WHAT IS LIBERTARIANISM?
Kenny Johnsson of The Liberal Post interviews Lew Rockwell. Below is an excerpt
BY LEW ROCKWELL

Lew Rockwell is a paleolibertarian political commentator and economist in the United States. Rockwell is the founder and President of the Ludwig von Mises Institute in Auburn, Alabama and Vice President of the Center for Libertarian Studies. Other stories by Lew Rockwell

Do you consider yourself a Libertarian?

Most certainly. What are the choices? Conservative is obviously out, even though the media describe us this way. The term’s heritage dates to the Tory party in Britain, the very mercantilist-landowners who resisted change in the Corn Laws. This group opposed capitalism as socially destabilizing. They didn’t like the merchant class making more money than the old families — meaning that they didn’t want to lose their privileges. In the United States, the term conservative came about after World War II. It had no meaning, really, other than to refer to the general desire to be prudent in public affairs, in contrast to the revolutionary tendencies on the left. The problem is that it amounted to a defense of the status quo, and, after Buckley, it was irretrievably wrapped up with the Cold War cause.

I like the term liberal since genuine liberalism is our heritage. It was their insight that society is self-managing, and this is the greatest political idea ever advanced in human history. But there are two problems here. The first is that the term was hijacked by socialists during the Progressive Era and especially after the New Deal, when the liberals finally sold out to the state. The second is more obscure but it is important: Even the good kind of liberalism was very much bound up with Republican theory, that you could have a government made up of the people rather than the elites. This error, which is really utopian, led to a commitment to government as an essential institution. Advances in economics and political philosophy since that time have shown that this is a misnomer. There is no way to keep government in check, since by definition it is guilty of committing the very aggressions it is supposedly designed to keep at bay: namely, theft, murder, counterfeiting, kidnapping, and the like. So the liberal critique of the state just wasn’t radical enough.

There are other terms bandied about from time to time, but in the end, I think we have to be happy with the term Libertarian, while knowing that politics tends to taint all word usage issues. What is a libertarian? It is a person who believes in the absolute right of private property ownership. All else follows from that one proposition.


Your slogan on LewRockwell.com is Anti-War, Anti-State, Pro-Market; how do you define anti-state?

To be anti-state is to hold the intellectual position that there is nothing that society needs that the state can do better than the market. If you hold that view, you are anti-state. So in some ways, to say anti-war, anti-state, and pro-market is to propose redundancies of the same idea. I would defend the anti-state idea in every aspect of human life. The market is better in schools, energy, food, housing, charity, trade, consumer protection, justice, security and even international relations. I know of no exceptions. The major burden of all the editorial work that I do is to make this point again and again. Does it grow weary? Not in any way. The number one, central, ubiquitous problem of our time and all time is the state. Whenever a criminal band manages to bamboozle the public that it alone should be granted the legal right to aggress on others, there is a problem that needs to be uprooted. The struggle for freedom is precisely this and no other.


What about anti-war? Are there no wars Libertarians can support?

We can support any defense of person and property. But war as we understand the term in modern times is a government program like any other, meaning that it over-utilizes resources, causes destruction of property and life, and fails to achieve its stated aims. On the last point, war often leads to the opposite of its stated aims. Iraq is a good example. But it is important for us to realize that in this respect, it is like any other government program. Western history had this idea of “just war” that was supposed to prevent war from starting and prevent them from becoming total. But who is left to decide what is just and what is not? The finally authority here is the state. Of course, it sees itself as just. That’s why we need not just rules but institutional change.