DemocracyThe God That Failed (45 page)

builds value in the inventory of community land chiefly by satisfying three functional requirements of a community which he alone as an owner can adequately fulfill:
selection
of
members,
land
planning,
and
leadership.
.
.
.
The first two functions, membership selection and land planning, are accomplished by him automatically in the course of determining to whom, and for what purpose, to let the use of land. The third function, leadership, is his natural responsibility and also his special opportunity, since his interest alone is the success of the whole community rather than that of any special interest within it. Assigning land automatically establishes the kinds of tenants and their spatial juxtaposition to one another and, hence, the economic structure of the community. . . . Leadership also includes arbitration of differences among tenants, as well as guidance and participation in joint efforts [Indeed], in a fundamental sense the security of the community is a part of the owner's real estate function. Under land planning, he
supervises the design of all construction from the standpoint of safety. He also chooses tenants with a view to their compatibility and complementarity with other members of the community and learns to anticipate in the leases and to provide in other ways against disputes developing among tenants. By his informal peacemaking and arbitrating, he resolves differences that might otherwise become serious. In these many ways he ensures "quiet possession," as it was so admirably phrased in the language of the Common Law, for his tenants.
³⁰

²⁹
"[T]he proprietary community is not unique to our time and culture," explains MacCallum.

Its roots are deep in human history. . . . Within households, in the primitive world, land is commonly administered by an elder male in the line of property succession. For groups of households, it may be administered by a clan or lineage or other group head who is commonly an elder male of the kin group of widest span. And similarly at the village level. This is "the familiar pattern," in anthropologist Melville Herskovits' words, "of village land ownership held in trust and administered by the village head in behalf of its members, native or adopted, and family ownership, for which the head of the family is trustee." The system is sometimes called
seignorialism
since the distributive authority is exercised by a senior member of the kin group at the span or level of organization in question.
(The
Art
of
Community,
p. 69)

Clearly then, the task of maintaining the covenant entailed in a libertarian (proprietary) community is first and foremost that of the proprietor. Yet he is but one man, and it is impossible for him to succeed in this task unless he is supported in his endeavor by a majority of the members of the community in question. In particular, the proprietor needs the support of the the community elite, i.e., the heads of households and firms most heavily invested in the community. In order to protect and possibly enhance the value of their property and investments, both proprietor and the community elite must be willing and prepared to take two forms of protective measures. First, they must be willing to defend themselves by means of physical force and punishment against external invaders and domestic criminals. But second and equally important, they must also be willing to defend themselves, by means of ostracism, exclusion and ultimately expulsion, against those community members who advocate, advertise or propagandize actions incompatible with the very purpose of the covenant: to protect property and family.
³¹

³⁰
MacCallum,
The
Art
of
Community,
pp. 63,66,67. Moreover,

[o]nce the ownerships are organized as participation in a single property, it becomes the common interest of the owners to redevelop and manage the whole as a unit in the most productive way, even to replanning the formerly fixed pattern of streets and common areas. It becomes their single interest to provide not only optimum physical environment, but optimum social environment as well—through an effective manager who can serve inconspicuously as expediter, peacemaker, and active catalyst to promote the freest possible conditions for the occupants to pursue their respective interests, (p. 59)

³¹
"On all levels of society, both primitive and modern" notes MacCallum on the importance of exclusion for the maintenance of social order, "exile is the natural and automatic remedy for default and fraud."

[B]y dispossession he [the village head] exiles individuals who have made themselves intolerable (exactly as a shopping center manager fails to renew the lease of an incompatible tenant). However infrequent in the village, as compared with modern proprietary communities, membership control is still a functional requisite of community life for which there must be regular provision, (p. 70)

In this regard a community always faces the double and related threat of egalitarianism and cultural relativism. Egalitarianism, in every form and shape, is incompatible with the idea of private property. Private property implies exclusivity, inequality, and difference. And cultural relativism is incompatible with the fundamental—indeed foundational—fact of families and intergenerational kinship relations. Families and kinship relations imply cultural absolutism. As a matter of socio-psychological fact, both egalitarian and relativistic sentiments find steady support among ever new generations of adolescents. Owing to their still incomplete mental development, juveniles, especially of the male variety, are always susceptible to both ideas. Adolescence is marked by regular (and for this stage normal) outbreaks of rebellion by the young against the discipline imposed on them by family life and parental authority.
³²
Cultural relativism and multiculturalism provide the ideological instrument of emancipating oneself from these constraints. And egalitarianism—based on the infantile view that property is "given" (and thus distributed arbitrarily) rather than individually appropriated and produced (and hence, distributed justly, i.e., in accordance with personal productivity)—provides the intellectual means by which the rebellious youths can lay claim to the economic resources necessary for a life free of and outside the disciplinary framework of families.
³³

The enforcement of a covenant is largely a matter of prudence, of course. How and when to react, and what protective measures to take, requires jud
gment on the part of the members of the community and especially the proprietor and the community elite. Thus, for instance, so long as the threat of moral relativism a
nd egalitarianism is restricted to a small proportion of juveniles and young adults for only a brief period in life (until they settle back into family-constrained adulthood), it may
well be sufficient to do nothing at all. The proponents of cultural relativism and egalitarianism would represent little more than temporary embarassments or irritations, and punishment in the form of ostracism can be quite mild and lenient. A small dose of ridicule and contempt may be all that is needed to contain the relativistic and egalitarian threat. The situation is very different, however, and rather more drastic measures might be required, once the spirit of moral relativism and egalitarianism has taken hold among adult members of society: among mothers, fathers, and heads of households and firms.

And in a footnote to this, he adds:

Anthropologist Raymond Firth records an expression of exile from the Pacific island society of Tikopia that evokes in its simplicity the pathos of the Anglo-Saxon poem, "The Wanderer." Inasmuch as all land was owned by the chiefs, an exiled person had no recourse but to canoe out to sea—to suicide or to life as a stranger on other islands. The expression for a person who is exiled translates that such a person "has no place on which to stand."
(The
Art
of
Community,
p.
77)

³²
See on this Konrad Lorenz,
Civilized
Man's
Eight
Deadly
Sins
(New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1974), chap. 7; also Sigmund Freud,
Civilization
and
its
Dis
contents
(New York:
W.W.
Norton, 1989).

³³
See also Helmut Schelsky,
Die
Arbeit
tun
die
anderen.
Klassenkampf
und
Priester
herrschaft
der
Intellektuellen
(Munich: DeutscherTaschenbuch Verlag, 1977).

As soon as mature members of society habitually express acceptance or even advocate egalitarian sentiments, whether in the form of democracy (majority rule) or of communism, it becomes essential that other members, and in particular the natural social elites, be prepared to act decisively and, in the case of continued nonconformity, exclude and ultimately expel these members from society. In a covenant concluded among proprietor and community tenants for the purpose of protecting their private property, no such thing as a right to free (unlimited) speech exists, not even to unlimited speech on one's own tenant-property. One may say innumerable things and promote almost any idea under the sun, but naturally no one is permitted to advocate ideas contrary to the very purpose of the covenant of preserving and protecting private property, such as democracy and communism. There can be no tolerance toward democrats and communists in a libertarian social order. They will have to be physically separated and expelled from society. Likewise, in a covenant founded for the purpose of protecting family and kin, there can be no tolerance toward those habitually promoting lifestyles incompatible with this goal. They—the advocates of alternative, non-family and kin-centered lifestyles such as, for instance, individual hedonism, parasitism, nature-environment worship, homosexuality, or communism—will have to be physically removed from society, too, if one is to maintain a libertarian order.

VII

It should be obvious then that and why libertarians must be moral and cultural conservatives of the most uncompromising kind. The current state of moral degeneration, social disintegration and cultural rot is precisely the result of too much—and above all erroneous and misconceived—tolerance. Rather than having all habitual democrats, communists, and alternative lifestylists quickly isolated, excluded and expelled from civilization in accordance with the principles of the covenant, they were tolerated by society. Yet this toleration only encouraged and promoted
even more egalitarian and relativistic sentiments and attitudes, until at last the point was reached where the authority of excluding anyone for anything had effectively evaporated (while the power of the state, as manifested in state-sponsored forced integration policies, had correspondingly grown).

Libertarians, in their attempt to establish a free natural social order, must strive to regain from the state the right to exclusion inherent in private property. Yet even before they accomplish this and in order to render such an achievement even possible, libertarians cannot soon enough begin to reassert and exercise, to the extent that the situation still permits them to do so, their right to exclusion in everyday life. Libertarians must distinguish themselves from others by practicing (as well as advocating) the most extreme form of intolerance and discrimination against egalitarians, democrats, socialists, communists, multiculturalists, environmentalists, ill manners, misconduct, incompetence, rudeness, vulgarity, and obscenity. Like true conservatives, who will have to dissociate themselves from the false social(ist) conservatism of the Buchananites and the neoconservatives, true libertarians must visibly and ostentatiously dissociate themselves from the false multicountercultural and anti-authoritarian egalitarian left-libertarian impostors.

11

On
the
Errors
of
Classical
Liberalism
and
the
Future
of
Liberty

I

Classical liberalism has been in decline for more than a centur
y. Since the second half of the nineteenth century, in the U.S. as well as in Western Europe, public affairs have increasingly been shaped instead by socialist ideas. In fact, the twentieth century may well be described as the century
par
excellence
of socialism: of communism, fascism, national socialism, and most enduringly of social democracy (modern American liberalism and neoconservatism).
¹

¹
The term liberalism here and in the following is used in its original or classical meaning as defined, for instance, by its foremost twentieth-century proponent, Ludwig von Mises, in his 1927 treatise
Liberalism:
In
the
Classical
Tradition
(Irvingtonon-Hudson, N.Y.: Foundation for Economic Education, 1985), on p. 19:

The program of liberalism ... if condensed into a single word, would have to read:
property,
that is, private ownership of the means of production (for in regard to commodities ready for consumption, private ownership is a matter of course and is not disputed even by the socialists and communists). All the other demands of liberalism result from this fundamental demand.

By contrast, modern American "liberalism" has almost the opposite meaning, which can be traced back to John Stuart Mill and his 1859 book
On
Liberty
as the fountainhead of modern moderate—social-democratic—socialism. Mill, notes Mises (ibid., p. 195),

is the originator of the thoughtless confounding of liberal and socialist ideas that led to the decline of English liberalism and to the undermining of the living standards of the English people. . . . Without a thorough study of Mill it is impossible to understand the events of the last two generations [1927!]. For Mill is the great advocate of socialism. All the arguments that could be advanced in favor of socialism are elaborated by him with loving care. In comparison with Mill all other socialist writers—even Marx, Engels, and Lassalle—are scarcely of any importance.

For a detailed and devastating critique of John Stuart Mill from a liberal-libertarian perspective see Murray N. Rothbard,
Classical
Economics:
An
Austrian
Perspective
on
the
History
of
Economic
Thought
(Cheltenham, U.K.: Edward Elgar, 1995), vol. 2, chap. 8.