I was pleased to see that my suggestion a while back that there should be a debate on the relationship between Libertarianism and foreign policy was taken up by some bloggers. Most recently by Brian Doss at the always thoughtful Catallarchy (The Problem with Libertarians Today). Some like David Beito considered this an invitation to debate the merits of the war in Iraq, but I was more concerned with the degree to which Libertarianism qua Libertarianism says anything about foreign policy. Because Libertarianism is essentially a philosophy of individual rights, I doubt it says much about what policies either individuals or collective institutions ought to pursue other than that they should not violate the rights of individuals in pursuing them.
Even if, as many Libertarians believe, governments themselves inherently violate rights, it does not follow (as some Libertarians appear to assume) that everything such an unjust institution does is a rights violation. Consider mail delivery. The post office may be an unjust monopoly (and unconstitutional to boot), but the letter carrier who coincidentally is walking up my driveway as I type this) is not violating my rights by delivering my mail. Likewise, even if the government of the United States is an unjust institution, this does not make everything (or anything) done by the U.S. Army a rights violation. This is why I found my friend Rod Long’s comment on David’s post unhelpful. One of the biggest errors made by Libertarian anarchists is assuming that because an institution is an unjust monopoly (because it confiscates its income by force and puts its competitors out of business by force), this makes everything such institutions do also unjust. The latter proposition simply does not follow from the former.
As for Iraq, there were a number of valid legal justifications for initiating the latest hostilities, but if I start to describe them here I will provoke a different discussion than I intend. Any such discussion would inevitably implicate international law or The Law of Nations, which I also do not believe follows from Libertarian first principles. Sometimes it appears to me that the governments of “nations” are simply assumed by Libertarians to have the same sorts of rights in the international sphere that Libertarians specifies for individual persons (which I think is what Rod Long is properly rejecting). Other times even these same Libertarians know better.
However legal or justified the war in Iraq may have been, though, this does not make its initiation good foreign policy (though I think it was). And this is my point. I do not think Libertarianism qua Libertarianism tells us much about what good foreign policy may be, any more than it tells us what good business or personal policies may be. As was well-expressed by Duncan Frissell at Technoptimist (in a post with which I have some disagreement):
Libertarianism qua libertarianism is only a political philosophy and lacks theories of esthetics, ethics, theology, epistemology, and personal behavior. Libertarians as individuals are perfectly free within their political philosophy to espouse white supremacy, pacifism, private ownership of nuclear weapons, Anglo-Catholicism, atheism, the worship of Shiva, vegetarianism, the Atkins’ Diet, grammatical prescriptivism, progressive education, etc.
This claim is central to my recent paper The Moral Foundations of Modern Libertarianism. I am leaving for Gummersbach, Germany tomorrow to lecture at the Europe & Liberty Summer Seminar sponsored by IES Europe, so I may not be able to respond as speedily as I might to any responses to this post that may appear.
Update: I am a little surprised that no one has caught this so far, but the claim to which I meant to allude was that the postal monopoly was unconstitutional. The power to establish a post office and post roads is explicitly granted in Article I of the Constitution. In contrast, the power to grant a legal monopoly to its post office, though included in the Articles of Confederation, was omitted. This is the position defended by Lysander Spooner in the essay to which I linked. Spooner himself created a commercially successful private postal delivery service called the American Mail Letter Company that was driven out of business by disparate prosecutions for violating the express mail statute. Spooner unsuccessfully sought a legal forum in which to contest the constitutionality of this grant of monopoly.
Comments are closed.