Roderick Long responds to a recent bout of militarism over at Liberty & Power, and his post is worth sharing and expanding upon. Long:
- Jacob [Levy] describes [Michael] Badnarik’s position as a “silly Panglossianism about politics that says, ‘Any wrong must be traceable to another wrong; if only we never did anything wrong, no one would ever do anything wrong to us.'”
- That would indeed be a silly position. But it is not Badnarik’s position, nor is it the position of antiwar libertarians generally. The following three propositions are distinct:
a) The kind of interventionist foreign policy the U.S. regularly pursues is likelier to provoke terrorist attacks than to deter them.
b) The specific attacks the U.S. suffered on 9/11 were primarily a response to its interventionist foreign policy, and the further interventions with which the U.S. has responded are making future terrorist attacks more rather than less likely.
c) The U.S. would never suffer any attacks if it did not have an interventionist foreign policy.
Note that (a) does not imply (b), and (b) does not imply (c). We antiwar libertarians have been defending propositions (a) and (b), but in doing so we are not committed to (c) — and no antiwar libertarian known to me has endorsed (c).
Compare the following three propositions:
d) The kind of interventionist economic policy the U.S. regularly pursues is likelier to provoke economic crises than to deter them.
e) The Great Depression was primarily the result of the U.S. government’s interventionist economic policy during the 1920s, and the further economic interventions with which the U.S. government responded served mainly to lengthen the Depression rather than alleviating it.
f) The U.S. would never suffer any economic crises — i.e., there would be no earthquakes, no floods, no hurricanes, etc. — if it did not have an interventionist economic policy.
Most libertarians accept propositions (d) and (e); but of course this does not commit them to the absurdity à la Fourier of (f). Isn’t accusing antiwar libertarians of Panglossian silliness a bit like accusing libertarians in general of not believing in earthquakes and floods?
That this should even need explaining to libertarians is sad. We don’t support laissez-faire economic policies because we believe poverty, discrimination, etc., would disappear without government meddling in the economy. We don’t support the right to bear arms because we believe gun-related deaths would end with the Brady Bill’s repeal. We don’t support free speech because we think the airwaves would be smut-free and completely edifying without the FCC. If we had our way, the world wouldn’t be perfect. But the world won’t be perfect no matter what. Those who believe it will be if we just pass some more antitrust regulations, ban all guns, outlaw profanity, or – ahem – bomb the hell out of a few more countries are the true Panglossian idiots.