TGIF: "America First" Need Not Be Antiwar

Today's Trump-inspired "America First" faction cannot be counted on to be consistently noninterventionist and antiwar. That it may lean that way because its chief rival faction is so enthusiastic about foreign adventurism is hardly a firm assurance that it will remain antiwar in the future.

We must beware of the assumption that an interventionist foreign policy is, in contrast to America First, by nature "Any Country But America First." Admittedly, advocates of U.S. foreign adventurism often defend their policy choices in terms of the benefits to another population. But that's not all they do. They also typically invoke the security interests of the American people. It's a small world, after all, they say, and what protects others also protects us. How often have you heard interventionists agitate for war solely on behalf of foreigners? Sure, national self-sacrifice might not be good politics, but that doesn't mean that people of the interventionist mindset don't mean what they say.

My point is not that they are right, but only that they, or most of them, are sincere (though misguided). I doubt if George W. Bush's disastrous invasion of Iraq was motivated solely by regard for the Iraqis or Israelis.  Not was Barack Obama's bombing and regime change in Libya carried out on behalf of the Libyan people only. In both cases the key policymakers and their supporters believed that these actions were also good for the American people, who had been told for decades that Saddam Hussein and Muammar Qaddafi threatened them. The same can be said about the people who gave us the war in Vietnam. This is not to dismiss the malign influence of dishonest people who simply enjoy exercising power or who will profit from selling weapons to the government.  But I am suspicious of such single-factor explanations.

If I'm right about this, we must ask what today's America Firsterism is defined in contrast to. Aren't the two main competing approaches to foreign policy in reality both America first, although one may be unilateralist and the other multilateralist? One might respond that a true America Firster considers only the interests of America and no one else. But is that really such a big difference? Perhaps the difference is that American Firsters would want to see immediate benefits for Americans from intervention, while the neoconservatives and humanitarian interventionists are willing to wait a little longer even if foreigners would benefit sooner. But now we're quibbling about time preferences among the interventionists.

Now let's talk about Donald Trump. (I wish we didn't have to.) Trump is regarded as the architect of today's America First faction, although I don't think he used the phrase (if he's used it at all) until critics smeared him with it. While Trump fans boast that unlike his two immediate predecessors, he started no new wars, I would caution against confidence that Trumpism equals noninterventionism. First, he didn't end any wars either, and he chose to keep American troops in key areas of Syria, namely, where the oil and wheat fields are. (They're still there.) Did he end any of America's covert wars? Or stop helping Saudi Arabia from making war on Yemen? Or refuse to send lethal aid to Ukraine as Obama had done? No, he did not.

Moreover, he might have gotten us into new wars, with China and Iran, for example. He put tariffs on  Chinese imports, harming American consumers and intending to harm Chinese businesses. Trade wars can lead to other forms of warfare. Regarding Iran, Trump tore up Obama's so-called nuclear deal (Iran wasn't making a bomb) and reimposed economic sanctions. He ordered the assassination of a major Iranian military/political leader. No doubt he continued the covert and proxy war against Iran that the U.S. and Israeli governments have conducted for years. Finally, he reportedly nearly attacked Iran as his term drew to a close. It looks like we avoided a new war thanks only to contingent circumstances. Why should we be confident about a new Trump term?

Right-wing populists, like their left-wing counterparts, seem to oppose the establishment's foreign policy mostly because it consumes tax money they want the government to spend on domestic projects. That's hardly comforting to anyone who wants the government to do less and thereby consume far fewer scarce resources, which after all are produced privately.

Much more could be said against America First, for example,  that the term national interest has long been a cover for collectivism and coercion. America First is no guarantee of nonintervention. What we need is a commitment not to America First but to individual liberty first.

TGIF: Foreign Policy Matters

In an extra special way, foreign policy matters crucially to champions of individual liberty. Not that it doesn't matter to other people too -- just not in all the same ways. Anyone who understands the importance of keeping government power strictly limited in domestic matters (if such power must exist at all) will also grasp the paramount importance of constraining government power abroad. They're cut from the same cloth.

This is obvious to libertarians, but not necessarily to others. When Randolph Bourne wrote that "war is the health of the state," he expected his readers to understand that this is a bad thing because the state is dangerous. But do most people know that? For neoconservatives and humanitarian interventionists, war being the health of the state is a feature, not a bug.

I think it was Richard Cobden, the 19th-century British free trader, peace activist, anti-imperialist, and member of Parliament, who demanded, "No foreign politics." He meant that the government should be too busy dismantling power at home to engage in deadly balance-of-power intrigue abroad. In America a century later, Felix Morley, the anti-interventionist and pro-market newspaper editor, said in opposing the advocates of war and central bureaucracy that politics will stop at the water's edge only when policy stops at the water's edge, which he favored.

War naturally repulses individuals because -- obviously -- it kills and disables people, most atrociously, noncombatants. It's so obviously repulsive that many soldiers have to be turned into killers during training. Another count against war is that it encourages a self-destructive, indiscriminate, and collective hatred of foreigners and even local individuals who are invidiously identified with the designated "enemy." (Russian athletes and even long-dead Russian composers are targets of hostility these days.)

But those who understand that full individual liberty is a necessity -- and not a mere luxury -- include another count in the indictment against war. It inevitably fosters the general growth of government power, which then infects all aspects of life and society. That doesn't happen all at once, but it sets in motion a deadly process that menaces everything in its path unless it is stopped. Few things approach war fever in this regard. (A pandemic and a major economic crisis can have similar effects.)

War is a great way to instill the "governmental habit": it powerfully encourages people to think that the state is indispensable for all sorts of problems -- including the control of "disinformation." F. A. Hayek wrote The Road to Serdom in 1944 because World War II had people thinking that if central planning worked in wartime, it ought to work in peacetime too. (The phrase governmental habit is from economic historian Jonathan R. T. Hughes. Hughes wasn't writing about foreign policy; in that regard, see Robert Higgs's Crisis and Leviathan.)

Just think about this century. Without the wars of the last 20 years, it would have been tougher for the government to have gotten away with its frightening surveillance powers, which have no doubt spread to matters other than terrorism. People will say it was a response to the horrific 9-11 attacks, but those must be seen out of context. While the attacks were atrocities, they did not come out of the blue. The U.S. government was hardly minding its own business before 2001. Rather, it had been fighting proxy, covert, and even overt wars in the Middle East killing thousands of people far from home.

Surveillance is not the only consequence of a belligerent foreign policy. Let's not forget the huge monetary price tag, which has to be handled through taxation and, less visibly, borrowing, followed by inflationary monetization, an implicit form of taxation. Other burdens on people's freedom include economic regulation, trade barriers through sanctions and tariffs, the militarization of local police departments, and the corruption of the news media. It's said that the first casualty of war is truth. (Noninterventionist Sen. Hiram Johnson said that in 1917.) War and government lying go hand in hand.

An especially insidious thing about foreign policy is that critics can be silenced by the war party's invoking of state secrets. The classified document is the ace up the sleeve. This doesn't happen in domestic policy. But it happens all the time in foreign policy -- which is why we should be grateful to Daniel Ellsberg (who died the other day, sad to say), Chelsea Manning, Edward Snowden, Julian Assange, and other whistle-blowers. Naturally, the government treats them brutally.

War is also useful to politicians in taking people's minds off other government-caused problems. Shakespeare showed that he understood this when, in Henry IV, Part II, he had the king tell his son, "Be it thy course to busy giddy minds with foreign quarrels, that action, hence borne out, may waste the memory of the former days."

Foreign intervention, covert war, and open war are poison to a society that aspires to be free. That's another reason to say no to interventionism.

TGIF: Markets Clean Up

Donald Boudreaux, a professor of economics at George Mason University, has been a great defender of individual liberty for a long time. One of his favorite projects is pointing out how innovative and usually unnewsworthy market activity, to the extent that government keeps out of the way, increasingly helps us to live in cleaner, healthier surroundings. In other words, if "the environment" matters for human well-being -- and it certainly does -- the freer that markets are, that is, the freer that we are, the better for everyone. Freedom and the wealth it generates on net make our world better.

This has been known for a long time, but many people have never learned it. (Disclosure: Boudreaux hired me to edit The Freeman magazine in the late 1990s when he became president of the Foundation for Economic Education. Working for him was a pleasure.)

I should stop there and let Boudreaux explain what he means by the environment. It's not immediately obvious. He writes that

the relevant environment for humanity is not exclusively the outdoor and often-distant environment that we think of today when we encounter this word. Humans’ environment includes more than just the likes of the outdoor air that we breathe, the condition of the oceans and of far-away tundra, and the average temperature of the globe; humans’ environment includes also the cleanliness of the buildings in which we live, of the furniture on which we sit and sleep, of the clothing that we wear, and of the foods that we eat.

By implication, the world was pretty dirty before markets prevailed in the West. Just for example; think of all that horse manure, not to mention those rotting equine carcasses in the sometimes-dusty-sometimes-muddy streets before oil and the internal-combustion engine rescued us. Most cases are not as dramatic but are just as important.

Boudreaux explains that nine years ago he began a feature on his blog, Cafe Hayek, that he called "Cleaned by Capitalism." He writes, "Each post describes – and is typically accompanied by a photograph of –  an affordable and familiar modern good that makes humans’ immediate environment cleaner, safer, and more pleasant. Each of these goods is made available to the masses by innovative, competitive markets."

Keep in mind that the spread of at least semi-free markets made mass production of clothing and other basic household goods a feature of everyday life for the first time in history. Before that, production was for the aristocracy only. The rest of the people made do with a paltry number of homemade goods. That was the case for millennia.

Boudreaux wants to do more than broaden the definition of the word environment. As noted, he wants to illustrate "the practically countless ways that innovative capitalist markets cleanse our personal environments of filth and perils that pose a far greater and more immediate threat to us than do global warming and the other the environmental conditions that are today regularly featured in the news." (There's plenty of evidence that catastrophic warming or climate change is not happening. Look up the writings or YouTube videos of Stephen Koonin, who was a top energy physicist in the Obama administration.)

And, further, Boudreaux wants to

encourage readers to understand that, while capitalist production does indeed emit pollutants into the air and water, it also – and in the process – produces goods many of which make our everyday lives less polluted. Whatever are the costs of the "seen" environmental effects of industrial production – effects such as carbon emissions and the risk of oil spills – these effects must be weighed against the benefits, including the unseen environmental benefits, of the very industrial activities that have as a by-product these "seen" environmental effects.

Here Boudreaux reminds me of Julian Simon, the late economist who documented how much richer and cleaner the world had become because human beings ("the ultimate resource") are intelligent and enterprising. (See Simon's classics, The Ultimate Resource II and The State of Humanity.) He's also making a point that the philosopher Alex Epstein makes online and in many writings. (See Fossil Future.)

"There’s no question," Boudreaux winds up writing, "that the environment in which modern humans live is immeasurably cleaner, safer, and more pleasant than was the filthy and dangerous environment in which all of our pre-industrial ancestors lived." Amen.

But stay tuned. Boudreaux isn't resting on his laurels. He has promised to start a new series on his blog: "Soiled by Socialism" and is soliciting reader help in finding examples. He doesn't mean just socialism in other countries. See his article for a preview.

Additional reading: Saving the Environment for a Profit, Victorian-Style, by Pierre Desrochers, The Freeman, May 2003.

TGIF: Condemning Tyranny Abroad and War

Can foreign-policy noninterventionists publicly criticize foreign tyrannies without giving credence to the war party? Yes -- if they try. At least I hope so. Being a noninterventionist does not require agnosticism about, much less approval of, despotic regimes.

U.S. war, of course, threatens the liberty and lives of Americans, not to mention foreigners. That's why Randolph Bourne wrote, "War is the health of the state." When private individuals condemn tyranny abroad and U.S. war against it, they are pursuing the same cause.

That many people who denounce tyranny in Russia, China, and elsewhere are enthusiasts for U.S.-led war (or proxy war) is no reason to assume that every American opponent of foreign tyranny also favors war. Principled noninterventionism must not appear to whitewash despicable regimes for the sake of damping war fever (or any other reason). For one thing, that would imply that war against acknowledged tyrannies would be good -- which it would not. Noninterventionism stands on its own merits, whatever the nature of the state's imagined threat du jour.

So one can oppose the U.S. war party while denouncing, among others, the regimes of Russia, China, Iran, North Korea, Cuba, and Venezuela. The oppression of their domestic populations, China's threat to Taiwan and Hong Kong, and Russia's war on Ukraine should not be played down because the war party also denounces them. That U.S. policymakers have made things worse through economic sanctions and other provocations -- like the expansion of NATO and the instigation of coups -- is no excuse for giving those atrocious regimes a pass. Bad regimes don't become good because American politicians also do wrong. 

What prompts these thoughts is a man named Jimmy Lai, who just won the Cato Institute's Milton Friedman Prize for Advancing Liberty. Lai, a 75-year-old Hong Kong businessman-turned-pro-liberty-publisher/activist, is in prison and faces more charges, having been oppressed by the Chinese government for his pro-freedom activities. Lai is the most famous example of China's attempt to crush the individual, but he's far from the only one.

His story is inspiring as well as heartbreaking. (See the movie "The Hong Konger: Jimmy Lai's Extraordinary Struggle for Freedom.") Born poor in China in 1947, he escaped to Hong Kong before he was a teenager. He worked in a factory and eventually started his own apparel manufacturer and retail chain, Giordano, which has been a huge success.

While until 1997 Hong Kong was been a British colony without democratic institutions, it largely had a free market and other classical liberal features. Milton Friedman celebrated its essentially laissez-faire market system in his television series, Free to Choose. Because of this freedom, which included the rule of law as well as freedom of speech and press, Hong Kong it went from very poor after World War II to very rich in short order. Bear in mind that Hong Kong has no resources: even drinking water has to be imported. But it had enterprising free people, and markets, including free trade with the world.

A better demonstration of the market in action is hard to imagine. But Hong Kong's future had a dark cloud over it: the Chinese communist government.

In 1997 the British relinquished control of Hong Kong to China under the terms of the 99-year lease Great Britain and China had signed. As part of the turnover, the Chinese communist government agreed to respect Hong Kong's autonomy for 50 years, but many doubted that the Chinese government would leave Hong Kong alone before or after 2047. It didn't keep hands off for long.

That government offered an ominous preview of the future on mainland China eight years before the British turned over Hong Kong: the horrific violence against pro-democracy demonstrators in Beijing's Tiananmen Square in 1989. This was a decade after had China significantly liberalized economic, but not political, activity. One-party rule prevailed, and dissent was not tolerated.

As a result of the violence, according to the Cato announcement, "Lai founded Next Media (which became Next Digital in 2015) and launched Next magazine. Next became the top news magazine in Hong Kong for over 30 years." Among other claims to fame, "it was also known for its strong advocacy of free markets, lower regulation, and economic choice in all matters."

Lai's promotion of freedom, which he says was inspired by F. A. Hayek's The Road to Serfdom, started to get him in trouble. "Following a column in the magazine in 1994, in which Lai told then Chinese Prime Minister Li Peng to 'drop dead,' China began to force the closures of branches of Giordano on the mainland. Lai sold his share of that company and in 1995 launched Apple Daily, which was a combination of tabloid journalism, democracy advocacy, and a loud and clear free-market message."

That newspaper became a much-read paper, which the Chinese government would eventually shut down as it tightened the screws on Lai.

In 2014 Lai's participation in pro-democracy demonstrations got him arrested. He further irritated China's rulers five years later when on a  visit to the United States he met with high-profile government officials. Perhaps he should have skipped that part of the trip. Past U.S. government meddling in many countries has made it too easy for repressive governments to smear dissidents as foreign agents.

Cato continues:

His clashes with authorities intensified sharply in 2019, especially after the July 2020 enactment of a sweeping Chinese national security law that is now expanding mainland China’s suppression of the Hong Kong people.

Lai was arrested on February 28, 2020, and again on April 18 for alleged participation in unlawful demonstrations the previous year. Police arrested him again on August 10, 2020, for alleged collusion with foreign powers. He was arrested again and denied bail on December 3 after being charged with fraud. He was formally charged under China’s national security law on December 11.

Libertarians know how so-called national security laws can empower any government to get away with all manner of repression.

Lai was granted bail on highly restrictive terms on December 23, only to have bail revoked on December 31. Subsequent applications for bail under the national security law were denied on the grounds that he might commit further offenses. Lai was arrested again on February 17, 2021, while already in prison for allegedly helping 12 fugitives in their failed attempt to escape Hong Kong for Taiwan.

The Chinese government threw nearly everything it had at him, but all reports say that it has not broken his spirit.

On April 16, 2021, Lai was sentenced to 14 months in prison for the alleged organization of, and participation in, two unauthorized marches in 2019. In December 2022, Lai was sentenced to five years in prison for a lease violation that was then elevated to a fraud charge and subsequently investigated by China’s national security police, prosecuted by a national security prosecutor, and tried by a national security judge. A conviction in the ongoing national security case, scheduled for trial in September 2023, could result in a sentence of life in prison. [Emphasis added.]

Lai could have left Hong Kong when his troubles began, as some of his associates had done. He chose to stay and fight for the freedom of Hong Kong. That takes courage few people have.

TGIF: Immigration and Liberty

Forbidding freedom of movement to aspiring migrants strikes at the liberty not only of those individuals but also of citizens and legal residents of the United States. That's the way it is with immigration. Indeed, that's the way it is with freedom. The government can't violate the freedom of some peaceful people without also violating the freedom of others.

Ilya Somin, who teaches law at George Mason University and is a constitutional scholar with the Cato Institute, makes this point in "Three Constitutional Issues Libertarians Should Make Their Own." (The other two issues his title refers to are zoning and racial profiling.) Somin also wrote the book Free to Move: Foot Voting, Migration, and Political Freedom.

"Immigration restrictions," he writes, "massively restrict liberty and degrade human welfare. By barring entry to hundreds of thousands of people who seek freedom and opportunity in the United States, the federal government massively restricts the liberty of would‐​be immigrants and American citizens alike."

The harm to aspiring migrants is obvious. People seeking to escape crushing poverty and/or oppression are denied the freedom to move to a safer and more productive place. They are condemned to deprivation, misery, and pain at the hands of the government and gangs. (The U.S. war on drug makers and merchants in Latin America is the big reason for this.) By what right are they condemned? "Legal" immigration is more of a theoretical fiction than a real thing. Somin writes:

In theory, they can join the “line” and wait to enter legally. But for most, that line is either decades‐​long or nonexistent. And for the most part, these exclusions are based on arbitrary circumstances of parentage and place of birth, of a kind libertarians and others in the liberal political tradition consistently reject in other contexts.

He goes on: "Less widely appreciated, even by many libertarians, is the massive negative effect of immigration restrictions on the liberty of current American citizens." We don't usually think of immigration this way. (Political philosopher Chandran Kukathas does.) But every person represents an American's opportunity for gains from trade, friendship, and more intimate relationships, all the things that promote flourishing. Immigration controls control Americans too. As Somin writes:

Immigration restrictions bar millions of Americans from engaging in economic and social transactions with potential immigrants. It closes off Americans from hiring immigrant workers, getting jobs at businesses founded by immigrants (who establish such enterprises at higher rates than native-born citizens), renting property to immigrants, and benefiting from scientific and economic innovations to which immigrants also contribute at higher rates than natives.

Those who lament the government-made mess at the border have never understood that constructive responses to the new potential employees, buyers, tenants, etc. would privately and spontaneously arise if border crossing was legal.

Somin adds that "No other current U.S. government policy restricts liberty more than immigration exclusion does—and that’s true even if we focus solely on the liberty of native‐​born citizens, especially economic freedoms."

The prevention of gains from trade has profound and negative consequences for the production of wealth. Somin: "Economists estimate that free migration throughout the world would double global domestic product. That’s an enormous chunk of lost wealth for immigrants and native‐​born citizens alike."

Think of the abundance of goods, the new things, and the low prices that we're all missing out on! (See Bryan Caplan's Open Borders for details.)

Somin also sees constitutional problems with the restrictions that he laments has been neglected by even most libertarian legal scholars (including himself), not to mention others, such as conservatives, who claim to be staunch constitutionalists. "It’s far from clear," he writes, "that the original meaning of the Constitution even gives the federal government a general power to restrict immigration in the first place."

Nothing in the text specifically grants Congress or the president such authority, and leading Founding Fathers—including James Madison—argued that no such power existed. It took more than a century for the Supreme Court to rule—in the 1889 Chinese Exclusion Case—that the federal government does in fact have this unenumerated power. And that decision is based on highly dubious reasoning and tinged with racism.

Somin does not foresee an imminent overturning of the ruling, but he would like to see assaults on "extensions of that ruling that have largely immunized immigration restrictions from constitutional constraints that apply to virtually every type of government policy." For example:

Immigration detention and deportation proceed with far weaker due process protections than other severe deprivations of liberty. Due process is so lacking in the system that Immigration and Customs Enforcement and other agencies have detained and sometimes even deported thousands of American citizens before they figured out their error. Such detention with little or no due process would not be tolerated elsewhere.

But do "illegal" immigrants have rights supposedly protected by the Constitution? Somin replies: "A few constitutional rights are explicitly confined to U.S. citizens. But the vast majority are phrased as general constraints on government power, and protect citizens and noncitizens alike." Thus, "[t]he exemption of immigration restrictions from many normal constitutional constraints on government power has no basis in the text or original meaning of the Constitution."

So he wants an end to the many double standards. That "would curtail many of the worst abuses of the current migration regime, and perhaps set the stage for further progress. Even incremental improvement could make the difference between freedom and oppression for many thousands of people."

Hear, hear!