DemocracyThe God That Failed (48 page)

Second, it follows likewise from the error regarding the moral status of government that the traditional liberal preference for and attachment to local (decentralized and territorially small) government is inconsistent and contradictory.
¹⁸
Contrary to the original liberal intent, every government, including local government, has an inherent tendency toward centralizing and ultimately becoming a world government.

Once it is incorrectly accepted that in order to protect and enforce peaceful cooperation between two individuals A and B, it is justified and necessary to have a judicial monopolist X, a twofold conclusion follows. If more than one territorial monopolist exists, X, Y, and Z, then, just as there can presumably be no peace among A and B without X, so can there be no peace between the monopolists X, Y, and Z as long as they remain in a "state of anarchy" with each other. Hence, in order to fulfill the liberal
desideratum
of universal and eternal peace, all political centralization and unification, and ultimately the establishment of a single world government, is justified and necessary.
¹⁹

¹⁷
Explains Murray N. Rothbard,
ForANew
Liberty,
p. 48:

[N]o constitution can interpret or enforce itself; it must be interpreted by
men.
And if the ultimate power to interpret a constitution is given to the government's own Supreme Court, then the inevitable tendency is for the Court to continue to place its imprimatur on ever-broader powers for its own government. Furthermore, the highly touted "checks and balances" and "separations of powers" in the American government are flimsy indeed, since in the final analysis all of these divisions are part of the same government and are governed by the same set of rulers.

¹⁸
On the characteristic liberal preference for decentralized government see Wilhelm Ropke,
jenseits
von
Angebot
und
Nachfrage
(Berne: Paul Haupt, 1979), chap. 5.

19
Interestingly, while socialists of all stripes—traditional Marxists, social democrats, American "liberals" and neoconservatives—have typically shown little difficulty in accepting the idea of world government and have thus at least been consistent, classical liberals have rarely if ever acknowledged the fact that by the logic of their own doctrine they too are forced to be advocates of a single, unified world government and clung instead, inconsistently, to the idea of decentralized government. Now theoretical consistency is not necessarily a good thing; and if a theory is consistent but false, one might well admit that it may be preferable to be inconsistent. However, an inconsistent theory can never be true, and in not facing up to the inconsistency of their theoretical position liberals have typically neglected to pay attention to and account for two important, and from their own viewpoint "anomalous" phenomena. On the one hand, if law and order requires a single,
monopolistic judge and enforcer (government), as they claim, why does the relationship between, say, German and American businessmen appear to be just as peaceful as that between, say, New York and California businessmen, despite the fact that the former live in a "state of anarchy"
vis-a-vis
each other? Isn't this positive proof that it is
not
necessary to have government in order to have peace?! On the other hand, while the relationship between the citizens and firms of different countries is neither more nor less peaceful than that between citizens and firms of one and the same country, it appears to be equally obvious that the relationship of any one
government,
say the U.S.,
vis-a-vis
both its own citizens as well as other (foreign) governments and their citizens is anything but peaceful. Indeed, in his well-known book
Death
by
Government
(New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Publishers, 1995), Rudolph Rummel has estimated that in the course of the twentieth century alone, governments have been responsible for the deaths of approximately 170 million people. Isn't this positive proof, then, that the liberal view concerning the "state of anarchy" as conflict-ridden and of "statism" as the sine
qua
non
of security and peace is just about the reverse of the truth?

Last, it follows from the error of accepting government as just that the ancient ide
a of the universality of human rights and the unity of law is confused and, under the heading "equality before the law," transformed into a vehicle of egalitarianism. As opposed to the antiegalitarian or even aristocratic sentiment of old liberals,
²⁰
once the idea of universal human rights is combined with government, the result will be egalitarianism and the destruction of human rights.

Once a government has been incorrectly assumed as just and hereditary princes and kings ruled out as incompatible with the idea of universal human rights, the question of how to square government with the idea of the universality and equality of human rights arises. The liberal answer is to open participation and entry into government on equal terms to everyone
via
democracy. Everyone—not just the hereditary class of nobles—is permitted to become a government official and exercise every government function. However, this democratic equality before the law is something entirely different from and incompatible with the idea of
one
universal law, equally applicable to everyone, everywhere, and at all times. In fact, the former objectionable schism and inequality of the higher law of kings versus the subordinate law of ordinary subjects is fully preserved under democracy in the separation of public versus private law and the supremacy of the former over the latter.
²¹
Under democracy,
everyone is equal insofar as entry into government is open to all on equal terms. In a democracy no
personal
privileges or privileged persons exist.
However,functional
privileges and privileged functions exist. As long as they act in official capacity, public officials are governed and protected by public law and occupy thereby a privileged position
vis-a-vis
persons acting under the mere authority of private law (most fundamentally in being permitted to support their own activities by taxes imposed on private law subjects).
²²
Privilege and legal discrimination will not disappear. To the contrary. Rather than being restricted to princes and nobles, privilege, protectionism, and legal discrimination will be available to all and can be exercised by everyone.

²⁰
On the aristocratic roots of liberalism see Bertrand de Jouvenel,
On
Power:
The
Natural
History
of
its
Growth
(New York: Viking, 1949), chap. 17; Erik von KuehneltLeddihn,
Liberty
or
Equality
(Front Royal, Va.: Christendom Press, 1993).

²¹
On the distinction between private and public law see Bruno Leoni,
Freedom
and
the
Law
(Indianapolis, Ind.: Liberty Fund, 1991); Fried rich A. Hayek,
Law,
Legisla
tion,
and
Liberty
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973), vol. 1, esp. chap. 6.

Predictably, under democratic conditions the tendency of every monopoly to increase prices and decrease quality will only be stronger and more pronounced. As hereditary monopolist, a king or prince regarded the territory and people under his jurisdiction as his personal property and engaged in
the monopolistic exploitation of his "property." Under democracy, monopoly, and monopolistic exploitation do not disappear. Even if everyone is permitted to enter government, this does eliminate the distinction between the rulers and the ruled. Government and the governed are not one and the same person.
Instead of a prince who regards the country as his private property, a temporary and interchangeable caretaker is put in monopolistic charge of the country. The caretaker does not own the country, but as long as he is in office he is permitted to use it to his and his proteges' advantage. He owns its current use—
usufruct
—but not its capital stock. This will not eliminate exploitation. To the contrary, it will make exploitation less calculating and more likely to be carried out with little or no regard to the capital stock. In other words, exploitation will be shortsighted.
²³
Moreover, with free entry into and public participation in government, the perversion of justice will proceed even faster. Instead of protecting preexisting private property rights, democratic government will become a machine for the continual redistribution of preexisting property rights in the name of illusory "social security," until the idea of universal and immutable human rights disappears and is replaced by that of law as positive government-made legislation.

²²
The incompatibility of private and public law has been succinctly summarized by Randy E. Barnett, "Fuller, Law, and Anarchism,"
The
Libertarian
Forum
(February 1976), p. 7:

For example, the State says that citizens may not take from another by force and against his will that which belongs to another. And yet the State through its power to tax "legitimately" does just that. . . . More essentially, the State says that a person may use force upon another only in self-defense, i.e., only as a defense against another who initiated the use of force. To go beyond one's right of self-defense would be to aggress on the rights of others, a violation of one's legal duty. And yet the State by its claimed monopoly forcibly imposes its jurisdiction on persons who may have done nothing wrong. By doing so it aggresses against the rights of its citizens, something which its rules say citizens may not do.

To this one might want to add only two more pertinent observations: The State says to its citizens "do not kidnap or enslave another man." And yet the State itself does precisely this in conscripting its citizens into its army. And the State says to its citizens "do not kill or murder your fellow men." And yet the State does precisely this once it has declared a "state of war" to exist. See also Rothbard,
The
Ethics
of
Liberty,
chaps. 22, and 23.

V

In light of this, an answer to the question of the future of liberalism can be sought.

Because of its own fundamental error regarding the moral status of government, liberalism actually contributed to the destruction of everything it had originally set out to preserve and protect: liberty and property. Once the principle of government had been incorrectly accepted, it was only a matter of time until the ultimate triumph of socialism over liberalism. The present neoconservative "End of History" of global U.S. enforced social democracy is the result of two centuries of liberal confusion. Thus, liberalism in its present form has no future. Rather, its future is social democracy, and the future has already arrived (and we know that it does not work).

Once the premise of government is accepted, liberals are left without argument when socialists pursue this premise to its logical end. If monopoly is just, then centralization is just. If taxation is just, then more taxation is also just. And if democratic equality is just, then the expropriation of private property owners is just, too (while private property is not). Indeed, what can a liberal say in favor
of
less
taxation and redistribution?

²³
As Rothbard notes in this connection, it

is curious that almost all writers parrot the notion that private owners, possessing time preference, must take the "short view," while only government officials can take the "long view" and allocate property to advance the "general welfare." The truth is exactly the reverse. The private individual, secure in his property and in his capital resource, can take the long view, for he wants to maintain the capital value of his resource. It is the government official who must take and run, who must plunder the property while he is still in command.
(Power
and
Market,
p. 189)

If
it is admitted that taxation and monopoly are just, then the liberal has no principle moral case to make.
²⁴
To lower taxes is not a
moral
imperative. Rather, the liberal case is exclusively an economic one. For instance, lower taxes will produce certain long-run economic benefits. However, at least in the short-run and for some people (the current tax recipients) lower taxes also imply economic costs. Without moral argument at his disposal, a liberal is left only with the tool of cost-benefit analysis, but any such analysis must involve an interpersonal comparison of utility, and such a comparison is impossible (scientifically impermissible).
²⁵
Hence, the outcome of cost-benefit analyses is arbitrary, and every proposal justified with reference to them is mere opinion. In this situation, democratic socialists only appear more upfront, consistent, and consequent, while liberals come across as starry-eyed, confused, and unprincipled or even opportunistic. They accept the basic premise of the current order—of democratic government—but then constantly lament its antiliberal outcome.

If liberalism is to have any future, it must repair its fundamental error. Liberals will have to recognize that no government can be contractually justified, that every government is destructive of what they want
to preserve, and that protection and the production of security can only be rightfully and effectively undertaken by a system of competitive security suppliers. That is, liberalism will have to be transformed into the theory of private property anarchism (or a private law society), as first outlined nearly one-hundred-fifty years ago by Gustave de Molinari and in our own time fully elaborated by Murray Rothbard.
²⁶

²⁴
Thus, writes Murray N. Rothbard,

if it is legitimate for a government to tax, why not tax its subjects to provide other goods and services that may be useful to consumers: why shouldn't the government, for example, build steel plants, provide shoes, dams, postal service, etc.? For each of these goods and services is useful to consumers. If the laissez-fairists object that the government should not build steel plants or shoe factories and provide them to consumers (either free or for sale) because tax-coercion has been employed in constructing these plants, well then the same objection can of course be made to governmental police or judicial service. The government should be acting no more immorally, from a laissez-faire point of view, when providing housing or steel than when providing police protection. Government limited to protection, then, cannot be sustained
even
within
the laissez-faire ideal itself, much less from any other consideration. It is true that the laissez-faire ideal could still be employed to prevent such "second degree" coercive activities of government (i.e., coercion
beyond
the initial coercion of taxation) as price control or outlawry of pornography; but the "limits" have now become flimsy indeed, and may be stretched to virtually complete collectivism, in which the government only supplies goods and services, yet supplies all of them.
<
The
Ethics
of
Liberty,
p. 182)

²⁵
See Lionel Robbins,
The
Nature
and
Significance
of
Economic
Science
(New York: New York University Press, 1984); Murray N. Rothbard, "Toward a Reco
nstruction of Utility and Welfare Economics," in idem,
The
Logic
of
Action
One
(Cheltenham, U.K.: Edward Elgar, 1997).