My
previous Salon essay,
in which I asked why there are not any libertarian countries, if
libertarianism is a sound political philosophy, has infuriated members
of the tiny but noisy libertarian sect, as criticisms of cults by
outsiders usually do. The weak logic and bad scholarship that suffuse
libertarian responses to my article tend to reinforce me in my view
that, if they were not paid so well to churn out anti-government
propaganda by plutocrats like the Koch brothers and various
self-interested corporations, libertarians would play no greater role in
public debate than do the followers of Lyndon LaRouche or L. Ron
Hubbard.
An unscientific survey of the blogosphere turns up a
number of libertarians claiming in response to my essay that, because
libertarianism is anti-statist, to ask for an example of a real-world
libertarian state shows a failure to understand libertarianism. But if
the libertarian ideal is a stateless society, then libertarianism is
merely a different name for utopian anarchism and deserves to be
similarly ignored.
Another response to my essay has been to claim
that a libertarian country really did exist once in the real world, in
the form of the United States between Reconstruction and the New Deal.
Robert Tracinski
writes that I am “astonishingly ignorant of history” for failing to
note that the “libertarian utopia, or the closest we’ve come to it, is
America itself, up to about 100 years ago. It was a country with no
income tax and no central bank. (It was on the gold standard, for crying
out loud. You can’t get more libertarian than that.) It had few
economic regulations and was still in the Lochner era, when such
regulations were routinely struck down by the Supreme Court. There was
no federal welfare state, no Social Security, no Medicare.”
It is
Tracinski who is astonishingly ignorant of history. To begin with, the
majority of the countries that adopted the “libertarian” gold standard
were authoritarian monarchies or military dictatorships. With the
exception of Imperial Britain, an authoritarian government outside of
the home islands, where most Britons were denied the vote for most of
this period, most of the independent countries of the pre-World War I
gold standard epoch, including the U.S., Germany, France, Russia and
many Latin American republics, rejected free trade in favor of varying
degrees of economic protectionism.
For
its part, the U.S. between Lincoln and FDR was hardly laissez-faire.
Ever since colonial times, states had engaged in public poor relief and
sometimes created public hospitals and asylums. Tracinski to the
contrary, there were also two massive federal welfare programs before
the New Deal: the Homestead Act, a colossal redistribution of government
land to farmers, and generous pension benefits for Union veterans of
the Civil War and their families. Much earlier, the 1798 act that taxed
sailors to fund a small system of
government-run sailors’ hospitals was supported by Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton alike.
State
and local licensing rules and trade laws governed economic life in
detail, down to the size of spigots in wine casks, in some cases.
It was precisely these state and local regulations that the Supreme Court struck down, in Lochner v. New York (1905) and other cases,
to promote the goal of creating a single national market. At the same
time, sharing their racism with most white Americans, federal judges in
Tracinski’s “libertarian” America permitted the most massive system of
labor market distortion of all: racial segregation, which artificially
boosted the incomes and property values of whites.
The
single national market that Lochner-era courts sought to protect from
being Balkanized by state and local regulations (other than racial
segregation) was walled off by the highest protective tariffs of any
major industrial nation. The U.S. government between Lincoln and FDR
engaged in a version of modern East Asian-style mercantilism, protecting
American industrial corporations from import competition, while
showering subsidies including land grants on railroad companies and
using federal troops to crush protesting workers. This
government-business mercantilism was anti-worker but it was hardly
libertarian.
High tariffs to protect American companies in
Tracinski’s alleged Golden Age of American libertarianism were joined by
racist immigration restrictions that further boosted the incomes of
white workers already boosted by de jure or de facto racial segregation.
The 1790 Naturalization Act barred immigrants from becoming citizens
unless they were “free white persons” and had to be amended by the 1870
Naturalization Act to bestow citizenship on former slaves of “African
nativity” and “African descent.” Although the Supreme Court in 1898
ruled that the children of Asians born in the U.S. were citizens by
birth, Tracinski’s libertarian utopia was characterized by increasingly
restrictive immigration laws which curtailed first Asian immigration and
then, after World War I, most European immigration.
Calvin
Coolidge, the subject of a hero-worshiping new biography by the
libertarian conservative Amity Shlaes, defended both high tariffs and
restrictive immigration. Here is
an excerpt from President Coolidge’s second annual address in 1924:
Two
very important policies have been adopted by this country which, while
extending their benefits also in other directions, have been of the
utmost importance to the wage earners. One of these is the protective
tariff, which enables our people to live according to a better standard
and receive a better rate of compensation than any people, any time,
anywhere on earth, ever enjoyed. This saves the American market for the
products of the American workmen. The other is a policy of more recent
origin and seeks to shield our wage earners from the disastrous
competition of a great influx of foreign peoples. This has been done by
the restrictive immigration law. This saves the American job for the
American workmen.
In 1921 then vice-president Coolidge wrote an article entitled “Whose Country is This?” in
Good Housekeeping, in which he declared:
“Biological
laws tell us that certain divergent people will not mix or blend. The
Nordics propagate themselves successfully. With other races, the outcome
shows deterioration on both sides.” (Amity Shlaes’s hero evidently
believed racist pseudoscience about dangerous and inferior
“half-breeds”).
Protectionist, nativist paleoconservatives of the
Patrick Buchanan school might have reason to idealize the U.S. as it
existed between 1865 and 1932. But libertarians who want to prove that a
country based on libertarian ideology can exist in the real world
cannot point to the United States at any period in its history from the
Founding to the present.
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