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Posted on 05/09/2005 6:19:48 AM PDT by kjvail
The second anniversary of America's expedition into Iraq passed with relatively scant fanfare. Since hostilities in Mesopotamia commenced, thousands of American and Iraqi casualties have been tallied. Every month Washington spends billion of dollars on counterinsurgency and rebuilding efforts in Iraq and further afield, which swells the nation's largest budget and budget deficit in its history[i].
As vast quantities of blood and treasure are expended abroad, Washington politicians win plaudits domestically for their warmongering, and government contracting at home and abroad burgeon, on what basis is this imperial project—financed by foreign lenders and American taxpayers—justified?...
...Democracy deconstructed
As Hans Hermann-Hoppe adeptly describes in Democracy: The God that failed, the democratic state is inherently a "public" monopoly. Unlike privately-owned monopolies, e.g., monarchies where the sovereign generally has an incentive to moderate expropriations of property to preserve the realm's present value for heirs, state officials in a democracy are mere caretakers who cannot privately enrich themselves from ownership or sale of government property.
Rather, a moral hazard and tragedy of the commons ensues as bureaucrats and politicians may merely exercise use of government property while on the state payroll, precipitating a strong inducement to maximize current use of government property, irrespective if such activities entail dire consequences for taxpayers and the economy at large.
As concerns government finance, officials conduct the borrowing and enjoy the resultant political plaudits from the constituencies that benefit from state largesse while other private citizens defray the expenditures and debts via taxation or government-stoked money creation. Indeed, Hoppe contends an elected president can run up public debts, instigate inflation, inaugurate long-running wars, and introduce other state projects footed by hapless taxpayers without being held personally liable for the consequences.
Rothbard’s Wall Street, Banks and American Foreign Policy methodically chronicles how the personnel of successive democratically-elected administrations manipulated American foreign policy to secure the narrow self-interests of connected business interests whilst justifying these massive, costly and incessant interventions on the pretext of combating communism or promoting democracy.
Politicians who have aggressively expanded the state in America and elsewhere are extolled as great. Verily, democratic governance provides an alluring career for aspiring politicians, their cronies and bureaucrats. Not only do officials have the resources accrued by the state at their disposal, they also exercise the authority and wherewithal to confiscate private property and participate in the process of spending and borrowing—absent individual culpability—all the while receiving a salary and pension funded by taxpayers. Furthermore, politicians and appointed administrators are only accountable during regular popularity contests, in which voters can reshuffle personnel but are not inclined to alter fundamentally the scheme of free-for-all theft.
Hoppe states democracy abolishes the distinction between rulers and ruled—the limited opportunity to become a member of the royal family that pervaded under monarchy—and assumes that any member of the political system may ascend to the upper echelons of governance. Given the state's indispensable need to steal for its subsistence and the nearly unfettered entry into the ranks of the ruling class, democracy renders it that much easier for politicians to accelerate exactions from the public, as the gates remain open for any individual or faction to gain access to governmental powers and impose the same taxes or regulations themselves. As democracy has taken root in the United States and elsewhere, jostling between rival political factions has been less about how flaccid or robust the state should be, but what direction the state should take as its scope expands.
The ability of elected politicians and entrenched bureaucrats to institutionalize and enforce systematic predation and redistribution of private property is an outcome of the democratic ethos itself. Indeed, the grand bargain of democracy is this: every individual within the system—whether voluntarily or not—cedes the inviolable title to his or her property for the ability to either elect, participate in or marshal a political movement that competes for the privilege of seizing and spending everyone else's money. It follows that individual responsibility and private property ownership are seriously impaired and denigrated as the government-instituted "law of the jungle" taps innate human characteristics such as envy, self-preservation, and keenness for gratification.
As Frederic Bastiat explained in The Law, self-preservation and self-development are universal instincts among men as is the preference to do so with the minimum amount of pain and the maximum level of ease. Plunder then is favored over production, so long as the risks and inputs of confiscation are not as agonizing or as indomitable as the painstaking act of production and exchange. When given an opportunity to seize private property or stipulate regulations on owner's use thereof, as democratic rule is wont to do, participants in the political system vie for the chance to apply the state's coercive arm in service of their supporters' ends.
Motivated by envy and self-preservation, all classes of individuals demand, whether through forceful or pacific means, the franchise as its price for defraying the expenses of others running the government. Once empowered to help decide the course of public expenditures—Bastiat wrote—plundered classes opt to be as licentious as other enfranchised classes, rendering the systematic looting universal, even though such profligacy is undeniably detrimental to the economy's well-being.
It should be noted that the chief feedback mechanism of democratic government, voting, does occur in private enterprises and associations. Beyond this superficial similarity, however, there are acute distinctions. Shareholders exercise voting rights in a corporation proportionate to stock ownership whereas every eligible voter in a democratic election is entitled to one vote, irrespective if they are net tax-eaters or taxpayers.
Should shareholders grow disaffected by voting procedures, business strategies or dividends payouts they may opt out of owning a portion of an enterprise by selling stock, a prerogative denied to democratic voters who must acquiesce to government spending plans and policies—regardless of consent—lest they risk jail or emigration. The intrinsic tenuousness of property ownership in a democratic system and the inability to extricate oneself and possessions from possible confiscation accelerates the temptation to seize other people’s goods.
Bastiat argues that the onset of universal plunder undermines the purpose of law, in his view the collective organization of the individual right to defense of life, liberty and property. The moment law is perverted to engineer ends contrary to individual liberty, e.g., enshrining the notion individuals are entitled to a portion of each other’s property absent voluntary agreement, the conversion pits morality versus the adulterated law. Thus, moral chaos is the outcome of democratization, as one must either relinquish respect for the law or compromise moral sense.
The divergence between morality and democratic rule can be observed in legal positivism, the notion that right and wrong are absent prior to the introduction of legislation. Legislation attenuates predictability of law as the free entry into government and the intrinsic fluidity of political priorities ensure the governing process reflects the most urgent desires of policy-makers and the electorate, irrespective of the long-term ramifications of the enacted rules. Furthermore, the emergence of public or administrative law, which exempts government agents from individual culpability when exercising their sanctioned duties, enables the state's workforce to engage in behaviors that no other individual may commit licitly. Lew Rockwell cites a few euphemisms where the state excused itself from the laws it professes to uphold, such as kidnapping posing as selective service, counterfeiting masquerading as monetary policy and mass murder sold as foreign policy[v].
Consequently, law is not considered negative—inimical to injustice as Bastiat would have it—much less universal, eternally bestowed, discoverable by man and anterior to the institution of government. Bastiat asserts that the prior existence of life, liberty, and property is the impetus for enacting laws in the first place. Moreover, the demarcation between right and wrong and the very definition of crime is obfuscated and debased by the inexhaustible and transitory adoption and amendment of legislative diktat and the bifurcation of law codes applicable to the rulers and the ruled.
In sum, the unique characteristics of democratic government tend, according to Hoppe, Bastiat and others, to accelerate rising time preference, decivilization, and the incidence of crime to the detriment of private property, voluntary production and exchange, individual responsibility and even morality.
Why then do Messrs. Bush, Wolfowitz, and any other politicians, statesmen or bureaucrats get away with inaugurating recurring conflicts and administer an ever-expanding vehicle of coercion and plunder? The fundamental rules and ethos of democratic government impel man's innate inclination toward self-preservation and self-development to not only produce, trade and safeguard his own possessions but also employ legal theft to acquire more property from others.
Politicians and their deputies are merely the best at exploiting the system's impaired moral climate to organize the state's confiscatory arm to serve their backer's interests.
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Mr. Nuelle wrote,
"...state officials in a democracy are mere caretakers who cannot privately enrich themselves..."
Do we need any further proof that Mr. Nuelle is disconnected from the real world?
As vast quantities of blood and treasure are expended abroad, Washington politicians win plaudits domestically for their warmongering, and government contracting at home and abroad burgeon, on what basis is this imperial project—financed by foreign lenders and American taxpayers—justified?...
"Every month Washington spends billion of dollars (blah, blah) which swells the nation's largest budget and budget deficit in its history. (more blah, blah, blah)"
As a percent of our GDP, the deficit is NOT the biggest in history - period. This tiny fact has only been stated about a gazillion times by the likes of Fred Barnes and Michael Barone. Ergo any article that leads off with this big lie in the first paragraph isn't worth a shi-ite.
Well 'spreading democracy' is a messy and expensive business....of course I suppose someone forgot to ask if anyone else wanted it in the first place.
As democracy has taken root in the United States and elsewhere, jostling between rival political factions has been less about how flaccid or robust the state should be, but what direction the state should take as its scope expands.
Nuelle's analysis of Hoppe hits the nail on the head. Currently there is not a party of limited government in Washington DC.
These Austrians are certainly an inspiration to us all! Their experiments in government from failed monarchy, to aborted democracy, to Nazi Reich, to socialist paradise have been truly awe inspiring. Just look at the pinnacle that Austria has raise itself to in the last hundred years while America has been sliding down the tubes! :^)
From the article:
"The 'slam dunk' pretext for the invasion of Iraq was Saddam Hussein's reputed stockpile of weapons of mass destruction. Although the Bush administration touted the virtues of toppling a mass murderer and inspiring/imposing democracy across the Middle East, the most compelling and controversial justification put to the American people was the prospect of Saddam striking the U.S. with WMD himself or by proxy, given his alleged connections to al-Qaeda. Only when the hyped weapons failed to surface, and they have yet to do so, did the Bush administration quickly scrap the weapons talking points and opt for the democratization gambit.
"Judging by the findings of the latest presidential commission to investigate the intelligence failures concerning Saddam's fictitious arsenal, it is clear the nation's security services and the American people were duped, however willingly. The 14-month, $10m presidential commission concluded that virtually every shred of evidence produced by the government's $40bn per annum intelligence apparatus was predicated on gravely flawed information. At the centre of the commission's report[ii] on the pre-war amalgamation of WMD evidence was the Iraqi ex-pat code-named "Curveball," a chemical engineer and brother of one of the aides to Ahmed Chalabi, head of the then Pentagon-connected Iraqi National Congress.
"Although American intelligence officers never met Curveball before the war, save on one occasion, his dubious claims were unquestioningly infused into the Bush administration's case against Iraq. The sole Iraqi source spoke with frank specificity about Iraq's alleged biological weapons programs and existence of mobile labs described by then-Secretary of State Colin Powell during his now infamous Feb. 2003 address to the United Nations.
"Post-war investigations showed that Curveball was not even in the country at the times he claimed to have taken part in illicit weapons work. CIA analysts who lobbied for the agency to come clean about its star source's duplicity were sacked.
"According to the commission, U.S. intelligence agencies' reliance on Curveball and their failure to scrutinize his claims was the 'primary reason' that the CIA and other spy agencies 'fundamentally misjudged the status of Iraq's weapons programs.'
"Washington's other showpiece examples of Saddam's malevolent intent—secret acquisitions of uranium and aluminum tubes for a resurrected nuclear program and fleet of unmanned aerial vehicles capable of discharging nasty chemical agents above U.S. cities—were all undermined in turn by outside organizations. Inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency discovered in Jan. 2003 that documents fingering Iraq for attempting to purchase uranium from Niger were forged, a mere inconvenience the CIA opted to ignore until a few months after the war.
"America’s leading centrifuge physicists, who characterized it as technically garbled and unmistakably false, dismissed the CIA’s case for aluminum tubes. Without convincingly substantiating in the first place how unmanned aerial vehicles would make the trek from Iraq to America undetected, the White House's claim was duly refuted by UN Weapons inspectors before the war, who correctly assessed the vehicles as fit for reconnaissance missions, not WMD delivery.
"The glaring deficiency of the Robb-Silberman commission's report is that its remit did not entail investigating policy-makers' (mis)use of intelligence. Though the commission's findings explicitly deny that political pressure was exerted on intelligence analysts to ensure information fit the Bush administration's bellicose agenda, the dismissal is belied by the text's accounts; one could reasonably infer such a colossal blunder could not have been perpetrated without direction from political handlers at the top.
"Rather, Bush secures re-election for prosecuting a war under deliberately false pretenses against an infirm adversary unconnected to 9-11. Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz’s appointment to head the World Bank smacks of former defence secretary and Vietnam War architect Robert McNamara's selection in 1968. Condoleezza Rice becomes secretary of state while her subordinate Stephen Hadley, assumes her former post. A figure instrumental in ensuring the spurious uranium story posited in the 2003 State of the Union Address, Bob Joseph, gets to be under secretary of state. Lastly, George Tenet—head of the CIA during this mess—is awarded a medal of freedom for presumably bending intelligence to suit his boss's whims.
"Hence, the Bush administration is exonerated by default and is presented with an unprecedented opportunity to take credit for the massive revamp of intelligence collection at home and abroad. If justice were to be served, the president and his cronies would be held to account for their actions."
Well I agree with the statement. When you think about state officials in a democracy are in fact caretakers who enrich themselve not privately, but with the public's funds.
LOL, I wouldn't be calling anyone from Mises a leftist. Secondly, the report did not say as a percent of our GDP, just that the deficit was the largest. Just as the $2.6 trillion budget from the party of 'limited government' is the largest budget in this nation's history. But don't worry. This budget and deficit will pale in comparison in a few years when we have to start paying for the pill bill passed and signed by 'limited government' conservatives
Modernman and Jackbob, -- my two recent correspondents, -- you should enjoy this:
[S]tate officials in a democracy are mere caretakers who cannot privately enrich themselves from ownership or sale of government property.Rather, a moral hazard and tragedy of the commons ensues as bureaucrats and politicians may merely exercise use of government property while on the state payroll, precipitating a strong inducement to maximize current use of government property, irrespective if such activities entail dire consequences for taxpayers and the economy at large.
[...]
Hoppe states democracy abolishes the distinction between rulers and ruled—the limited opportunity to become a member of the royal family that pervaded under monarchy—and assumes that any member of the political system may ascend to the upper echelons of governance. Given the state's indispensable need to steal for its subsistence and the nearly unfettered entry into the ranks of the ruling class, democracy renders it that much easier for politicians to accelerate exactions from the public, as the gates remain open for any individual or faction to gain access to governmental powers and impose the same taxes or regulations themselves. As democracy has taken root in the United States and elsewhere, jostling between rival political factions has been less about how flaccid or robust the state should be, but what direction the state should take as its scope expands.
The ability of elected politicians and entrenched bureaucrats to institutionalize and enforce systematic predation and redistribution of private property is an outcome of the democratic ethos itself. Indeed, the grand bargain of democracy is this: every individual within the system—whether voluntarily or not—cedes the inviolable title to his or her property for the ability to either elect, participate in or marshal a political movement that competes for the privilege of seizing and spending everyone else's money. It follows that individual responsibility and private property ownership are seriously impaired and denigrated as the government-instituted "law of the jungle" taps innate human characteristics such as envy, self-preservation, and keenness for gratification.
[...]
It should be noted that the chief feedback mechanism of democratic government, voting, does occur in private enterprises and associations. Beyond this superficial similarity, however, there are acute distinctions. Shareholders exercise voting rights in a corporation proportionate to stock ownership whereas every eligible voter in a democratic election is entitled to one vote, irrespective if they are net tax-eaters or taxpayers.
[...]
The divergence between morality and democratic rule can be observed in legal positivism, the notion that right and wrong are absent prior to the introduction of legislation.
Meant to flag you
Really? Which historical record is that? For over 200 years we have being living with the "Whig interpetation" of history, supplemented in the last 50 years by a Marxist view. If you get your history from public school textbooks and the history channel you have been profoundly misled.
Let's attack this logically for a minute.
Principle 1
we know the left,with their willing accomplicies in the media and the education system, lie to and mislead people as a matter of course to achieve their goals. In fact this is a basic tenet of leftism as expoused by Lenin and Marx.
I don't think hardly anyone disagrees with this assertion - I could do a quick search on FR and find probably 1000s of articles that articulate this exact point, so lets call it a priori (does not need to be proved)
Principle 2
We live in a two party, winner take all, democratic (this is the method - one person, one vote, universal sufferage over 18) republic (this is the form). In order to obtain and maintain their power the Democrat party lies to and misleads the people, I'm sure very few here would disagree with this, it's well documented and again I could find 1000s of articles on FR saying the same thing. So we can call that a priori as well.
So why is the GOP different?
When you view something on CNN do you not react with suspicion, and correctly so?
Why is FOX different?
Are those who are alleged to be "conservative" saints? Do they not desire power in our system?
Are they not capable of propogandizing?
Finding fault is always easy. The difficult task is in finding solutions. That is finding methods that will stand up to the same level of analysis, and criticism, that the faulted theory is subject to.
On the other hand I do not wish to splash cold water here. The necessity to criticize, as both the article posted and most of the comments made here on this thread thus far have done, needs to be repeated again and again, until every potentially thinking person understands the short comings of the current system.
Monarchy, while still a monopolistic system, is better in that it has an inherent long term time preference because it is privately owned. Taxes tend to be lower. Wars tend to be more constrained because they are essentially disputes of property ownership.
The ideal system would be that of non-monopolistic privately owned protective services competing with each other for citizen-subscribers. How a society gets to that point I do not know. But perhaps that will be the next phase of the evolution of Western civilization.
The supply siders, many of whom I greatly admire, primarily Jude Wanniski, do not care about the size of government. As long as that maximum point of revenue generation on the Laffer Curve is attained, they do not care. They would advocate that government has to grow as an economy grows. Most of them would admit that socialism does work as long as there is a greater primary emphasis on economic growth rather than economic redistribution. Only when the redistributive impulse overtakes that of growth are there problems. You could be on the low end of the Laffer Curve and still have socialism. Furthermore, supply siders would advocate raising taxes if on the low end.
Private property anarchists like Hoppe (I prefer the term "polyarchy" because a citizen would select which system to live under) represent the most pure form of anti-socialism. The "governments" are competing with each other and have an incentive to protect their people very well. Because it is based entirely on private property, many social problems would be solved - there would be an incentive to stop illegal immigration and crime would go down. Because slothful and unproductive behavior would no longer be subsidized, general manners and morality would improve. There would be a rise in the fertility rate as people, no longer slaves to a socialistic state, would now have the financial freedom and free time to dedicate to childrearing. All of the problems of the Western world are directly or indirectly tied to socialism, which is a result of the increase in democracy since the time of Marx. The democratic impulse originates on the left. That is why the neoconservatives, the first generation of which used to be communist, are so in love with it - they are still statists and socialists.
But I can't do Hoppe justice. If you are interested, you need to read Democracy: the God that failed.
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I see that static analysis of foreign policy is every bit as useful as their static analyses of economic policy. Someone needs to explain to these people that t is not always equal to zero.