Nazis and Other Delusions: A Response to Hoppe
Recently, VDARE.com published Hans Hermann Hoppe’s 2010 address to his Property and Freedom Society in Turkey. Hoppe’s speech included his account of the 1996 meeting of the John Randolph Club, the last at which there was an organized libertarian presence, and a broader attack on the ideas of Pat Buchanan and Sam Francis. Hoppe’s account is factually dishonest, and the arguments Hoppe first presented against Buchanan and Francis at the 1996 John Randolph Club meeting, and that he now rehashes, are fundamentally flawed.
Hoppe wants his readers to believe that the libertarian grouping abandoned the John Randolph Club because we conservative members of the Club were too stupid—"economic ignoramuses"—to appreciate the truth of his criticism of Sam Francis and Pat Buchanan, a criticism that in any event was offered in sympathy to Francis and Buchanan, an "'immanent' critique," in Hoppe’s words. Showing the modesty for which he is known, Hoppe also writes that he "had hoped that, notwithstanding feelings of friendship and personal loyalty, after some time of reflection reason would prevail," "reason" being synonymous with agreement with Hoppe and a willingness to "express some intellectual distance to Buchanan and his program," but that the paleoconservative members of the John Randolph Club remained unaccountably unreceptive to his views.
Hoppe’s account, as Thomas Fleming noted in his incisive and judicious response here, is founded on "an historical lie." What Hoppe did in 1996 was to label Sam Francis an advocate of "national socialism," and then to apply this label to Pat Buchanan and his supporters. It is not common practice in America, or in Hoppe’s native Germany, to accuse coalition partners of Nazism, much less to act astonished when those coalition partners take offense. Chris Kopff summarizes the situation well: "In today’s world calling someone a Nazi is a deal breaker and no one doubted (on our side) or denied (on theirs) that the point of Hoppe’s talk was to provoke the breakup of the John Randolph Club."
Hoppe’s apologists are now suggesting that “national socialism” was merely a bland economic term, at which no one should have taken offense. The first fact showing that this argument is nonsense is Hoppe’s failure even to mention it in his 2010 speech purporting to explain what had happened in 1996. If Hoppe’s criticism were as bland as his apologists want us to believe, he would not have felt the need to suppress it from his account of what happened. The second fact showing that Hoppe’s “national socialism” comment was intended as Fleming and Kopff understand it is Hoppe’s version of the speech, published in 2005, after Hoppe presumably had the chance to clean it up, on the website of the Ludwig von Mises Institute, under the irenic title “The Intellectual Incoherence of Conservatism.” In this article, Hoppe quotes from Sam Francis’ Chronicles essay “From Household to Nation: The Middle American Populism of Pat Buchanan,” and then comments: “For obvious reasons this doctrine is not so named, but there is a term for this type of conservatism: It is called national socialism or social nationalism.” The “obvious reasons” are indeed “obvious,” no matter how much Hoppe’s apologists want to deny them. Finally, there is the manner in which Hoppe delivered his talk—the feline way in which he delivered this line. All the paleoconservatives present at the 1996 meeting with whom I spoke confirmed my recollection of this, and I can attest that Sam Francis understood Hoppe to be calling him a Nazi as well. This cobbled-together apology may fool the gullible, but it won’t fool those of us who were there in 1996 or anyone who gives even a moment’s reflection to Hoppe’s own accounts.
In his 2010 speech, Hoppe states that after his 1996 talk, “There was no attempt to refute my arguments.” What Hoppe omits is that Sam Francis, who was in charge of assembling the program for the John Randolph Club that year, had very much wanted to have a debate. According to Scott Richert, Francis first proposed a debate on the issues raised by the Buchanan campaign. The libertarian side declined. Then Francis suggested a debate focusing on the more general issue of protectionism. The libertarians again declined and, as a result, the John Randolph Club ended without a debate for the first (and only) time in its history. Instead, the libertarians suggested an additional panel with Hoppe speaking on what libertarians could learn from conservatives and vice versa. It turns out what Hoppe thought paleoconservatives could learn is that they were supporting “national socialism.”
The fact that Hoppe slandered supposed allies, and now feels the need to lie about it, is a sufficient basis for reasonable men to avoid his company. Of course, that does not necessarily mean that Hoppe had nothing of value to say, either in 1996 or in his 2010 retelling. But an examination of Hoppe’s speeches reveals that Hoppe’s criticisms of Buchanan and Francis miss the mark. Hoppe, from his perspective as an advocate of a “stateless natural order,” dismisses Buchanan and Francis as “statists.” It is true, of course, that Francis and Buchanan recognized government as an indispensable part of civilization, a stance that puts them squarely in the camp of reality. The blunt truth is that Hoppe’s “anarcho-capitalism” is a fantasy, and measuring political figures by how closely they adhere to a fantasy is not useful. Indeed, in his 1996 campaign, Buchanan advocated abolishing several federal departments and agencies, restricting the power of the federal judiciary, cutting federal income taxes, and following a non-interventionist foreign policy, all steps that would reduce the power of the federal government.
What aggrieved Hoppe in 1996 was Buchanan’s refusal to call for the wholesale abolition of public education, Medicare, Social Security, and unemployment compensation, stances that in no way distinguished Buchanan from anyone else wishing to get elected in 1996. A criticism of candidate X that also applies to all of candidate X’s rivals does not offer a compelling reason to support someone other than candidate X, much less call candidate X a Nazi. Even so staunch a libertarian as Rand Paul opposes cuts in Medicare payments to doctors. Is Rand Paul advocating “national socialism,” too? Hoppe’s criticism of Buchanan that “There is no recognition that the natural order in education means that the state has nothing to do with it” seems odd, both because Buchanan repeatedly called for the abolition of the federal Department of Education in the 1996 campaign and because Hoppe spent his sojourn as an immigrant in America being subsidized by the taxpayers of Nevada, as a professor at UNLV. Does Hoppe’s failure to apply “the recognition that the natural order in education means that the state has nothing to do with it” to his own life make Hoppe a “national socialist,” too?
Even more bizarre are Hoppe’s comments on health insurance. In 1996, Hoppe argued that “Subsidies for the ill, unhealthy and disabled breed illness, disease, and disability and weaken the desire to work for a living and to lead healthy lives.” The fact that the advent of health insurance has coincided with increasing longevity is of no moment, since Hoppe quotes Ludwig von Mises as saying that “being ill is not a phenomenon independent of the conscious will. . . . A man’s efficiency is not merely a result of his physical condition; it depends largely on his mind and will. . . . The destructionist aspect of health insurance lies above all in the fact that such institutions promote accident and illness . . . . We cannot weaken or destroy the will to health without producing illness.” Mary Baker Eddy could not have said it any better.
Hoppe also misunderstood what Buchanan was trying to achieve in 1996. Hoppe justified his rehashing of both cogent and bizarre criticisms of governmental social insurance programs by arguing that the focus of Buchanan’s campaign was to “fix the problem of moral degeneration and cultural decline” and then arguing, in essence, that there was no way to do that as long as one person is still drawing a Social Security check. It is true that Buchanan and Francis wanted to reverse moral degeneration and cultural decline, but the focus of the 1996 campaign was different. In the Sam Francis essay Hoppe quotes to establish his charge of “national socialism,” Francis wrote that Buchanan’s main goal in the 1996 campaign was “conserving the nation from the dominations and powers that are destroying it,” among which Francis identified the “globalization” that means “the disappearance of nationality, of cultures closely linked to national identity, probably of national sovereignty itself, and even of the distinctive populations of which nations are composed.” These goals of the Buchanan campaign are nowhere addressed by Hoppe, either today or in 1996, a fatal flaw in what Hoppe presents as the definitive critique of that campaign.
Then there is the matter of Buchanan’s protectionism, an object of Hoppe’s scorn both in 1996 and today. Nowhere does Hoppe evince the slightest recognition that far from being a manifestation of “national socialism,” American protectionism has a long and successful history predating the advent of socialism, going back to George Washington and Alexander Hamilton. This is the tradition to which Buchanan was appealing, with good reason. As the pseudonymous commenter Heligoland ably put it at the Alternative Right website: “As to Hoppe, I would reply: it is impossible to have a lasting intellectual association with economists who are either unwilling or incapable of testing their economic models against the natural experiments which history affords. 19th century Britain and America were two countries similar in race, language, religion, and political tradition. In 1860, America decisively embarked on a path of hyper-protectionism, while Britain simultaneously embarked on a path of completely free trade. Both countries continued their respective policies for at least half a century. In 1860, the British GNP/capita exceeded the American GNP/capita. In 1910, the situation was reversed—US GNP/capita was much greater than British. Wouldn't this vast and momentous experiment seem to suggest that unreciprocated free trade is not necessarily always and everywhere the right policy? That perhaps the positive externalities of industrialization can sometimes outweigh the benefits of unreciprocated free trade?”
Hoppe adds a new criticism of Buchanan’s protectionism in his 2010 talk—the claim that a “program of economic nationalism must alienate the intellectually and culturally indispensable bourgeoisie while attracting the (for us and our purposes) ‘useless’ proletariat.” Hoppe has apparently never heard the term “country club Republican” or grasped what it meant. There are reasons right-wing American political figures going back to Joe McCarthy have appealed more to the types of voters Hoppe dismisses as “useless” than to the types of voters who used to spend time at country clubs and who today enjoy all the “Stuff White People Like,” reasons well known to Buchanan and Francis but apparently unknown to Hoppe, who seems to view the world entirely through the prism of the prejudices of the 19th-century Austrian haute bourgeoisie as codified in the writings of Ludwig von Mises.
Hoppe’s dismissal of “useless” working-class voters leads to the final problem with Hoppe’s talks—the difficulty Hoppe’s ideas pose for any serious movement to reform American immigration laws of the type long advocated by VDARE.com. As Steve Sailer and others have long noted there, the voters who are “useless” to Hoppe are the ones most harmed by mass immigration, and the voters Hoppe covets instead are members of an upper-middle class that views indifference to the negative consequences of mass immigration as something of a class marker. How can we hope to reform American immigration laws by sneering at those Americans most hurt by mass immigration and attacking the politicians who appeal to those voters?
More fundamentally, a belief that the government has the right to protect the nation by levying tariffs on foreign imports is consistent with a belief that the government has the right to protect the nation by halting mass immigration, whereas a belief in the free movement of goods across national borders tends to be linked to a belief in the free movement of people across national borders, borders many libertarians insist are as meaningless as the nations they demarcate. Calvin Coolidge was both an ardent protectionist and an opponent of mass immigration, who signed the Immigration Act of 1924, which effectively ended the Ellis Island immigration; Lyndon Johnson reversed Coolidge both by signing the Immigration Act of 1965 and by negotiating the Kennedy Round of GATT, which reduced American tariffs and began the long process of our deindustrialization. In the case of the 1996 campaign, as Francis noted in the Chronicles essay cited by Hoppe, Buchanan’s “support for curtailing, through a five-year moratorium, all immigration, legal and illegal” was “a main pillar of his formulation of cultural nationalism.” Indeed, Buchanan highlighted the need to curtail mass immigration in the speech announcing his candidacy and in the standard stump speech he gave regularly throughout the country, a stance that prompted sustained media attention when Buchanan declared “No way, Jose!” to illegal immigration and when he asserted on ABC that Englishmen would be easier for America to assimilate than Zulus. Since Hoppe’s denunciation of Buchanan and Francis in 1996, of course, Buchanan has authored two best-selling books making the case against mass immigration, just as Francis wrote column after column on the issue, and Chronicles has continued to run annual immigration issues.
And what have Hoppe’s fellow libertarians done on immigration since 1996? Of course, the majority of libertarians who never considered themselves paleolibertarians have continued beating the drums for open borders, but so have most of the erstwhile paleolibertarians. Lew Rockwell’s website has run a piece by Ryan McMaken denouncing “Anglo-Saxon” opposition to illegal immigration from Mexico and exulting that “Soon, Anglo-Saxon civilization will be but a footnote in history” and a piece by Robert Higgs denouncing the “hatred” behind opposition to mass immigration, describing as “morally irrelevant” the fact that illegal immigrants cross America’s border, and referring to the Mexican-American War as “the War of North American Invasion.” In 2006, Rockwell himself declared that “The best immigration reform is one that would provide neither impediments toward work for anyone or subsidies of any sort” and denouncing as “pointless and dangerous” any attempt to deport illegal immigrants.
Such articles are deeply rooted in the mainstream of libertarian thought. Indeed, in his 2010 speech, Hoppe asserted that the issue of immigration divided libertarians from conservatives within the John Randolph Club from its inception, a division that was overcome only by the supposed agreement that the resolution of immigration (and other issues) must be had “on the smallest level of social organization: on the level of families and of local communities.” If I thought that way about mass immigration, I wouldn’t be concerned at all, since my family hasn’t imported any immigrants, and my local community has been largely untouched by the mass immigration that followed in the wake of the Immigration Act of 1965. Instead, I am opposed to mass immigration for the same reason that I am opposed to free trade, because I am convinced that both are harming my country and my countrymen.
Such reasoning makes no sense to someone like Hoppe, who desires a “stateless natural order,” one in which there is “no clear-cut distinction between inlanders (domestic citizens) and foreigners” and who also feels that the economic argument in favor of free immigration is “irrefutable and correct” and that “State borders . . . are an unnatural institution.” It is true that, in his idealized world, Hoppe allows that some anarcho-capitalists might not want those who are what Hoppe terms “human trash” and “inferior people” on their property and should therefore be allowed to exclude them, but one anarcho-capitalist’s “human trash” is another anarcho-capitalist’s road to riches in the form of cheap labor. Hoppe, who bridled in 1996 at Buchanan’s criticism of “wealth” and “elites,” is ill-equipped to deal with immigration in the real world, where businesses seeking cheap labor have been a driving force behind mass immigration in the West for many decades. The way forward for immigration reform lies with the rooted patriotism of men like Buchanan and Francis, not with ideologues like Hoppe who are interested in the United States only insofar as it is willing to serve as a laboratory in which to test their ideas.
Entries(RSS)
"To establish basic principles before going on to discuss the terms of specific policies is not “winging it”: it is what all rational people must do in a serious discussion."
I could not agree more Mr. Fleming, and this is what I have been trying to get to. What are these specific policies? If there is a way to tell the difference between hooddwinkers and transnationals, what are you going to do about it as a president? Is this really the biggest problem facing us, do you leave the markets alone or do you issue more legislation to regulate them? Do you prohibit all international trade when it means the loss of domestic jobs? To achieve these goals then, how about the currency standards? And at some point you need to ask what exactly is it that you want to do, which and whose traditions do you want to preserve? Do you want people to be free to move around or you want them beholden to their region? Are you going to start a government program in order to educate them as to the morality, tradition, authority and hierarchy in order to reach your goals? If you don't have specific plans of this nature then I submit to you that you are "winging it".
"The notion that economics has proved the case against any form of protection is complete and utter nonsense. Economics, as a social science, cannot actually “prove anything". Fine let's not talk about proofs if this is an overriding objection but about what is desirable and correct. Aside for wanting something not to be true so that we call it complete and utter nonsense protectionism is nevertheless a seriously discredited notion among contemporary economists of all stripes. If you are against international trade, then how about interregional?. Same problems and disalocations arise. To put it another way how exactly are the protectionist barriers going to protect these traditions that we cherish so much? We may subscribe to the notion that Japanese protectionism made them rich ( which can be shown not to be correct), but did it really protect their traditions and there is a lot of literature in Japan that decries what happened. So what does that say about protectionism? Did the success of Japan make the US poor? I doubt this very much. Pareto optimalities, all kinds of other effects compensate for many of the dislocations. On another note, to ask why someone who does not have a business is not rich just does not make sense. Should we read Trump instead of Keynes then? Do we buy stocks of the transnationals when they make us money? In any case nobody is going to tell you how to become rich, just like Gates won't tell you about Windows and if he had had you would not given him the money 30 years ago. It is a vaild point to the extent that a policy maker has to make some sense of what he is going to do about the economy and Keynes or Hayek invarably have better answers then Trump depending on what we want to do. But what Paleos as economic policy makers would want to do at that point is not at all clear. As to markets and efficiency in South Carolina, I do not see a problem there. If as a paleo you wish to insert your own constraints into the mix you are free to do so. The fact that your friend wishes the market to decide does not stop you from making models that appeal to you where someone else decides. It does not disprove the usefulness of economics. This tendency of the many that wish that economics would just go away is astounding to me as much as it has been reocurring phenomonon as long as I can remember. Economics should not be an ideology. You do not have to accept Austrians if you do not like them, you can accept Keynes or whomever but there are choices that must be dealt with in the real world. It is about actions and decisions. it is about more and less, do we want guns or butter, do we want the cake or do we eat it. For whatever we want to do there are economic tools and the only requirement that I make for the Paleos is that we use sound economics and this does not imply using Austrians all the time or even at all.
"As for the free-trade delusion, Mr. Bailey apparently takes on faith the notion that at some time before the Fall or perhaps on the island of Atlantis, the ruling class did not control access to markets or charge a fee or combine to prevent perfect competition. But the economics of Neverneverland have nothing to do with real people".
Once again in closing I repeat that I have agreed for the sake of argument that there is no free trade. However again, there is such a thing as trade and consequences of trade are such that the same aspects of tradition, hierarchy, authority will be affected. This means that you need specific policies and situational "it depends" approaches are not goint to tell you anything or assert a correct choice. I would like to find out what these specific policies for Paleos are, but it looks like I am not going to get an answer.
A fine piece, Mr. Piatak. I used to support HHH in his struggles with the academy (and signed a petition online to this effect); but if the remarks by him quoted here are typical of his current policies, I'm bitterly disappointed in how he has turned out, particularly as regards the illegal immigration issue.
If Mr. Bailey would right briefer, more coherent, and more pertinent responses, he would find that people would pay closer attention. He might also consider putting in paragraph breaks. As it is, in trying to go over what he has written above, I find nothing he has not said in the past. Since he has not apparently read or understood the responses that have been made and insists on setting up Keynesian strawmen that are entirely irrelevant, further discussion is pointless. Why in the world should I wish to put forward a detailed trade policy. I am no more an expert in this than Mr. Bailey. I would have no influence on anyone, any more than Ron Paul or his son have an influence except on people who already agree with them. I am here to teach what I know, not pontificate on what does not interest me. It is precisely because Mr. Bailey does not have a hierarchy of value, that he wants to make trade issues so important.
Mr. Sanjay has missed the point of my joke. If economics and the study of markets is truly a science that can "prove" things--as opposed to showing general tendencies--then it should be possible to make much better market predictions over the short and long run than anyone has done. If Austrian School economics--calling it simply Austrian is something of an insult to the country--provided such knowledge, then one could predict that Misesians, for example could make more money on average than liberals, leftists, and conservatives. No one would deny that some libertarians have got rich, just as no one would deny that the Marxist Armand Hammer made a lot more money than most libertarians. The old wheeze, "if you so smart, why ain't you rich" should apply particularly to libertarian gurus and spokesmen. To say they are not businessmen is no kind of response when so many members of the middle class, myself included, are invested in the stock market or in real estate. And it is absurd to argue or even hint that money is not important to these people, when all they talk about from morning to night is money and why everyone should be permitted to make as much as he can, as if making money for the sake of money were not a trivial pursuit, unworthy of serious men. If money is all that really counts, then why not simply make it, spend it, and shut up about it? The idea that Hoppe and company know anything about or are even vaguely interersted in what philosophers would call the "good life" or "happiness" is fantastic. Libertarianism is rooted in materialism, hedonism, and the pursuit of money.
The only justification for such low interests is that one would gain great wealth and power that would enable a man to bid defiance to the world and live the way he wants to. Those who remember the original JRC can testify as to what sort of Misesians, on the whole, showed up. They looked like refugees from the LP--as indeed many were--a group that Murray once characterized as an assortment of foul-balls and grifters. I used to know one prominent libertarian politico--I rather liked him--but he seemed to move around the country following a girlfriend who actually had a job. Then there were the strange people who came wearing old jeans and undershirts with holes in them--they always wanted a scholarship. Now, it is true, most ideologues are weird, and libertarians are only a little weirder than the average ultra-traditionalist, though I will say this about the monarchists and ultra-trads I have met: most of them bathe regularly and know what a necktie is for. They also don't always ruin conversations with their smug assumption of superiority. Near the end of his life, Rothbard made a beautiful speech in which he more or less tried to justify the mistakes of his life--running after one set of weirdos (libertarian, new left) after another--and declared that in joining with us, he had come home where he belonged. I'l try to dig this one up.
Dr. Fleming, if it is rooted in "materialism, hedonism, and the pursuit of money", it doesn't explain much of Rothbard's hatred of "anti-bourgeois" intellectuals, of dishonesty, of get-rich-quick schemes, of choosing the present over one's children's future. Ralph Raico holds such similar views. In fact, sometimes I am surprised that libertarians hold many traditionalist prejudices, especially Raico, and scoff at modern culture. I truly have a hard time looking up any cosmopolitan libertarian.
One of Rothbard's books, "What Has Government Done To Our Money?" mentioned that inflationary policies by central banks have caused an erosion in honesty, because how central bankers inflate at the expense of everybody else, and when other people are burdened by inflation and see their money depreciating away, the less principled too see less of a value in honest living, and more in cheating everybody else, just like central bankers. As Rothbard argued, free society forces people to save for the future, and regard money as a means to an end and not an end in itself. Inflationism, an intrustion on free society, forces people to start living in the present. This view was fully challenged by John Maynard Keynes, who said that lack of consumer spending slows aggregate growth, and ordinary people must be forced to live in the present.
So I think one can appreciate what an unusual sandwich it is into which libertarians are stuck. On one hand, they have Keynesians rebuking libertarians for pro-saving, anti-spending views, and on the other hand, everybody else rebukes the Austrian School for being materialistic.
But that aside, I guess your points are correct on the shabby kind of characters that conference meeting libertarians are, and I have never met any of them personally. I would say that it rather reflects the life of being an intellectual - a person who produces ideas for living; an all input, no output person. Such people wouldn't get jobs in the private sector, and rather work in non-profit organizations run on donations. If they ever achieved the free society they wanted, they would have the lowest status in it. It's why I don't remotely envy them. I prefer the anti-intellectual small businessmen background of people like my own family, who scoff at academics, especially financial economists, who give their opinions on commercial life or human life without being a part of it.
In that respect, intellectuals are a bad class of people; some intellectuals are less worse than others and their opinions worth considering. I like the works of various intellectuals, but on the whole, the class of university academia are generally a cruel burden on human society nonetheless, from the British Marxists in 1920s Cambridge to today's Harvard faculty. (PS: I hope there aren't any public intellectuals here that I may have offended!)
Wait a second, I think the comments have been dragged off-topic, and it's partly my fault.
Just to get it back where it started - Hoppe's slandering of old friends is deplorable, and not the way good men should ever behave.
Class warfare is also rotten politics, but Hoppe goes the other way round and turns on the poor, starting a whole new class warfare. In this respect, he becomes just like Fabian socialists in the tradition of George Bernard Shaw, who had even more contempt for the poor. It's wrong.
Rothbard would have been a good man even if he had been a communist. There are other good men who regard themselves as libertarians, indeed many, but they are mostly practical men of business. Intellectuals are mostly, as you say, a bad lot. and they have been for centuries. I suppose the first really bad set of them were the brilliant and talented writers whom Lorenzo de'Medici collected around him, though some of them came right in the end. And, I would add again, it is not that libertarianism/liberalism is wrong about everything. On the contrary. moral responsibility, thrift, limited government, prudence, etc are fine if rather limited (and limiting) ideals. Conservative liberals (a large group since the Victorian Age) are an interesting lot because of their difficulty in combining liberal principles with their other moral and cultural and social convictions. I think that is the best class into which Rothbard can be fitted, and it is a brave group of men, including Fitzjames Stephen and HS Maine and perhaps Lecky.
I should explain that I have been intervening in Tom Piatak's discussion at great length, because Tom is on vacation and asked us to take the point for him.
"Class warfare is also rotten politics, but Hoppe goes the other way round and turns on the poor, starting a whole new class warfare."
He certainly could use more tact, but that point of view is refreshing in this day and age. In the west, anti-bourgeois thinking and idolization of the poor has become so fashionable that its become an excuse to forget all manners and good taste, lest you be labeled a 'snob'.
Since you brought up that point of Rothbard being a good man even if he were a communist, it allows me to ask a question of you.
You had said that you were an atheist as a young man, and later in life, you were studying Christian philosophy at length and considering yourself Christian.
It does make me wonder - as a young man, were you exposed to left-wing ideas, Dr. Fleming? Had you ever been sympathetic to such ideas, because of the forced exposure to it from school/college without ever seeing another point of view? Or did it happen that it never quite *clicked* with you from the moment you first heard them, and never really believed them?
I thought it was a question worth asking, because neoconservatives include a lot of former leftists, even ex-communists. Hoppe, the subject of this topic, is an ex-Marxist. So I wonder if today's "Old Right"-ists or traditional conservatives also include migrants from the Left. I sometimes think I am only a liberal, because my father insisted, when I was 14, that I read Henry Hazlitt's book, so that made me a permanent convert. I do think if I had read a leftist's book at that impressionable age, I may have remained one for years. Perhaps I wouldn't have been, because I may have ended up being innately revulsed by ideas anyway.
These are difficult kinds of questions to answer. Politics did not interest me at all. My interests, in descending order, were literature, philosophy, and history. Personally rebellious and contrarian, I usually opposed in a childish way whatever anyone tried to tell me. I did not like the way the world was going and always preferred the natural and primitive to the developed, the pre-modern to the modern, the antique to the new. I liked folk music, either the old-fashioned and formal singing of Richard Dyer Bennet and John Jacob Niles or the gritty untutored stuff, but I came to dislike the commercial leftist stuff that dominated the folk movement. I might have been drawn to leftism, had I not loathed do-gooders who liked to arrange other people's lives, and I might have become a libertarian, had I not met a few of them and been appalled at their self-indulged ignorance and their complete indifference to all the things that seem to make life worth living, friendship, beautiful women, music, good food and wine, fishing and hunting...It is a long list. In this vein, I think that science even in its most valid form can dull the imagination and deaden the heart, but the pseudo-sciences that culminate in the various ideologies of leftist sociology or libertarian economics are even more deleterious. Henry Hazlitt is a valuable anti-socialist writer but in the long run you will get more out of reading William Hazlitt, not one of my favorite essayists but he got some important things right occasionally and often wrote very well.
I am sorry my editing skills are not up to par, but I find it necessary to repeat myself because I feel that I am getting fillibustered, as everytime I make a post I get what amounts to an unintelligible answer. I have been asking in fact what Mr. Fleming's hierachy of value is but the answer is that I do not have it! I am asking him to explain his protectionist policy, not just international but domestic as well, will the government get bigger or smaller, but the answer is that I am setting up Keynsian strawmen! If Mr. Fleming cannot form a trade policy due to expertise issues then why is protectionism so important to him or how does he even know that it is important? we are supposed to side with Mr. Fleming against HHH not just on personal level but theory as well, but how can we if we have so little to work with? All schools of economic thought are to be considered wrong, the science of economics useless in fact, HHH is wrong, but we cannot show how we are right! I am therefore giving up on getting a straight answer from Mr. Fleming, but since I am seriously interested in why Paleos ( and I believed that I was one of them!) are so big on protectionism I would be most interested if someone else on this forum can give me a reasonable answer and carry a fair-minded discussion.
Mr. Bailey, I don't know if I can help you, for I think I am more familiar with Austrian Economics than Paleoconservatism, if such a thing exists. But I think the short answer is that protectionism is preferred in many cases. Why should the citizens of this nation, who along with their ancestors worked very hard to build up the capital stock of the nation, be forced to abide peacefully without compensation as the capital is exported wholesale to foreign nations and peoples?
Certainly arguments may be made that the capital is the private property of the capitalists, that some of the produced wealth returns in the form of cheap goods or profits for the shareholders, that American labor is overpriced, or that foreign peoples deserve economic growth as well. All these arguments may be made, and some of them are substantive, but the fact remains that if you export a large share of the capital and allow native industry to wither, or import foreign peoples to capture the remaining wage employment in this country, the resultant damage to this nation and its resident peoples will be excessive.
In any trade scheme some men will be winners, others not so much. This is the nature of our relations. Some men are better equipped or luckier than others. Under a fully protectionist scheme some men will earn more than they should, and perhaps the nation will enjoy less wealth than it would with less protection. But men, families, and communities will have more assurance that the investments of labor, love, and life that they have made over the years will not be stripped away forever without so much as a gentle thank you.
There are no simple formulas or economic policies that guarantee all men will live in satisfaction and civil harmony. Economic texts do not provide these answers. For answers to the Universal questions I suggest you look elsewhere. Protectionism is not the answer at all times and in all places. But it might help at this time, if only to stop the bleeding so people can get back on their feet.
This is just "FYI." I am not to judge due to lack of complete information. Paul Gottfried, at the end of the following speech at the PFS, mentions that the JRC broke up for "other" reasons: http://www.vimeo.com/12598372
@61. Thank you for your thoughtful answer Mr. Templeton. I have pretty much the same sentiments as far as the scenario you are describing is concernedand the noble cause of preventing the collapse of our way of life is most important . My point is that putting protectionist measures are bound to fail. Putting aside the countermeasures that will be surely applied, which is the trade war scenario (and which I believe usally ends in a draw), there is the inherent problem with capital, the problem being that once it is over there, it can neither make money here, nor can it be spent or make money over there. Or to put it differently, we will run out of money unless the money is lent back to us, which is exactly what has been happening. If these sovereign (and nonsovereign funds) decide not to lend this money back to us, but instead ask us to give it to them, we will most certainly oblige (how do you want it in $20, $100?) by sending a few Boeing 747s full of greenbacks back to them.
So how can we achieve what we want, the increased welfare and restore the position of those afflicted by outsourcing? Paradoxically, by lifting domestic protectionism. If we stop protecting and subsidizing housing, health care, pensions, insurance, financial services, education etc., all these industries where prices are inflated (perhaps 10 or 20 times of what they should be) the purchasing power of the middle class will get back to where it was supposed to be, while the lower wages will keep domestic industries competitive in relation to the outsourced industries. Of course all the previously protected domestic industries will suffer but would eventually adjust to a new equillibrium. The sovereign funds would be affected as well, as there would be strong pressure on them to get out of the that would rapidly start losing valuetreasuries and make investments in venture capital. Whether this scenario is politically feasible is the $64 question.
On a different note, once containerisation was introduced in shipping in the early eighties, which exponentially reduced shipping costs worldwide, it was all over as far as stopping goods from being sent from the lower wages parts of the world. The containers will always find their way to their destination regardless of how hard we try to keep them out.
Mr. Templeton, I suggest you look up the statistics which show that only $6 billion has been exported as capital to China in manufacturing. It has been established clearly enough by James K. Jackson. http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/RS21118.pdf
Several dozen times that money goes to Canada in manufacturing investment - Canada, where the manufacturing is still tiny compared to US.
I am sorry people of Chronicles Magazine, but you can't make things up. You just can't make things up.
I am amazed by all these arguments made on issues that never existed, and on facts and premises never established.
You can't make things up.
Stop making things up. Please.
Protectionism is not the answer at all times and in all places. But it might help at this time, if only to stop the bleeding so people can get back on their feet.-Neil
Now I recall, as a boy growing up in piedmont North Carolina, during the late 70's, when unemployment was very high, that all the mills were hiring. A man could find work in a mill where you'd have a pay check at the end of each week. If you were really strapped you could go cut some pulp wood and sell it to the local yard, that was usually enough to put some food on the table for your family. In such an order there was a sense of getting things done, some sort of pride about men that they carried with them. For certain there were sorry no goods about but there always has been. My point concerns the ability of men to make things/produce wealth and social cohesion.
There are no mills now. The pulp wood yards are closed so your fix of corn bread and butter milk aint getting met in that manner. The average high school graduate is confined to working some retail job, getting a local government job (usually DOT), working in "fast food" or bouncing about from odd job to odd job. The social cohesion in many rural or semi-rural/post industrial areas of the southeast has taken a beating. People have been knocked off their feet by the serpents call of cheap goods.
Neil's point remains strong. There will be no recovery until there is a shake up in the economic structure and that structure has been on its head since the mid 90's when the first measure of jobs began leaving for China and Mexico. The cheap credit has come to an end and those cheap goods are no longer going to be cheap. Measured against the jobs open to most of the public those goods are getting more expensive and when weighed against the massive growth in local and state government, both of which are the largest employers in all areas now, (unheard of years ago) it strikes me that a great sickness has fallen on the land.
Take a ride on I-85 from north Georgia to the Virginia/NC line (better yet jump off on the side roads). It close to a foreign army destroying the land when you see the shuttered mills and the towns which now all claim to have "historic" districts. Hwy 70 in western North Carolina from Asheville east toward Hickory is even worse, massive furniture plants closed and little towns wasting away. All the local chambers of commerce think a festival of some sort will save those towns but the fact remains that when people were working they didn't have time to worry about "historic" districts or saving their towns, they were too busy living and working.
McCallum
@64. Mr. sanjay, I cannot speak for Mr. Templeton, but I believe he is using the term capital loosely in the sense of the money part of it.
A few brief responses:
First, Mr. Bailey will either learn how to insert paragraphs or his posts will be removed. It is quite easy: simply insert two of the following combination: left angle (< )bracket br right angle bracket (>) (no spaces) at the end of the paragraph. I would write this out but it would not show up.
Second, it is pointless to speak of paleoconservatism. When a group of us coined and began using the term, mostly in jest, we intended no more than that we maintained our conservative principles and rejected neoconservatism. As both the neocons and we realized, this was not strictly true. While we did adhere to the moral, social, and cultural standards of the West, as defended by people like Eliot, Weaver, and Kirk, we put no stock in NR's fusionism-as I pointed out at the time--and, since the Cold War was clearly over, we were free to take on different enemies. At Chronicles we had been developing arguments on the "national question," as John O'Sullivan was later to call it. In matters of immigration, trade, foreign policy, and international government, we argued for policies based on the national interest rather than the interests of a particular class or interest group. For us, the opposition to imperialism was of a piece with our opposition to the United Nations, the WTO, unrestricted immigration, and the chimera of free trade.
Although we thought these principles were not only defensible but self-evidently true for normal people, we did regard them as elements of an ideology, nor did they yield automatic policy prescriptions. Differing circumstances will always affect decisions on real-world situations. For example, we argued for decentralized "federalist" polities and defended secession, and when Yugoslavia began breaking up, I cautiously argued that it would be better for Croatia and Slovenia to be independent, but that there were international rules on such a break-up--rules that Croatia did not adhere to and which Germany, backed later by the US ignored. In Bosnia, we argued that what was sauce for the Muslims should be sauce for the Serbs, namely, that historically and predominantly Serbian areas should be permitted to be independent or join Serbia. In Montenegro, we opposed independence, because it was a deal brokered by crooked international interests who had teamed up with the smugglers and crooks who ran the government. The historic Montenegrin identity they were prating about did not exist. In the case of Kosovo, where Serbs had been ethnically cleansed by the Albanian Muslim terrorists, we argued only that the Serbian government be left to handle the terrorists and defend a sacred homeland.
What we have found over the years is that our anti-ideology was turned into a "paleo" ideology by younger and poorly educated conservatives looking for a one-idea-fits all approach as stupid as libertarianism. Now, when we take positions based on fact and principle, we are denounced as traitors. I prefer not to use any term that gives a handle to light-witted youth looking for leaders and causes.
I wouldn't worry too much about anything Paul Gottfried says about the JRC. In the first place, he was not an insider. The club was founded by Murray and me and controlled exclusively by our organizations. There were only four or five people who made decisions, and neither PG nor Hoppe were among them. In the second, he is generally unreliable and self-serving. As someone who, when writing a book with Gottfried, grew so alarmed with his cavalier and egocentric approach to questions of historical fact that I had to take my name off a book I regarded as dishonest, I would recommend strongly against taking anything he says about his career cum grano salis.
Finally, the trade issue. I am not going to repeat all the arguments I and my colleagues have made in the past for the benefit of someone who has apparently not been reading them. I will say just this: that the issue of trade is not simple. Suppose we adopt, for the sake of argument, a position I do not entirely subscribe to, namely that the objective is a level playing field--to use one of PJB's slogans, fair trade and not free trade. It is not just a question of tariffs. When the major economic powers lowered and eliminated tariffs, they did not necessarily quit protecting their industries. They can do this by several means: dictatorships use slave labor to keep down costs; Third World states ignore all environmental concerns and regulations; subsidies are given to businesses; complex regulations can be passed that favor native industries; and last but by no means least, the adoption of "border-adjusted" value-added taxes has the effect of penalizing American imports and benefitting our competitors sales at home and their sales abroad.
A rational economic policy in the American interest should seek, at the very last, some sort of parity with our principal competitors, but no American government has made an attempt. Selective political moves are unwise and harmful. Bush's steel tariff, for example, probably hurt domestic manufacturers who use steel more than it helped the steel industry.
The only way to approach such questions, then, is to be sure of one's basic principles first and then be sure of the facts and move cautiously. One major objective, for those who wish to be politically active, is to do internally what we think we should do internationally. If we oppose global economic regulation--the new global economic order--perhaps we should also be working on undoing all the federal laws and court decisions that have made it impossible for local and state governments to protect local business, exclude chains, and discourage the economic centralization that robs us first of economic, then political liberty.
The difference would still be a minor one - he is speaking of businessmen offshoring or creating ventures abroad with their money, is he not?
That still does not change the central point that there is no such thing as Global Labour Arbitrage - Third World countries are poor investments for money, Third World countries get little foreign investment, and the "low wages" are still offset by high costs of training, skill development, and managerial development.
#68 was referred to Mr. Bailey.
#70. I think what Mr. Templeton is actually concerned with is the sovereign funds or rather what happens when they have the money and we don't. It is not being invested here but rather loaned to us so that we can continue consuming foreign products. The real doomsday scenario is what happens if the Chinese that go to New York on a Tuesday on the way to the treasuries auction decide that they are gonna have a flat tire instead. As far as our capital in investments overseas, you are dead on.
My point is not that American capital that financed textile development on the eastern seaboard or heavy manufacturing in the Ohio valley and Great Lakes Region was simply transferred to Indonesia or China to finance the same sort of development there. Undoubtably some of this transfer has occurred, but American capital will be invested where it earns the greatest return. American manufacturing has been to a great extent replaced by foreign manufacturing, but that does not mean that all foreign manufacturing is financed by American capitalists. A good share of American capital has been wasted on war.
The point is that the U.S. appears to be developing the sort of economy that is not consistent with the kind of life that many Americans value. A few notable features of this economy are increasing disparities in wage rates between skilled and unskilled labor, with an increasing portion of positions by number falling in the latter class; increasing shares of national income allotted to finance, insurance, and real estate; and the increasing importance of military spending, large scale government contracting, and federal, state, and local government employment.
Obviously, legislated protection of manufacturing and other industries will not solve all of these problems or turn back the clock. My point is not that protection policies are a panacea, but that they might be used profitably to help develop more wage and skill diversity in our local economies. Also, obviously, any measures should be considered carefully and applied judiciously. I do not claim that such policies will make America an earth shaking power once again, if anyone wants to go there. But it might forestall our entry into the Third World.
@67-5. And he oozes contempt for the REAL Americans.
Luckily, THAT person wasn't in the room so he felt free to say whatever he wanted to. Over at takimag I saw him whine like a little girl that what is left of his career was going to be ruined by writebackers.
His kind is like that. They're mouthy but when you get in their face they shriek like little girls. I was delighted when Wolf slapped him down.
#67
#67
An off topic remark; The break-up of Yugoslavia was a disaster engineered by post-modernist leftists in alliance with the elements of the Catholic Church and assorted Jihadists. It was completely against the interests of all the Southern Slavs concerned. it was also against the interests of the larger European community
The idea that we are going to protect mom and pop or someone's lifestyle through some type of government regulation or protectionism is absurd in the sense of the "fox guarding the chickenhouse." To reread authors who come up with these schemes is pointless and to propose that since these protectionist ideas are so self evident and wonderful that those who disagree must not have read them is laughable.
If Those who are affected by outsorcing and foreign competition have a lifestyle that they cherish and believe in, they will continue to foster it regardless of hardhips. In the old days there were draughts, famines and traditions were continued. To believe that somehow if we win elections we are going to be able to use the very culprit, which is the government to institute change through domestic or foreign protectionism, protectionism which I argue is ineffective to begin with, then we at best very naive.
The moral decay of this country may very well be irreversible and we can only hope for a Soviet Union type of a scenario. We are going to need both Gorbachevs and Sakharovs, but I fear it will be a lot worse and more violent.
Mr. Bailey appears to know as much about the Balkans as he does about economics and political theory. At Chronicles we covered the "wars of Yugoslav succession" in detail. Srdja Trikfkovic was our point man, but in the course of the past 20 years I visited the region more times than I can recall, spoke with, interviewed, and got to know many Serbian leaders as well as a number of Croat intellectuals, learned the language and gave papers at academic and political conferences, wrote a hurry-up book on Montenegro and was even requested to serve as an expert witness at the Milosevic trial. But what good is such knowledge and experience compared with the sublime idiocy of an all-explaining conspiracy theory? I think we have wasted enough time on these fatuities. If Mr. Bailey will not give his poor fingers a rest (they obviously are doing his thinking for him), he will find this site closed to him.
"was even requested to serve as an expert witness at the Milosevic trial."
You were what?!
Yes, I did not end up doing it because Milosevic fired his lawyer and then became ill. My testimony would have to do not with his real and fictive crimes but with the ideology of Serbian nationalism, which I had studied and on which I had presented a paper at the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts. I never met Milosevic, but I did know his wife's sister quite well. Several people who wrote for us did testify including Dr. Trifkovic--who has called for his ouster early on at some risk to himself--and I believe James Bissett. I was, I don't mind admitting it, relieved when I learned my appearance was postponed. The last thing I needed was to appear to be supporting a man I had detested but who was in fact getting railroaded. I do not claim to be an expert on the Balkans, though I do have a fairly wide range of experience there. In the past three years, I have been going to Athens rather than Belgrade, but I truly miss my once frequent trips to Serbia. I had the time of my life and learned more about politics in visits there than a whole lifetime in the US.
Mr. Fleming, I am very familiar with both your involvment as Well as Dr. Trifkovic's in the Yugoslav matter. Chronicles have done a lot better job than anyone in the US of covering the situation. Your insights were quite constructive. In defense of my post, I will say that the original Yugoslav idea was a noble one and it was destroyed by those who hated it. I believe all other explanations are false and promulgated by those who may have factual but do not have experiental knowledge of the Serbian/Yugoslav monarchy or the remnants of its civil society. These false views of the demise are formed under the influence of those Yugoslav natives who are considered by the monarchists as carpetbaggers and communist usurpers.
I apologize. I will stop posting on your site from now on, as you find my remarks fatuous and irritating. I am not surprised, as learned men often find it difficult to have their beliefs questioned by those who appear less educated or smart than themselves. I wish you well and I will continue reading the Chronicles.
Mr. Bailey, please forgive me if I have curt with you, as I believe I have been. What I ask you to do is to pause a moment before posting. It is not that you are wrong-headed but that you make sweeping generalizations that distract the argument. Sitting at a computer on a hot and humid day, I find I fire back far too rapidly. So, if you will pause to reflect, I shall be sure to pause before jumping all over you, especially now that you have learned to insert paragraph breaks. To show good faith, I shall answer your observation as I should have initially.
It is perfectly true that Germany, for geopolitical and economic reasons, and the powerful Croatian lobby (often supported by Hungarians and Germans) in the Vatican conspired to break up Yugoslavia, but the ineptitude and mismanagement of the Communist leadership was also an incentive, to say nothing of the personal ambitions and corruption of Croat and Slovene leaders. In Bosnia, of course, Muslim governments and Muslim money--backed by the vermin in the Clinton administration--played a part. But the Yugoslav project was fatally flawed from the beginning. The Serbs, victorious in WWI, wanted a Velika Srbija, a great (not greater!) to unite Serbs in the Balkans, while Croat intellectuals saw the Serbian state as their protector from Hungary (the more predatory partner in the Dual Monarchy). The King and PM were talked into the Yugoslav idea, but it did not have the support of a large majority of Croats, who turned to the anti-Yugoslav Peasant Party, with the result that the Croatian delegation to the parliament was secessionist from the first day. Then, instead of drawing up a federal plan, like the US constitution, they imposed a unitary state but, to please the Croats, they carved off big chunks of Serb-dominated land, the result of which was the massacre in Krajina and Slavonia. All in all, they could not have done a worse job. I agree that there was nobility in the project of unifying the Southern Slavs--though the Slovenes should have been left out because their language is separate--but the religious differences made a union impossible except along Swiss lines. Enforced unification of diverse peoples inspires unrest that justifies more centralized control that inspires uprisings that justify a police state. That is one major lesson we can all learn from the Yugoslav mess.
#79 Mr. Jack Baily,
Please don't remove yourself from discussions you want to engage in on this blog. It is a hard hitting blog because most of the posters believe in the truth and want to understand it and become more familiar with it just as you obviously do. There are of course some who simply want to disrupt and see their words in print but you do not seem at all to be of that type. Tom runs a good blog for a reason, he owns and operates it and takes pride in its content. He has tried to shut me down on several occassions for being rude and obnoxious but upon reflection, he was almost always correct. So don't take his suggestions personally or think that you are the only blogger he has had to discipline.(It does happen around people with a passion to know) On the other hand, this is a tough place to make a silly point, so sometimes it is good to take a break and come back in a day or two. Even Tom does that on occassion so it is not a sign of weakness as much as it is prudence when one is "virtually communicating" instead of conversing face to face. Ok, enough of this. Cheers
#62 by Remnant
Yes,and I suppose the undisclosed guy wanting all the power and glory of running the JRC was supposed to be that notorious outlaw and cantankerous fellow, Tom Fleming? I actually listened to the whole talk. The professor is astute in alot of things, especially political motives and the difference between serious men and some of their followers. He is, and of course remains, totally ignorant of things Roman Catholic which is what one would expect. And he of course is not the only one in today's political climate --including practicing Catholics.
Mr. Fleming, as far as Yugoslavia goes, I would add that it was not a flawed concept in the sense that it has been claimed and pushed by its enemies as artificial. Mismanaged perhaps.
Slovenia was an essential part of Yugoslavia. It held it together. Support for the monarchy was high. Furthermore the whole civil society escaped communist purges as they simply joined in with the communist party. When the new left took over the party in Slovenia, after Kardelj's death, the lobbying for independence started as their argument was that the Yugoslav communists party was not reformable.
MUch is being made of the Croat dissent. This too has been exaggerated. Dalmatia and Istria were pro-monarchy. So were large parts of Slavonia. Even with the great effort from abroad financed by Mussolini to create havoc, it was never neccessary to institute martial law in Cratian areas. There were many pro Yugoslav Croats. some of them members in the exiled wartime government have written about this.
Similar war memoirs from The Kingdom's army prisoner-of-war camps attest to the widespread dedication to the Yugoslav ideology.
Just like the Kingdom of Yugoslavia's existence was threatened by the foolish coup d'etat against Price Paul, inspired by the lingering sentiments espoused by the Serb radical party, Tito's Yugoslavia was threatened by the same resurgent sentiments of the Serb Radical Party.
Serbian and Yugoslavian Monarchy have fought the Radicals for almost all its existence, except for the first two decades of the last century.
In closing, I would say despite egregious incompetence of Serbian leader,s the blame for the fall should be sent to the outside enemies of Yugoslavia. While the northern parts of Yugoslavia had always had a vibrant civil society, the South was run by what amounts to tribes and tribal chieftains. These have been able to gain power in Croatia and Serbia at the time of the fall as well. the foreign intersts found willing allies in these structure and the result is the disaster that we have in the Balkans. None of these so-called states are funictional, all dependent on foreign aid that is exponentially higher than anything Yugoslavia every received.
The confict over Yugoslavia has been frozen and is onsly waiting for the right time to ignite. The only civilizing ideology is the Yugoslav ideology for that part of the world. The Yugoslavia hating should be rejected. The idea of It being an "artificial creation" is particularly nauseating. Yugoslavian ideology remains a noble cause that should be supported nonetheless as only through Yugoslavia can civil societies of either Croats or Serbs prevail over the tribes of Hercegovina, Bosnia and Montenegro.
I am apologize for the typos. The meesage inadvertently got sent too early.