June 11, 2013
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My
previous Salon essay,
in which I asked why there are not any libertarian countries, if
libertarianism is a sound political philosophy, has infuriated members
of the tiny but noisy libertarian sect, as criticisms of cults by
outsiders usually do. The weak logic and bad scholarship that suffuse
libertarian responses to my article tend to reinforce me in my view
that, if they were not paid so well to churn out anti-government
propaganda by plutocrats like the Koch brothers and various
self-interested corporations, libertarians would play no greater role in
public debate than do the followers of Lyndon LaRouche or L. Ron
Hubbard.
An unscientific survey of the blogosphere turns up a
number of libertarians claiming in response to my essay that, because
libertarianism is anti-statist, to ask for an example of a real-world
libertarian state shows a failure to understand libertarianism. But if
the libertarian ideal is a stateless society, then libertarianism is
merely a different name for utopian anarchism and deserves to be
similarly ignored.
Another response to my essay has been to claim
that a libertarian country really did exist once in the real world, in
the form of the United States between Reconstruction and the New Deal.
Robert Tracinski writes
that I am “astonishingly ignorant of history” for failing to note that
the “libertarian utopia, or the closest we’ve come to it, is America
itself, up to about 100 years ago. It was a country with no income tax
and no central bank. (It was on the gold standard, for crying out loud.
You can’t get more libertarian than that.) It had few economic
regulations and was still in the Lochner era, when such regulations were
routinely struck down by the Supreme Court. There was no federal
welfare state, no Social Security, no Medicare.”
It is Tracinski
who is astonishingly ignorant of history. To begin with, the majority of
the countries that adopted the “libertarian” gold standard were
authoritarian monarchies or military dictatorships. With the exception
of Imperial Britain, an authoritarian government outside of the home
islands, where most Britons were denied the vote for most of this
period, most of the independent countries of the pre-World War I gold
standard epoch, including the U.S., Germany, France, Russia and many
Latin American republics, rejected free trade in favor of varying
degrees of economic protectionism.
For its part, the U.S. between
Lincoln and FDR was hardly laissez-faire. Ever since colonial times,
states had engaged in public poor relief and sometimes created public
hospitals and asylums. Tracinski to the contrary, there were also two
massive federal welfare programs before the New Deal: the Homestead Act,
a colossal redistribution of government land to farmers, and generous
pension benefits for Union veterans of the Civil War and their
families. Much earlier, the 1798 act that taxed sailors to fund a small
system of
government-run sailors’ hospitals was supported by Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton alike.
State
and local licensing rules and trade laws governed economic life in
detail, down to the size of spigots in wine casks, in some cases.
It
was precisely these state and local regulations that the Supreme Court
struck down, in Lochner v. New York (1905) and other cases, to promote
the goal of creating a single national market. At the same time, sharing
their racism with most white Americans, federal judges in Tracinski’s
“libertarian” America permitted the most massive system of labor market
distortion of all: racial segregation, which artificially boosted the
incomes and property values of whites.
The single national market that
Lochner-era courts sought to protect from being Balkanized by state and
local regulations (other than racial segregation) was walled off by the
highest protective tariffs of any major industrial nation. The U.S.
government between Lincoln and FDR engaged in a version of modern East
Asian-style mercantilism, protecting American industrial corporations
from import competition, while showering subsidies including land grants
on railroad companies and using federal troops to crush protesting
workers. This government-business mercantilism was anti-worker but it
was hardly libertarian.
High tariffs to protect American companies
in Tracinski’s alleged Golden Age of American libertarianism were
joined by racist immigration restrictions that further boosted the
incomes of white workers already boosted by de jure or de facto racial
segregation. The 1790 Naturalization Act barred immigrants from becoming
citizens unless they were “free white persons” and had to be amended by
the 1870 Naturalization Act to bestow citizenship on former slaves of
“African nativity” and “African descent.” Although the Supreme Court in
1898 ruled that the children of Asians born in the U.S. were citizens by
birth, Tracinski’s libertarian utopia was characterized by increasingly
restrictive immigration laws which curtailed first Asian immigration
and then, after World War I, most European immigration.
Calvin
Coolidge, the subject of a hero-worshiping new biography by the
libertarian conservative Amity Shlaes, defended both high tariffs and
restrictive immigration. Here is
an excerpt from President Coolidge’s second annual address in 1924:
Two
very important policies have been adopted by this country which, while
extending their benefits also in other directions, have been of the
utmost importance to the wage earners. One of these is the protective
tariff, which enables our people to live according to a better standard
and receive a better rate of compensation than any people, any time,
anywhere on earth, ever enjoyed. This saves the American market for the
products of the American workmen. The other is a policy of more recent
origin and seeks to shield our wage earners from the disastrous
competition of a great influx of foreign peoples. This has been done by
the restrictive immigration law. This saves the American job for the
American workmen.
In 1921 then vice-president Coolidge wrote an article entitled “Whose Country is This?” in
Good Housekeeping, in which he declared:
“Biological
laws tell us that certain divergent people will not mix or blend. The
Nordics propagate themselves successfully. With other races, the outcome
shows deterioration on both sides.” (Amity Shlaes’s hero evidently
believed racist pseudoscience about dangerous and inferior
“half-breeds”).
Protectionist, nativist paleoconservatives of the
Patrick Buchanan school might have reason to idealize the U.S. as it
existed between 1865 and 1932. But libertarians who want to prove that a
country based on libertarian ideology can exist in the real world
cannot point to the United States at any period in its history from the
Founding to the present.
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