because they felt that they could lead a life of
ease there," he wrote. "Others had secured minor government positions, and
still another large class was there in the hope of securing Federal
positions."

As it was in the 1870s it is today. The state chews up and either eats or
spits out those with a passion for liberty. The extent to which W.E.B
DuBois's Marxian push for political agitation has prevailed over
Washington's push for commercial advance has been tragic for black
Americans and for the whole of American society. Many obtained political
power but not liberty classically understood.

We can learn from this. The thousands of young people who are discovering
the ideas of liberty for the first time ought to stay away from the Beltway
and all its allures. Instead, they should pursue their love and passion
through arts, commerce, education, and even the ministry. These are fields
that offer genuine promise with a high return.

When a libertarian tells me that he is doing some good as a procurement
officer at HUD, I don't doubt his word. But how much more would he do by
quitting his job and writing an expose on the entire bureaucratic racket?
One well-placed blast against such an agency can bring about more reform,
and do more good, than decades of attempted subversion from within.

Are there politicians who do some good? Certainly, and the name Ron Paul is
the first that comes to mind. But the good he does is not as a legislator
as such but as an educator with a prominent platform from which to speak.
Every no vote is a lesson to the multitudes. We need more Ron Pauls.

But Ron is the first to say that, more importantly, we need more
professors, business owners, fathers and mothers, religious leaders, and
entrepreneurs. The party of liberty loves commerce and culture, not the
state. Commerce and culture is our home and our launching ground for social
reform and revolution.

_______________________________

Llewellyn H. Rockwell,
Jr. [<mailto:rockwell at mises.org>rockwell at mises.org] is president of the
Ludwig von Mises Institute in Auburn, Alabama, and editor
of <http://www.lewrockwell.com/>LewRockwell.com. He is the author
of <http://www.mises.org/store/product1.asp?SID=2&Product_ID=173>Speaking
of Liberty. See
his <http://www.mises.org/articles.asp?mode=a&author=Rockwell%2C+Jr%2E>archive
and comment on this article on the <http://www.mises.org/blog>blog. A
version of this article appeared in the May 2004 issue of The Free Market,
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