The Real American Right: Part II
By Murray N. Rothbard
Edited and with an introduction by Thomas E. Woods
Ludwig von Mises Institute, 231 pages, $20
Part II: The Rise of the Smearbund
Rothbard’s shift in viewpoint, from the objective to the personal, which occurs suddenly in the beginning of chapter 7, is nevertheless made to seem like a natural transition: he goes from describing the history of the Old Right standing outside the movement, to a partisan giving us the inside story, and the book really begins to pick up its emotional and narrative pace.
Here Rothbard details his first contacts with the nascent libertarian-conservative movement, notably the Foundation for Economic Education, led by Leonard E. Read, a former president of the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce. Another key institution of the Old Right movement at that time was the William Volker Fund, an early progenitor of libertarian and conservative scholarship. The Fund paid for academic positions held by Mises and Hayek throughout their careers: given the left-wing temper of the times, when Keynesianism in economics and statism in politics was the dominant paradigm, it was the only way these two pioneers of free market economics could obtain university posts.
It was through FEE that Rothbard came into contact with the small but intellectually energetic group of free-market and “isolationist” writers, academics, and activists who constituted the Old Right in the late 1940s. Rothbard talks about his early influences, including F. A. “Baldy” Harper, an economist with FEE whose emphasis on the philosophical rather than the purely economic aspect of libertarianism helped shape Rothbard’s own approach. Frank Chodorov, the writer, pamphleteer, and editor of the monthly analysis (yes, the lower-case is correct), had a profound effect on young Rothbard’s ideological evolution: as he puts it, “that noble, courageous, candid, and spontaneous giant of a man who compromised not one iota in his eloquent denunciations of our enemy the State … was my entrée to uncompromising libertarianism.”
Rothbard describes his first encounter with Chodorov’s work in his inimitable style, which gives us some idea of the underground nature of the libertarian movement of the day. He was looking around the Columbia University bookstore: it was 1947, and the racks were packed with “the usual Stalinist, Trotskyist, etc. leaflets,” but “one pamphlet was emblazoned in red letters, with its title, ‘Taxation Is Robbery,’ by Frank Chodorov,” which, for Rothbard, was “a true – and infinitely exhilarating – culture shock. Once seeing those shining and irrefutable words,” he relates, “my ideological outlook could never be the same again.”
While other groups dedicated to promoting “free enterprise,” however tentatively and apologetically, called for lowering taxes and relaxing regulations, Chodorov condemned all taxation as theft and called for its abolition: likewise with economic regulations. The State, in Chodorov’s view, was little more than an organized gang of highwaymen.
It was through Chodorov that young Rothbard was introduced to the works of Garrett, Flynn, Nock, Mencken, and the remnants of the Old Right movement that constituted a kind of intellectual and political underground, or counter-culture, in which he found kindred souls and began to flourish. I’ve told the essentials of this story in my biography of Rothbard – An Enemy of the State: The Life of Murray N. Rothbard (Prometheus Books, 2000) – but there are a few highlights here that I either didn’t touch on or that deserve to be doubly underscored.
The early days of FEE, which saw a struggle between anarchists and “minarchists,” the genesis of the William Volker Fund, which did so much to nurture a network of libertarian scholars, and Rothbard’s own intellectual evolution are all detailed here. Of some interest to readers of Taki’s Top Drawer, however, is the first smear attack on the slowly-reviving movement. Apostles of Discord: A Study of Organized Bigotry and Disruption on the Fringes of Protestantism, which devoted a chapter to the Spiritual Mobilization group, founded in 1935 by the Rev. James W. Fifield, pastor of the 4,500-member First Congregational Church of Los Angeles. The Spiritual Mobilizers put out the very libertarian magazine, Faith and Freedom, and Rothbard wrote for them under the pseudonym “Auberon Herbert” According to the author, Ralph Lord Roy, who devoted a chapter to “God and the ‘Libertarians,’” Fifield and “Herbert” were “apostles of discord” because they challenged and opposed all those Good Things that non –“extremists” embraced, like the Welfare State, the United Nations, and the liberal-collectivist shibboleths of the time, which were indeed held as sacred by both parties and all “respectable” commentators in 1953, the year the book was published.
Spiritual Mobilization was deemed a “threat to progress,” and “reactionary,” even meriting a blast from the socialist Reinhold Niebuhr. Roy hurled all the by-now-familiar “extremist”-baiting epithets, and then some: Fifield’s group represented “the Protestant priests of Mammon,” they were “benefactors of the rich and powerful, and allied with groups that “nestle on the fascist fringe.” Labor unions and The Nation magazine were particularly miffed that these “Neanderthals” dared raise their heads. Roy’s analysis, according to Rothbard, divided his targets “into two baleful groups: Apostles of Hate, and Apostles of Discord. In the slightly less menacing Ministry of Discord (along with pro-Communists and various rightists) was, in Chapter 12, “God and the ‘Libertarians,’” place for some reason in quotation marks. But, quotation marks or not, under attack or not, we had at least gained general attention, and I suppose we should have been grateful to be placed in the Discord rather than the Hate category.”
This should give you an idea of just how obscure and unsung these freedom-fighters of the Fifties were: a vicious attack was welcomed as recognition!
Yet there were advantages, if we look at it from our own perspective, in belonging to this beleaguered Remnant. Looking back on that bygone era, and Rothbard’s account of it, one can only wistfully pine for a conservative movement that wasn’t mired in warmongering demagoguery, that stood with the individual against the State, and that didn’t had yet to be co-opted and neutralized by an invasion of ex-Communists and right-wing Social Democrats [.pdf file]. Rothbard shows that the Old Right, which was, at that point, the mainstream of the conservative movement, was “staunchly and steadfastly opposed [to] both American imperialism and interventionism abroad, and its corollary in militarism at home.” Virtually the only opposition to conscription – extended until 1947, and reinstituted the next year – came from the “extreme right” Republicans in Congress, and such Old Right mainstays as Flynn and Chodorov. Furthermore, NATO and the Truman Doctrine were disdained by the Old Right Republicans, such as Nebraska Republican congressman Howard Buffett (yes, that’s right: the father of today’s famous billionaire), who attacked the Truman Doctrine on the floor of Congress:
“Even if it were desirable, America is not strong enough to police the world by military force. If that attempt is made, the blessings of liberty will be replaced by coercion and tyranny at home. Our Christian ideals cannot be exported to other lands by dollars and guns…. We cannot practice might and force abroad and retain freedom at home. We cannot talk world cooperation and practice power politics.”
Words that, if uttered today – by, say, Ron Paul – would need little if any emendation.
Robert A. Taft is portrayed, here, as a waffling albeit loveable and essentially sound politician, whose best instincts led him to oppose the world-saving, debt-creating, liberty-destroying foreign policy of the Truman Democrats and their internationalist Republican collaborators. Warning against our deepening intervention in Asia – which would eventually lead to the tragedy of Vietnam – Senator Taft denied that Korea fell within the American defense perimeter. He furthermore savaged Truman’s decision to send troops without congressional approval, setting a precedent that we all rue to this day: “If the President can intervene in Korea without congressional approval,” Taft warned, “he can go to war in Malaya, or Indonesia, or Iran, or South America.”
While the Old Right Republicans “valiantly opposed the war,” as Rothbard puts it, the Left completely capitulated to the war hysteria and the Cold War fever then enveloping the remnants of liberal opinion. Henry Wallace, most liberals, and even the Trotskyist followers of British “state capitalist” theoretician Tony Cliff, joined the pro-war chorus. Both The New Republic and The Nation jumped on board the Truman war-wagon, and together these two arbiters of American liberalism denounced “the Stalinist caucus” over in the Tribune Tower, where Col. Robert Rutherford McCormick, publisher of the staunchly “isolationist” Chicago Tribune, blazed away at the War Party. Rothbard offers a fascinating take on the debate by singling out the criticism of Taft by McGeorge Bundy, future architect of the Vietnam war, and rabid interventionist, who attacked the Senator for daring to question Truman’s authority to defy the Constitution and take the nation to war all by his lonesome. The President, he averred, must have the unimpeded authority to make war anywhere, at any time, if we were to win the global war on Communism. A decade or so later, the bitter fruits of Bundy-ism would be reaped in full.
As we watch the Democrats of today barely rustle up enough courage to propose meek modifications to the “surge” in Iraq, we should be inspired by the history of how the Republicans, led by Senators Taft and Wherry, boldly called for Truman to bring the troops home from Korea, and sought to deny him the funds to maintain permanent bases. As Herbert Hoover[.pdf file] joined the growing chorus of conservative Republican war critics, the liberal media was in a lather, with The Nation charging that “The line they [antiwar Republicans] are laying down for their country should set the bells ringing in the Kremlin as nothing has since the triumph of Stalingrad [!]. Actually, the line taken by Pravda is that the former President did not carry isolationism far enough.”
The Old Right was being red-baited! This would happen to Rothbard throughout his career, but, at this point, it was quite a shock for he and his fellow “extreme right” Republicans to read, in The New Republic, an editorial attacking conservative war opponents as an “opposition who saw nothing alarming in Hitler’s conquest of Europe,” and hardly raising an eyebrow as “Stalin, after raising the ante, as he did with Hitler, and sweeping over Asia, would move on until the Stalinist caucus in the Tribune tower would bring out in triumph the first Communist edition of the Chicago Tribune.”
McCormick, who was denouncing “reds” when The Nation and The New Republic were hailing Lenin’s “workers’ paradise” and defending the Moscow Trials, wasn’t “anti-Communist” enough for the neocons of yesteryear.
The fight against the conquest and occupation of South Korea was the last stand of the congressional “isolationists” in the GOP. There is an elegaic ring to a letter Rothbard wrote to a liberal friend, which he includes at the end of the Korea war chapter, that pretty much sums up the intellectual and political zeitgeist of the time, and the generally pessimistic outlook of the Old Right as the cold war began in earnest:
“In the last war, we were hampered by a few obstructionist, isolationist antediluvians, who resisted such salutary steps as a draft of all labor and capital, and total planning for mobilization by benevolent politicians, economists, and sociologists. But under our permanent war setup, we can easily push this program through. If anyone objects, we can accuse him of giving aid and comfort to the Commies ….
“Whoever the genius was who thought up the permanent war idea, you’ve got to hand it to him. We can look forward to periods of National Unity, of a quintupling of the National Income, etc. There is a little fly in the ointment that some obstructionists may mention – the boys actually doing the fighting may have some objections. But we can correct that with a $300 billion “Truth” campaign headed, say, by Archibald MacLeish, so they will know what they are fighting for. And, we’ve got to impose equivalent sacrifices on the home front, so our boys will know that things are almost as tough at home …”
The “swansong of the Old Right,” as Rothbard puts it, was Taft’s defeat at the 1952 Republican convention, where the nomination was stolen by the Wall Street wing of the party, in a repeat of the Wilkie coup of 1940. Part of the fascination of this book is that the author cites a number of writers and material I had never heard of until I read Rothbard’s manuscript, such as Garet Garrett, the muckraking journalism of the Chicago Tribune, and including the work of Chesly Manly, the Tribune’s longtime political correspondent, on the hijacking of the GOP by the Eisenhower forces:
“New York banks, connected with the country’s great corporations by financial ties and interlocking directorates, exerted their powerful influence on the large uncommitted delegations for Eisenhower. They did it more subtly, but no less effectively, than in 1940 when they captured the Republican convention for Wilkie. Having made enormous profits out of foreign aid and armaments orders, the bankers and corporation bosses understood each other perfectly.”
Another writer, who has long since gone out of fashion, was Louis Bromfield, whose 1954 polemic, A New Pattern for a Tired World, is cited by Rothbard as one of the last echoes of the Old Right: Bromfield’s call for free markets and his bitter denunciation of the new militarism “began to seem anachronistic and had almost no impact on the right wing of the day.”
One by one, the lions of the Old Right withdrew from the battlefield: Taft, McComick, Flynn, Garrett, the first two dead by the end of the decade and the latter two retired, worn out from a struggle in which they found hardly any reinforcements, and were particularly lacking an influx of youthful successors to take their place. A few, however, stepped forward, one of them a young Murray Rothbard, who took up the cudgels against all wings of the War Party, both its “rightist” faction and its social democratic manifestation, as we’ll see in the next installment ….
Comments
1. I have written before that the best political writing at the moment is coming out of the Mengerian School (the “Austrian” School). To read Rothbart, Lew Rockwell, Thomas Woods, Hans-Hermann Hoppe, Ron Paul, and above all Thomas DiLorenzo is invigorating. Invigorating also is Justin Raimondo. I thank him.
Once again, this website obliges us Torys to define and distinguish ourselves from two groups who try to masquerade in the false whiskers of Toryism. (i) That we have little in common with Hamiltonians (“Neoconservatives”) I think we all agree. (ii) The intelligent among us know that we have nothing in common with racialism, Fascism, Clerical Fascism, and ethnic nationalism. (Sadly, Judeophobia is weak point among Torys, but one which Torys can correct.)
We Tory Conservatives can learn much from the Mengerians, however much our own deep structure differs. They too utterly reject ## i and ii above, and also Judeophobia. Let’s call them friends, but friends from whom we also must differ. After reading Mises, I had the feeling he was just Bentham with the flavor of Linzertorte. (Nothing against Austria, mind you!). From my reading, I find Böhm-Bawerk their best thinker, who k.o.-ed Marx and Rodbertus. All the same, we Torys can work with the Mengerians, and also with Jeffersonians. Frank Meyer may end up with the status of a prophet.
2. The Hamiltonians make much hay of their supposed victory over Naziism and Communism and how the “Old Right” libertarians didn’t help out. Truth be told, Naziism was defeated by a Latter-Day Tory (Churchill), a Quasi-Maurrasian (De Gaulle), and by that fact that ol’ ‘Dolf was a bad general. Communism was defeated (1)by the fact that Socialism doesn’t work, and (2) by a Polish Personalist and Christian Democrat, Wojtyla by name.
3. “Right Wing Social Democrats” is an utter oxymoron.
4. Paul Gottfried, please chime in! Compare for us your latest book’s arguments to Rothbard’s!
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Sid,
Who is the “we” in your little pseudo-Tory club? Some kids from around your neighborhood?
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In the days of the Old Right it went without saying that America was an Anglo-European society. How many people in the Old Right would have voted to have their people displaced by Third Worlders? Perhaps Sid could provide us with some evidence.
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Sid,
You are off topic again and pushing your personal agenda, so what else is new? You share a common failing with marxists or is it a common failing of all doctrinaire bores in assuming that political theory is a substitute for common sense. I bet you have done more single-handed to turn people away from conservatism, the LOTS and any other cause that you associate with than any ten committed enemies could. I’m rather more interested in educating myself in how we have come to this sorry pass than being subjected to your pet mental tics.
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I have one of the “rate the presidents” guides. it’s amazing how strong the mythology is. there are dozens of professors who are consulted for it and somehow there is unanimaty on FDR, Lincoln. I think Carter even has a higher rating that reagan. conservatives nowadays are obsessed with teachers who don’t tow the israel party line, but they are fine with the interventionist version of american history.
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These standard bearers of the “Old Right” are ignored at worst or treated like crazy uncles at best because there is no axis of discussion any longer. There is no critical memory of success or failure, only the extended period of lucky breaks afforded by cheap oil. The long period of American Triumphalism.... crowned by the implosion of the Soviets and seconded by the deterministic hybrid of Chinese Communist-capitalism.... has imparted a mindset, mistakenly.... that being American removes one from cause and effect reality. When American’s go woozy over Obamas inchoate exclamations of “change”, they really believe it possible and do not question what that “change” might actually be, let alone question whether or not ....in a democratic Republic.... we elect Presidents who can single-handedly “change the World” as candidate Obama suggests when he is really stemwinding in the cadences of an old time pastor. They never question whether the institutional pistol whipping they are getting is something they should elect to change or something that has their beloved governments fingerprints all over it. Funny enough, George W. Bush has enacted more “change” in the office of the Executive than have any of the other Presidents in modern history. He’ll retire from office to build a cozy library and actually get paid to “speak” in spite of the kinds of wrist-cutting actions that consigned Napoleon to rocky islands.
Accordingly, when the crippled bus rockets into the ditch, the people will scream for government to help them because government is the only extra-legal organization they can imagine that can concoct a relief of sorts , We are habituated to dismiss any non-governmental solution unless we are small pockets of religious denominations whose apocalyptic philosophy has created a functioning welfare system. Both have a history confusing whether or not they are planning for the worst by hoping for the best or hoping for the worst by planning for the best. Government far outweighs any of the religious efforts in this secular age and with current policy, it enlists them in the power-play. Then, the entire cycle repeats and the Friedmans and Greenspans begin again to mutter their oracular incantations and the Titans rebuild their Bunko Scams with government but again until the charade can no longer be maintained and the bus crashes again. This is called the Non Cyclic Business Cycle.
Perhaps they should call it the Free-Market Free Free-Market.
Now that the species is finally eating its way through the global larder, it will be ever more difficult to resurrect libertarian principles because the power-plays to dominate and secure declining commodity sources will demand obedience to the mentality of the Militant hoarder.
This generation of Americans is uniquely suited to the sanguinary road ahead because they have freely relinquished the kind of skepticism and free-curiosity and initiative that got them where they are. Unfortunately, what we see today may come to be called “the good old days” as we move deeper into the cycle. The Chinese and Russians will likely cope quite alot better than the Americans because they have consigned themselves to the mindset of loathing their government and their government will be more efficient at the zero sum game than ours. American’s , on the other hand stubbornly refuse to suspect their government of perfidy even though they claim to be suspicious of it. As soon as the Souza marches start up and the flags wave and some tormented assailant scores a point, they revert to the kind of slavish devotion typical of the institutionally enslaved.
We do have a dilemma ahead of us, there are choices to be made and Libertarian Principles are part of the canon of choices in front of us. But without debate, reading Rothbard or Nock or Mies is akin to reading the Greek Classics. They are dead letters in a world that will embrace the “progress” of large institutions and the besotted declining returns of the “growth economy” until the bitter end. Anyone doubting this should simply review last nights results in a State that has the term “Live Free or Die” tattooed on it’s psyche but must think this is something like “Go Aggies” and an old steer horn fist salute. Less than 8% voted for liberty and rebuked the consumptive authoritarianism of the Federal State....in a State that has a purported reputation for being anti-state. The majority voted for authoritarian statists who spout reform but champion the kinds of mistaken consumptive policies that pre-date Nebuchadnezzer and simply will not die because humans will not break away from fear and supplication.
I suppose only the cockroaches will mourn the passing of their great garbage stream benefactors. Everything else will breathe the kind of sigh one heaves when a mugger runs off down the block with only your wallet and pride.
When one’s economy is little more than an institutionalized and hyper-exploitive waste stream and the citizenry simply expectant sows at the trough, Free Market Principles would seem to be beside the point.
Sure, this windy little bit of nihilist reductivism smacks of sour grapes but anyone that suggests there is not at least a grain of truth in it must have forsaken whatever God they might have in favor of prostration at the foot of the lower intestine.
The Superpower is a Superboob.
Oddly, I find the moment invigorating. I really must be a celebratory nihilist. Typical American, I still think we can change even though I aint got the first clue of what that change should be. One thing that is unmistakable though is that large institutions are a menace that stand athwart the self-defending intelligence we humans are capable of.
Sincerely,
Emily Dickinson
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@Dirk Sabin
“Sure, this windy little bit of nihilist reductivism smacks of sour grapes but anyone that suggests there is not at least a grain of truth in it must have forsaken whatever God they might have in favor of prostration at the foot of the lower intestine.”
Don’t be so hard on yourself. Anyone currently feeling the worm glow of self satisfaction is either actively contributing to the mess or so unaware as to approach idiocy. I have long sought a guide that would inform me of the proper response to the current and future madhouse that goes by the name America. While I personally draw the line at nihilism, it may be just the medicine for you, who knows? I do find that a liberal dash of bitterness keeps the slop tolerable without unduly whetting the appetite.
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Mr. Sabin. That was not mainly right on, it was highly entertaining. Thank you.
What surprises me is to be in the presence (so to speak) of so many folks possessed of a ton of intelligence and industry and yet to see them, and others, repeatedly fall into magical thinking when it comes to the latest political saviour.
A writer will limn the historical trajectory from liberty to tyranny and then, at the drop of a hat into the presidential ring, the writer will begin singing silly songs about how THIS time there really is hope etc etc.
I just don’t get it. The only way I can account for it is to observe, naturally, that even the best of any age is tainted, in not suffused, by the cultural corruption they find themselves drowning in and they lose their logical bearings.
And, there is also the reality of the existential heresy of thinking salvation is achieved via politics - the nastiest of the innumerable 60s heresies.
As to your last comments, I not only think we are capable of change I am positive we will change. The tyranny we live under will become ever more apparent as we baby-boomers retire and demand our rights :)
Collectivists court chaos. They know that puts the natives at unrest and the natives will DEMAND Washington control them more.
Talk about learning to love Big Brother… We lust after him in America. And he is slouching towards our altar.
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Sorry. I meant to write - That was not only mainly right on, it was highly entertaining.
And, Mr. Cundiff. I mean, really… Every time I see you rehearse that same tired-old political rap I want to drain fluid from my optic nerve using the rusty pop-top from an old can of Billy Beer.
Have pity…
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Crying Free Market, I say, is akin to Shouting I Love Robber Barons.
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What is badly needed today is a fair and balanced assessment of both FDR and ‘the Old Right’. Currently one is lionised and the other is smeared. Rothbard (and Raimondo’s) contribution is helping to balance the scales.
My guess is that ultimately FDR will be seen as a vain but imaginative politician who gave the American people ‘hope’ in the midst of the Great Depression (when they really wanted jobs) and ‘leadership’ in war (when they really wanted peace).
We can still make a more balanced judgement, even if, in the overall scheme of things, we believe America and FDR’s intervention against the vile Hitler and his regime was all told “a good thing” for mankind. Even if that intervention wasn’t quite based on the 100% pure motives as FDR lionisers constantly recycle.
A balanced conclusion does not vindicate FDR entirely nor does it mean the isolationists were ‘wrong’ or FDR somehow unusually farsighted (certainly any farsight he may have had about Hitler was lost on Stalin). A balanced history would note that in real world history venality, vice and virtue can all come wrapped in the same package. It’s not “either / or”.
The isolationists claimed (like Beard and Flynn) that opportunistic militarism followed from the economic failures of the New Deal, especially after the 1937 and on “Roosevelt Depression”. Other isolationists, (like Wheeler) often former Progressives, noted that FDR’s push for an unprecedented third term and court packing were a threat to traditional constitutional republicanism. The war drive was seen as more of the same. Some believed that the ultimate geopolitical winner of any intervention would be the USSR, and it is hard for any impartial observer to disagree that that is what actually happened.
None of these charges are nutty or extreme or somehow or other repudiated by subsequent history. A good test is to imagine the reaction were say George W Bush to discover yet another foreign threat soon after a deep economic downturn. Imagine if Bush claimed that “the war on terrorism” or the dollar crisis required that he stay on for a couple more terms, and imagine if he instituted unprecedented Congressional and Supreme Court changes to ensure his reign. I don’t think modern liberals would hold back for a moment in calling him a prospective tyrannt. So it’s a bit rich for modern liberals to deny FDR’s contemporary critics from making comparable claims against their hero.
The isolationists may have been wrong in opposing war with Hitler, or in under-estimating the depravity of the Hitler regime (just as the left to this day has continued to understate the depravity of the communist regimes) ..but their expose of the process used to take America into the so called “Good War” was certainly more right than wrong.
Many of the Old Right had previously witnessed how the process of Presidential war making had taken America into WW1, an intervention that certainly had disastrous results, both diplomatically and economically, so they naturally opposed one of Wilson’s under-studies (FDR had been Asst Sec of Navy under Wilson) repetition of the act.
And one of the things they did predict was that a long term consequence of the intervention would be an erosion of the republic. Many Old Righters expected the erosion to proceed more quickly than it did proceed in fact, but few unbiased observers could claim their fears for the republic were unfounded, or disproved by subsequent history.
Those who believe that the intervention was proven correct by history, and by the crimes of Hitler, know that even noble victories come at a price, and unfortunately part of that price has been massive damage to the machinery of the American republic.
There is no need for modern paleos to refight the lost campaign against intervention in WW2. Or even claim that the AFC was right all along. The Old Right should be honoured for the things they got right, not buried because of what they got wrong.
And of course they were right that in the long run, and in most cases, the case for non-intervention is usually the wisest and safest course for the American republic. WW2 was no ‘watershed of history’, just because the campaign against the real Hitler was right does not mean that that a perpetual war policy everywhere forever is required. Nor does it mean that the observations and recommendations of the Framers, and the Old Right, need to be consigned to the trash bin.
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Thank you Tim for a beautifully written and sensible commentary. You comment that FDR is still “lionised” in some quarters. Given the large body of evidence suggesting that FDR authorised the provocation of Japan and then allowed the slaughter of large numbers of military personnel at Pearl Harbor, I am surprised that many Americans see him in a favourable light.
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Jet, you may be correct about the Free Market but only in so much as the current corrupted version of it, one in which large institutions ....both government and industry have created a regulatory environment that has nothing whatsoever to do with Free Market Principles. Well, I shouldn’t say nothing to do with them because the current structure is designed to counter and subvert the Free Market and steer it in favor of large coalitions and institutions dependent upon the State.
In effect, the Corporate-Government Combine have crafted an Institutional Bunko Operation that employs Patriotic Bunkum to cement the deal. Government designed Anti-Racketeering Law was initiated as a useful ordering device and loyalty oath and it is too bad we cannot turn the RICO act back on it’s authors.
It all reminds me of a little plaque I have hanging in the office;
“This is a non-profit organization, it aint the way we planned it but its just how it worked out.”
This plaque is next to one that will suit the coming year,
“please remain seated while the room is in motion”.
To discuss “Free Market” principles within the current economic structure is pretty much a waste of time ...just as discussing “Democracy and Peace” is a waste of effort within the Military Industrial paradigm......but as a constructive philosophy following the essential definition of it, there is much of value and this is why Raimondo’s brief guide here is valuable.
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Ian comments about Pearl Harbor. It’s interesting that in terms of the historical treatment of this episode it is the “revisionists” who have more or less stayed consistent for the past 50 odd years with the “mainstream” doing the most “revising” of it’s story, and with each step moving closer to the standard revisionist account. The mainstream now more or less concedes most of the points to the revisionists but argues that the disaster had more to do with incompetence and miscommunications versus outright conspiracy. As if these were mutually exclusive categories. Anyone who has worked in any large organisation knows that ‘normal bureaucratic incompetence’ provides great cover for a host of sins.
Also we still debate as to whether communist totalitarianism is or was better or worse than nazi totalitarianism. This faux debate underlies much of the debate regarding isolationism and the Old Right. And it is really quite false. It is like debating whether having terminal bone cancer is worse than a terminal brain tumor. And of course the third great crime of the WW2 era, the firebombing and destruction of civilians in Japan and Germany is rarely mentioned in the same breath, if only as runner up to the other two.
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