I am sad to claim that it is of a piece with Rothbard's thought.
So much did he detest "our enemy the[, specifically our own,] state" that he was full of denials, demurrals, justifications, excuses, and mitigations for all of its enemies, foreign and domestic, not excluding criminal ones, even when they actually harmed (life, limb, and) liberty to a greater degree than our own state did, even of our own citizens!
I call that a total loss of perspective. A great loss. Even more important, a number of American libertarian writers have followed him in this terrible error. This brings libertarianism into disrepute.
Not that statists left or right were ever going to like it.
Some left-wing statists definitely liked his anti-anti-Soviet stuff during the Cold War, but Rothbard's attempted alliances with such people were short-lived.
I was first introduced to Rothbard with his "Conceived In Liberty" four volume history of the colonies, and only gradually realized he was a Big Name in libertarian theoretical circles; I had not even known there were libertarian theoretical circles.
Some of his ideas appall me. He had a short rant about how moral and proper it was to deduct his New York City and state high taxes from his federal taxes, justifying it on the grounds the NYC was an expensive place to live. I don't remember now where this rant was, but it was only a paragraph or so, and I may have misremembered parts of it.
He also had an example of unenforceable contracts, a grandparent who promises to reimburse a granddaughter's tuition if she finishes the year, then reneges; Rothbard's justification for saying his promise was unenforceable is that he received nothing in return like must happen in a true contract.
And he supports protection agencies and private law, which I have never understood.
On the other hand, I had not known how ignorant he was of the USSR. It takes a special kind of willful ignorance to think the USSR was more benevolent and less harmful than the USA.
I suppose I should consider myself lucky to have been so ignorant of libertarian theorists for so long. Nothing I have read from Ayn Rand has impressed me either.
If Rothbard’s notion about unenforceable contracts were the law, then the contract would be sealed by the granddaughter ceremonially giving the grandfather one dollar.
Adding silly ceremonies or traps for the unwary to the law is not what libertarianism is for.
Exactly. I hate laws that are so easily gotten around. I can vaguely guess the original intention was to avoid one-sided rackets, but I can’t think of anything but paternalism was the real motive. “We won’t let anyone take advantage of our peasants” while they took advantage of them in far more nefarious but legal way.
And of course there’s always the possibility that I misunderstood what he was arguing for. It’s like those protection agencies — I don’t understand how anyone could think they make sense, but some awfully bright libertarians believe in them, so maybe I am just missing something.
They want to privatize everything, even the police. They forget that private anything depends on contracts being enforced, and while adjudication of contracts could be privatized, enforcement of judgements against armed and powerful “private police forces” cannot be.
For attempts to reason how this could be done by reputations, with special reference to ancient Norse civilization, see David Friedman. I think it doesn’t pass the laugh test, myself.
I think private police would work well, as independent private agencies. Merging police and insurance agencies and allowing every agency and court to have its own sets of laws is lunacy, government in all but name.
Having every private court system is lunacy only as to the litigants in a single case (counting criminal victims as litigants) who do not subscribe to the same court systems. There would have to be some “public” (government) as-neutral-as-possible adjudication for those cases. I may add that incompetents (ee.gg. children and lunatics) cannot subscribe to any.
Why should not the law of contract between co-religious so electing be established and administered by the religious courts of their denomination? Or the law merchant by courts merchant?
Insurance, ideally, is a bilaterally private unregulated contract to shift risk (for a fee) from someone relatively risk-averse to someone relatively risk-indifferent. I don’t see why it should not be combined with or separated from any other private contract acceptable to the contracting parties.
Okay. Let’s say a “private police” agency goes rogue, in violation of its contract, as it has every incentive to do because there’s more money in a “protection” racket. What stops them?
A possible response would be that terrorism would be rare enough that it wouldn't pay to worry about it. But that's trivially true, since you assert that terrorism is already rare enough not to worry about: https://www.betonit.ai/p/terrorism_and_ihtml.
You also might claim that terrorism in Switzerland is a response to US intervention in the Middle East (with Middle Eastern migrants generally being too dumb to effectively differentiate between the US and Switzerland). This seems possible, but hardly trivial.
The core argument, though, seems to be that US military actions could only theoretically be beneficial by preventing terrorism, but that not only do they not prevent it, they cause it.
The first point hardly seems trivial, though. Given the context of "military actions increas[ing] human freedom," for example, we could note that Kuwait and Iraq seem better off than they were under Saddam. And Afghanistan was far freer under the US than under the Taliban.
I don't think defending western Europe from aggressors was bad, and that part had very good results. The mistake was giving weaponry and stuff to one of the aggressors, the USSR. If the US said to them, "You invaded like a dozen countries with Germany before this war, we aren't helping you now" the result would have better.
If the USA hadn't been involved in WW2 then the Nazi's might well have conquered Europe to the Urals and Japan conquered China and Southeast Asia. I can't see how this could possibly be a superior outcome to actual historical events.
Stalin getting Eastern Europe is just the pragmatic result of "possession is 9/10th of the law". Is Bryan seriously proposing we should have initiated Churchill's Operation Unthinkable and started WW3?
I have a lot of beefs with the USA not supporting the KMT more after the wear, but USA involvement in WW2 didn't CAUSE communist takeover of China. Absent KMT victory the only way to prevent that outcome would be for imperial Japan to rule over China.
A Nazi-Soviet stalemate seems more likely than Nazi conquest up to the Urals.
Japanese rule over China would almost surely have been better than Mao. But that seems extremely unlikely given the demographics.
My main concern is that WWIII would have already happened if Nazi Germany or Imperial Japan had endured and gotten nuclear weapons. In the real world, we know we got lucky.
"A Nazi-Soviet stalemate seems more likely than Nazi conquest up to the Urals."
Don't know. "Stalemate" means decades long charnal house of death about where Barbarossa ended up as far as I can tell. Can you imagine the Soviets kicking out the Nazi's without lend/lease and the allied combined bomber offensive (about half of Nazi GDP went into fighting the bombers). Militarily Soviet deep battle relied entirely on American logistic supplies.
"Japanese rule over China would almost surely have been better than Mao."
Ordinarily I would choose any non-communist ruler over a communist, but Japanese rule over China was pretty fucking terrible. Based on their treatment of Korea I doubt it would have been better in peacetime.
As to their being unable to defeat China, Ichi-Go happened in 1944 when Japan was falling apart and it essentially destroyed the KMT. Best case scenario is kind of the same as your Russia scenario, a decades long guerrilla war that kills millions and destroys civilized life.
Moreover, it seems you have completely avoided my main point! USA joining WW2 didn't create Mao! Mao was already there. He won the civil war despite USA support of the KMT for reasons totally independent of USA joining WW2. If anything the USA joining earlier might have spared the KMT the catastrophic WW2 loses that allowed Mao to come back from the ashes of the long march.
Truth is USA involvement should have been earlier and harder. Should have prevented things getting as bad as they did. Communists took over Eurasia because of the power vacuum created by our absence was filled first by the fascists and then by the communists.
Setting aside pre-war, we should have throttled lend/lease in 43/44 (so the soviets didn't get into Eastern Europe, once they were there we weren't going to fight WW3 to dislodge them) and provided the KMT with more support (simply not asking them to stop their initial offensive to negotiate with Mao might have been enough). The problem in both cases is that the New Deal Democrats viewed communist as legitimate political actors because they were ideologically favorable to them, plus they didn't want the American casualties necessary to invade Europe before the German army was broken and were willing to let the Soviets buy Eastern Europe in blood.
BTW, this isn't a "USA doesn't get involved" scenario. But it is a "Nazies win against Russia" scenario.
TLDR: Germany eventually is defeated in the 1950s in a conflict that leaves large parts of Europe and some parts of Britain destroyed by WMDs. Anglo/Americans become more authoritarian states as a result of the traumas of war.
I asked Bryan in person about the Japanese being the least bad faction in China, and he justified his stance based on both Korea and Taiwan. My impression is that on Taiwan people don't have very negative feelings about the Japanese (the KMT takeover after they lost the civil war to Mao is what their pop culture highlights as the bad old days), whereas Koreans do. The Chinese definitely do, and I recall someone on twitter recently pointing out how amusing it is that other east asian countries are fine with modern Japan now that they're pacifist, whereas the Chinese are the only ones still acting like WW2 never ended (part of this was attributed to countries like Indonesia having much younger populations, who will thus place more weight on the present relative to the past).
It seems to me that Bryan is making some assertions.
1) the imperial Japan (not post war Japan) would have been better then whatever came post war.
2) that USA involvement in ww2 caused mao to take over China.
3) speculations about who would have “won” absent us intervention
On the first I think the assertion is debatable. Communism was terrible, but the imperial Japanese were also terrible. It’s hard to see Nazi rule or russia as being better then the ussr, and it’s hard to see imperial rule of china being better. It’s not a slam dunk as far as I’m concerned
2) I see absolutely no reason to believe USA involvement in ww2 cause mao to take power, as I outlined in an earlier post. I think this is the weakest of Bryan’s claims
3) on the third I can only offer my own views (elaborated previously) about the likely military outcome without us assistance. I think they range from axis victory to decades long genocidal guerilla war
I am sad to claim that it is of a piece with Rothbard's thought.
So much did he detest "our enemy the[, specifically our own,] state" that he was full of denials, demurrals, justifications, excuses, and mitigations for all of its enemies, foreign and domestic, not excluding criminal ones, even when they actually harmed (life, limb, and) liberty to a greater degree than our own state did, even of our own citizens!
I call that a total loss of perspective. A great loss. Even more important, a number of American libertarian writers have followed him in this terrible error. This brings libertarianism into disrepute.
Not that statists left or right were ever going to like it.
Some left-wing statists definitely liked his anti-anti-Soviet stuff during the Cold War, but Rothbard's attempted alliances with such people were short-lived.
I was first introduced to Rothbard with his "Conceived In Liberty" four volume history of the colonies, and only gradually realized he was a Big Name in libertarian theoretical circles; I had not even known there were libertarian theoretical circles.
Some of his ideas appall me. He had a short rant about how moral and proper it was to deduct his New York City and state high taxes from his federal taxes, justifying it on the grounds the NYC was an expensive place to live. I don't remember now where this rant was, but it was only a paragraph or so, and I may have misremembered parts of it.
He also had an example of unenforceable contracts, a grandparent who promises to reimburse a granddaughter's tuition if she finishes the year, then reneges; Rothbard's justification for saying his promise was unenforceable is that he received nothing in return like must happen in a true contract.
And he supports protection agencies and private law, which I have never understood.
On the other hand, I had not known how ignorant he was of the USSR. It takes a special kind of willful ignorance to think the USSR was more benevolent and less harmful than the USA.
I suppose I should consider myself lucky to have been so ignorant of libertarian theorists for so long. Nothing I have read from Ayn Rand has impressed me either.
But I still like his histories.
If Rothbard’s notion about unenforceable contracts were the law, then the contract would be sealed by the granddaughter ceremonially giving the grandfather one dollar.
Adding silly ceremonies or traps for the unwary to the law is not what libertarianism is for.
Exactly. I hate laws that are so easily gotten around. I can vaguely guess the original intention was to avoid one-sided rackets, but I can’t think of anything but paternalism was the real motive. “We won’t let anyone take advantage of our peasants” while they took advantage of them in far more nefarious but legal way.
And of course there’s always the possibility that I misunderstood what he was arguing for. It’s like those protection agencies — I don’t understand how anyone could think they make sense, but some awfully bright libertarians believe in them, so maybe I am just missing something.
They want to privatize everything, even the police. They forget that private anything depends on contracts being enforced, and while adjudication of contracts could be privatized, enforcement of judgements against armed and powerful “private police forces” cannot be.
For attempts to reason how this could be done by reputations, with special reference to ancient Norse civilization, see David Friedman. I think it doesn’t pass the laugh test, myself.
I think private police would work well, as independent private agencies. Merging police and insurance agencies and allowing every agency and court to have its own sets of laws is lunacy, government in all but name.
Having every private court system is lunacy only as to the litigants in a single case (counting criminal victims as litigants) who do not subscribe to the same court systems. There would have to be some “public” (government) as-neutral-as-possible adjudication for those cases. I may add that incompetents (ee.gg. children and lunatics) cannot subscribe to any.
Why should not the law of contract between co-religious so electing be established and administered by the religious courts of their denomination? Or the law merchant by courts merchant?
What about insurance, exactly?
Insurance, ideally, is a bilaterally private unregulated contract to shift risk (for a fee) from someone relatively risk-averse to someone relatively risk-indifferent. I don’t see why it should not be combined with or separated from any other private contract acceptable to the contracting parties.
Okay. Let’s say a “private police” agency goes rogue, in violation of its contract, as it has every incentive to do because there’s more money in a “protection” racket. What stops them?
Thanks for sharing
> In a similar vein, it seems likely that the U.S. wouldn’t have to worry about terrorism if it had simply stayed out of the Middle East altogether.
So simply adopting neutrality, like Switzerland, should do it.
https://www.foxnews.com/world/three-wounded-swiss-train-station-bladed-weapon-attack-phrase-allahu-akbar-allegedly-shouted
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_Lugano_stabbing
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_Morges_stabbing
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swissair_Flight_330
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/El_Al_Flight_432
A possible response would be that terrorism would be rare enough that it wouldn't pay to worry about it. But that's trivially true, since you assert that terrorism is already rare enough not to worry about: https://www.betonit.ai/p/terrorism_and_ihtml.
You also might claim that terrorism in Switzerland is a response to US intervention in the Middle East (with Middle Eastern migrants generally being too dumb to effectively differentiate between the US and Switzerland). This seems possible, but hardly trivial.
The core argument, though, seems to be that US military actions could only theoretically be beneficial by preventing terrorism, but that not only do they not prevent it, they cause it.
The first point hardly seems trivial, though. Given the context of "military actions increas[ing] human freedom," for example, we could note that Kuwait and Iraq seem better off than they were under Saddam. And Afghanistan was far freer under the US than under the Taliban.
I don't think defending western Europe from aggressors was bad, and that part had very good results. The mistake was giving weaponry and stuff to one of the aggressors, the USSR. If the US said to them, "You invaded like a dozen countries with Germany before this war, we aren't helping you now" the result would have better.
If the USA hadn't been involved in WW2 then the Nazi's might well have conquered Europe to the Urals and Japan conquered China and Southeast Asia. I can't see how this could possibly be a superior outcome to actual historical events.
Stalin getting Eastern Europe is just the pragmatic result of "possession is 9/10th of the law". Is Bryan seriously proposing we should have initiated Churchill's Operation Unthinkable and started WW3?
I have a lot of beefs with the USA not supporting the KMT more after the wear, but USA involvement in WW2 didn't CAUSE communist takeover of China. Absent KMT victory the only way to prevent that outcome would be for imperial Japan to rule over China.
Not a good outcome!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unit_731
A Nazi-Soviet stalemate seems more likely than Nazi conquest up to the Urals.
Japanese rule over China would almost surely have been better than Mao. But that seems extremely unlikely given the demographics.
My main concern is that WWIII would have already happened if Nazi Germany or Imperial Japan had endured and gotten nuclear weapons. In the real world, we know we got lucky.
"A Nazi-Soviet stalemate seems more likely than Nazi conquest up to the Urals."
Don't know. "Stalemate" means decades long charnal house of death about where Barbarossa ended up as far as I can tell. Can you imagine the Soviets kicking out the Nazi's without lend/lease and the allied combined bomber offensive (about half of Nazi GDP went into fighting the bombers). Militarily Soviet deep battle relied entirely on American logistic supplies.
"Japanese rule over China would almost surely have been better than Mao."
Ordinarily I would choose any non-communist ruler over a communist, but Japanese rule over China was pretty fucking terrible. Based on their treatment of Korea I doubt it would have been better in peacetime.
As to their being unable to defeat China, Ichi-Go happened in 1944 when Japan was falling apart and it essentially destroyed the KMT. Best case scenario is kind of the same as your Russia scenario, a decades long guerrilla war that kills millions and destroys civilized life.
Moreover, it seems you have completely avoided my main point! USA joining WW2 didn't create Mao! Mao was already there. He won the civil war despite USA support of the KMT for reasons totally independent of USA joining WW2. If anything the USA joining earlier might have spared the KMT the catastrophic WW2 loses that allowed Mao to come back from the ashes of the long march.
Truth is USA involvement should have been earlier and harder. Should have prevented things getting as bad as they did. Communists took over Eurasia because of the power vacuum created by our absence was filled first by the fascists and then by the communists.
Setting aside pre-war, we should have throttled lend/lease in 43/44 (so the soviets didn't get into Eastern Europe, once they were there we weren't going to fight WW3 to dislodge them) and provided the KMT with more support (simply not asking them to stop their initial offensive to negotiate with Mao might have been enough). The problem in both cases is that the New Deal Democrats viewed communist as legitimate political actors because they were ideologically favorable to them, plus they didn't want the American casualties necessary to invade Europe before the German army was broken and were willing to let the Soviets buy Eastern Europe in blood.
BTW, this isn't a "USA doesn't get involved" scenario. But it is a "Nazies win against Russia" scenario.
https://www.amazon.com/Festung-Europa-Anglo-American-Nazi-War-ebook/dp/B015URFGEC
TLDR: Germany eventually is defeated in the 1950s in a conflict that leaves large parts of Europe and some parts of Britain destroyed by WMDs. Anglo/Americans become more authoritarian states as a result of the traumas of war.
I asked Bryan in person about the Japanese being the least bad faction in China, and he justified his stance based on both Korea and Taiwan. My impression is that on Taiwan people don't have very negative feelings about the Japanese (the KMT takeover after they lost the civil war to Mao is what their pop culture highlights as the bad old days), whereas Koreans do. The Chinese definitely do, and I recall someone on twitter recently pointing out how amusing it is that other east asian countries are fine with modern Japan now that they're pacifist, whereas the Chinese are the only ones still acting like WW2 never ended (part of this was attributed to countries like Indonesia having much younger populations, who will thus place more weight on the present relative to the past).
Let’s clarify the assertions.
It seems to me that Bryan is making some assertions.
1) the imperial Japan (not post war Japan) would have been better then whatever came post war.
2) that USA involvement in ww2 caused mao to take over China.
3) speculations about who would have “won” absent us intervention
On the first I think the assertion is debatable. Communism was terrible, but the imperial Japanese were also terrible. It’s hard to see Nazi rule or russia as being better then the ussr, and it’s hard to see imperial rule of china being better. It’s not a slam dunk as far as I’m concerned
2) I see absolutely no reason to believe USA involvement in ww2 cause mao to take power, as I outlined in an earlier post. I think this is the weakest of Bryan’s claims
3) on the third I can only offer my own views (elaborated previously) about the likely military outcome without us assistance. I think they range from axis victory to decades long genocidal guerilla war