TGIF: The US Empire's 72-Year War on Iran

The likely temporary Israel-Iran ceasefire notwithstanding, if you need proof of how despicable Donald Trump is, consider this:

When asked last week if he would ask Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu to stop bombing Iran, which had already said it would stop retaliating for Israeli attacks, Trump said, “I think it’s very hard to make that request right now. If somebody is winning, it’s a little bit harder to do that [than] if somebody’s losing. But we’re ready, willing and able, and we’ve been speaking to Iran. Israel is doing well, in terms of war, and… Iran is doing less well. It’s a little bit hard to get somebody to stop.”

Of course, Trump could have done more than request. He could have told Netanyahu that the transfer of American tax money, bombs, missiles, planes, arms, and spare parts would end at once if he did not stop the war. Trump did not do that. Instead, he made light of the question. That's despicable.

To say the least, Trump has a thing about Iran. That is likely explained in part by the 1979 Islamic revolution, which overthrew the American- and Israeli-backed dictator-monarch, and the taking of hostages in the American embassy. However, history did not begin in 1979. The U.S. government had helped abuse the Iranians long before that. A more suitable date on which to begin the story is August 15, 1953. That is when the CIA and British operatives ousted the democratically elected prime minister, Mohammad Mosaddegh, and restored the autocratic Shah of Iran to power. Mosaddegh, among other things, had nationalized the oil industry to the detriment of British oil interests.

March 22, 2026, Update: It has come to my attention that the coup story is wrong. For details see this. We live and learn.

It so happens that in 2014, when the Obama administration was negotiating a nuclear deal with Iran (the JCPOA) and congressional Democrats and Republicans were trying to undermine the interim agreement that had been agreed to, my old friend Marc Joffe and I wrote an article in the Guardian detailing the U.S. government's long abuse of Iran. Here are highlights from that article.

Congressional hostility toward Iran is rooted in a black-and-white worldview that runs as follows: the United States and Israel are liberal democracies that defend individual rights and human dignity, whereas Iran is a despotic theocratic regime that sponsors terrorism and would do anything within its power to wipe Israel off the map.

The world is rarely black and white, and conflicts are usually not resolved until each side understands the other's point of view. With that in mind, it may be worth pondering some inconvenient truths that would cause a fair-minded Iranian to doubt congressional wisdom.

The assertion that US policies are driven by a concern for human rights is not consistent with the history of US-Iran relations.

That may have been (and still may be) news to many Americans, but it should not have been. It wasn't news to the Iranians. The U.S. government has been aligned with brutal regimes all over the world for a long time. You can look it up. No need to go through the larger record here. The history of U.S.-Iran relations makes the point.

As the CIA now admits, [the U.S. government] overthrew a democratically elected Iranian government in 1953 and restored Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi to power. For the next quarter century, until the 1979 Islamic revolution, the US government supported the autocratic Shah—whose regime also enjoyed close relations with Israel.

The Shah's secret police—Savak—became increasingly brutal, ultimately detaining without trial and torturing tens of thousands of Iranian citizens. By the 1970s, the regime's brutality had been well documented in the west.

In 1976 the International Commission of Jurists in Geneva reported: "There is abundant evidence showing the systematic use of impermissible methods of psychological and physical torture of political suspects during interrogation."

Yet successive US administrations supported the Shah until the very end and then shielded him from prosecution after his overthrow.

Not only did the United States impose and support a regime that tortured innocent Iranians, there is also evidence that the CIA assisted Savak. A 1980 report on CBS's 60 Minutes documented close ties between these two organizations.

Joffe and I pointed out that this "adds perspective to the US embassy hostage-taking drama that stretched over the last 444 days of the Carter administration. Many in Iran believed that US embassy staff had aided and abetted Savak and were thus fair targets for retaliation. One need not condone the hostage-taking to understand that it was not merely an unprovoked, sadistic act." The 66 American embassy personnel were not seized by militant students until months after the revolution, when President Jimmy Carter admitted the Shah to the United States for medical treatment and presumably political refuge. The students were backed by the new ruler, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.

That was not the end of the story. Americans might have forgotten the U.S. role in Iraq's savage war on Iran.

It is now well known that the Reagan administration helped Iraq with "intelligence and military support" after Saddam Hussein attacked Iran in 1980 and launched a brutal eight-year war. "[I]t was the express policy of Reagan to ensure an Iraqi victory in the war, whatever the cost," Shane Harris and Matthew M Aid wrote in Foreign Policy magazine last year. With the administration's knowledge,

Note well: "Iraq used chemical weapons against Iranian forces, killing thousands. Declassified government records show that the Reagan administration, represented by special envoy Donald Rumsfeld, helped Saddam's military produce and deploy these awful weapons of mass destruction, which included biological as well as chemical agents."

Got that? The U.S. government provided WMD to Saddam Hussein for use against Iran. Iran's ruler refused to permit his military to produce chemical weapons for retaliation. (In 2003 the U.S. military invaded Iraq supposedly over WMD that Saddam had gotten rid of years earlier.)

To add injury to injury:

In 1988, while the war was in progress, a US warship, the USS Vincennes, shot down an Iranian civilian aircraft over the Persian Gulf, killing all 290 aboard, including 66 children. The captain of the ship said it was under assault by Iranian gunboats at the time and that the Airbus A300 was misidentified as an attacking F-14 Tomcat. Iran countered that flight 655 left Iran the same time every day. Witnesses with Italy's navy and on a nearby US warship said that at the time it was shot down, the airliner was climbing. In 1996 the United States settled an Iranian claim against it at the International Court of Justice for $131.8m. While it was appropriate for the US government to accept responsibility, it could not make up for the Iranian people's losses: more innocent lives were snuffed out by this attack than were killed in the Pan Am 103 bombing over Lockerbie, Scotland.

President George H. W. Bush, however, refused to apologize for the tragedy. As Bush I put it: "I'll never apologize for the United States of America, ever. I don't care what the facts are." Sensitive, yes?

The new century signaled no diminution in American belligerence toward Iran—not even after the 9/11 attacks, which presented an opportunity for rapprochement with the Islamic Republic.

Despite Iran's efforts to cooperate with the United States after 9/11 (the Shiite regime opposed both the Sunni Taliban and al-Qaida in next-door Afghanistan to the east), President [George W.] Bush in 2002 included Iran as a member of the "axis of evil" along with North Korea and Iraq. The following year, the United States overthrew Saddam Hussein and occupied Iraq—placing US forces on both Iran's western and eastern flanks. Finally, in 2011, Iranian forces captured a US surveillance drone that was flying well within its air space—about 140 miles from the Afghanistan border.

Thus, "far from being innocent, US policy toward Iran appears downright hostile when viewed from the other side. Rather than continuing to tell ourselves tales, it is time we embrace the truth about our relations with Iran, which even American and Israeli intelligence agencies say is not building a nuclear weapon. We have a historic chance to end the destructive cold war with Iran, which, like it or not, will remain a major power in the Middle East. It would be a tragedy if Congress were to sabotage this opportunity."

Congressional obstruction notwithstanding, Obama, working with the other Security Council members, Germany, and the rest of the European Union, finalized the nuclear agreement with Iran, which imposed an additional inspections regime along with other restrictions and seemed to take war off the table. In return, Western sanctions were to be lifted, and Iran was to rejoin the world economy. In the 1990s, Iran's second and current "Supreme Leader," Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, issued a fatwa forbidding the procurement, production, or use of nuclear weapons.

Unfortunately, Trump tore up the agreement in 2018. President Joe Biden did precious little to revive his old boss's deal, but Trump presumably would have torn that up too when he returned to office this year. The U.S. government's shameful record concerning Iran continues to haunt the world. It's not over yet, no matter what Trump says.

TGIF: This Is America First

The Trump battle cry is America First. Revealingly, it is not Americans First. The former signifies, implicitly if not explicitly, national collectivism; the latter, individualism. To the extent Trump has a political worldview, it is not individualist. We cannot doubt that.

All of this is abundantly clear in his Iran policy, which is not just about Israel and Iran. This is not new. His seeming antiwar stance was an opportunistic political ploy. The Republican and Democratic wars of the 21st century were palpable fiascos, so of course he had to distance himself from them if he was to become the president. If he is good at anything, it is in finding his opponent's weakness. But what he says bears no necessary relation to what he believes.

Trump did not originally oppose America's wars. In a 2016 debate against his Republican primary opponents, he said George W. Bush had lied the country into war against Iraq, which is true. But the very next day, when confronted by an old army veteran in South Carolina, he slunk away from the charge, presumably so as not to offend the vet. In 2011, when the U.S.-led NATO assault on Libya was pending, Trump told Howard Stern that since "we" have troops in the neighborhood, they might as well take out Col. Qadaffi. Those are not good credentials for an antiwar candidate. I said from the start that he was not to be trusted.

No one should have expected America First to be linked to the freedom of individuals. Trump could have quoted John F. Kennedy's famous "Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country." For Trump, after himself, the nation is the only important unit. His foreign policy is of a piece with his mercurial yet steady protectionism and anti-immigrationism.

So we should not be surprised by his use of Israel to destroy Iran, which he has an obvious distaste for. It was clear in what he was saying for months before the immoral attack. The offer to negotiate over Iran's civilian nuclear program was a sham since it was always accompanied by the threat of military force. His cancellation of the solid Iranian nuclear deal during his first term was an unmistakable signal of what was to come when he thought the moment was right. As early as 2011 Trump tweeted that "America should not be pressuring Israel to show restraint against Iran." What more did we need to know?

What about MAGA? We'll have to see what happens, but I will be surprised by a wholesale jumping from the Good Ship Trump. Where would they go? Many will probably defer to Trump's claim that the imaginary Iranian bomb is a threat to America. Will MAGA follow Carlson and Bannon, or will they stick with El Presidente? We'll see.

If you have lingering doubts about Trump's honor, listen to him:

“Well, considering that I’m the one that developed ‘America First,’ and considering that the term wasn’t used until I came along [so wrong], I think I’m the one that decides [what it means]. For those people who say they want peace—you can’t have peace if Iran has a nuclear weapon. So for all of those wonderful people who don’t want to do anything about Iran having a nuclear weapon—that’s not peace.”

Who did MAGA think would be deciding, Laura Loomer and Marjorie Taylor Greene? (I don't want them to do the deciding either.)

By the way, no one really thinks Iran has or has even wanted nuclear weapons. That includes American and Israeli intelligence and the International Atomic Energy Agency. The ayatollah issued a fatwa against nuclear weapons as contrary to Islam long ago. That's inconvenient for Trump, so he declared that he does not care what his director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, thinks.

Yet no one doubts that Israel has such weapons. Unlike Iran, it has not signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and thus is not subject to international inspections.

Also by the way, the surest method to encourage Iran to build a nuke is to attack the country. Nothing would be more effective than a nuclear weapon to deter a future attack, as North Korea's Kim Jong Un knows and Col. Qadaffi learned too late.

Finally, you might think someone who threw around the phrase America First would show some respect for constitutional limits on his power. But we're talking about Trump. He recognizes no limits. 

Be Careful What You Ask for

You wanted America First. You got it.

Did you think it wouldn't be conceived in national collectivist terms?

The clue's in the name. It's America First, not Americans First.

Phony Noninterventionists

Call me naive, but I increasingly suspect that much of today's "left" is not antiwar on principle. Rather, it's anti-American war because, in its view, America (not just the government) is rotten to the core: bourgeois, racist, patriarchal, heteronormative, blah, blah, blah. If left-wingers (Marxists, heavy or light) were in charge, they'd likely support foreign intervention under the right conditions, e.g., fighting apartheid in South Africa (which indeed was bad) or Pinochet (also bad) in Chile, or saving Maduro (bad too) from a middle-class uprising in Venezuela. In the 1960s and 70s the so-called radical left favored the communists in the Vietnam War. It was not just against U.S. intervention, as many libertarians were. In the 1970s Noam Chomsky supported Vietnam's intervention in Cambodia; he also favored leaving some U.S. troops in Syria. I note that Max Blumenthal has lately called for intervention against Israel (bad). (By whom I don't know.)

If the left is interventionist at home, then why wouldn't it also be interventionist abroad? It has no principled objection to government power. It just wants aggressive force put to "good" use, such as managing other people's peaceful market relations.

Libertarians are the only comprehensive noninterventionists. The "left" may want the libertarians to tag along to demonstrate that its opposition to the U.S. empire is broad-based. That would make libertarians its useful idiots. I prefer another role, as antiwar libertarians. But deep down, the "left" likely thinks the libertarians are knowing or misguided shills for what they disdainfully call "corporate America"—which they are not. The goal is freedom.

Maybe we libertarians should be called Compnons.

TGIF: Magna Carta Day

I wrote this in 2015 to mark the 800th anniversary of Magna Carta, or Great Charter. In light of current events—featuring a president who aspires to unchecked power, despairs of the rule of law, and has discussed suspending the right of habeas corpus—the posting of this slightly modified version seemed appropriate. Magna Carta is remembered, somewhat fuzzily, for reining in the power of the government, for substituting the rule of law for the arbitrary rule of a man, and for a faltering step toward a decent  system of justice (presumption of innocence, burden of proof, trial by jury, and so on.) Happy Magna Carta Day this Sunday!

Sunday, June 15, is the 810th anniversary of the day in 1215 that rotten King John put his seal to the sheet of parchment known as Magna Carta at Runnymede in England. It wasn’t the first charter issued by an English monarch pledging to subordinate his power to the law (custom), yet it has had a staying power like no other in the imagination of people worldwide. This is especially ironic when you consider that at John’s request, Pope Innocent III nullified the charter just 11 days later and excommunicated the rebellious barons who forced it on him. (Further ironies: the charter had been drafted by the learned archbishop of Canterbury, Stephen Langton, whom the Pope had selected over John’s objection, and the charter affirmed the autonomy of the church.)

With the nullification, the civil war resumed between king and landholders who had grown tired of his taxes for wars in France (which he had lost along with vast properties) and other impositions. In the end, however, the barons more or less triumphed, as John’s successors, starting with his nine-year-old son, reissued the charter, albeit in revised editions. The principle that an English king was not a law unto himself would stand. While Magna Carta did not immediately raise the curtain on a libertarian, or even classical liberal, future, it may be said to have gotten the ball rolling, even if that was no part of anyone’s intention.

As I've mentioned before, the story of Magna Carta is instructive precisely because of its unintended consequences. This has been long noted, for example, by John Millar (1735-1801), a student of Adam Smith, a figure of the Scottish Enlightenment in his own right, and author of the multivolume  An Historical View of the English Government, From the Settlement of the Saxons in Britain to the Revolution in 1688 (1787). The judge and literary critic Francis Jeffrey wrote in 1804 that Millar’s “leading principle” was that institutions evolve “spontaneously from the situation of the society.” “Instead of gazing, therefore, with stupid amazement, on the singular and diversified appearances of human manners and institutions,” Jeffrey wrote, “Mr. Millar taught his pupils to refer them all to one simple principle, and to consider them as necessary links in the great chain which connects civilized with barbarous society.” (From Mark Salber Phillips’s introduction to Liberty Fund’s 2006 edition of Millar’s book.)

Regarding Magna Carta, in book 2, chapter 1, Millar wrote, “The character of John … is universally known, as a compound of cowardice, tyranny, sloth, and imprudence. This infatuated king was involved in three great struggles, from which it would have required the abilities of his father [Henry II], or of his great grandfather [Henry I, son of William the Conqueror], to extricate himself with honour; but which, under his management, could hardly fail to terminate in ruin and disgrace.”

Those struggles were against:  the challengers to his land holdings in France, Pope Innocent III, and the rebellious barons. After his humiliating losses in France, John made peace with the pope—accepting Langton at Canterbury and, in Millar’s words, “surrendering his kingdom to the pope, and submitting to hold it as a feudatory of the church of Rome.”

But his troubles were only beginning. Millar wrote:

The contempt which this abject submission of their sovereign could not fail to excite in the breast of his subjects, together with the indignation raised by various acts of tyranny and oppression of which he was guilty, produced at length a combination of his barons, who demanded a redress of grievances, and the restoration of their ancient laws. As this appeared the most favourable conjuncture which had occurred, since the Norman conquest, for limiting the encroachments of prerogative; the nobility and principal gentry were desirous of improving it to the utmost; and their measures were planned and conducted with equal moderation and firmness.

John would have none of it, and he moved to quash the rebellion of the barons. “He endeavoured by menaces to intimidate them; and, by delusive promises, to lull them asleep, in order to gain time for breaking their confederacy.” When that failed, “he made application to the pope as his liege lord; and called upon his holiness to protect the rights of his vassal.”

War broke out, and the king, “deserted by almost all his followers,” saw the ranks of the rebels grow.

All further opposition, therefore, became impracticable. At Runnemede, a large meadow between Windsor and Staines; a place which has been rendered immortal in the page of the historian and in the song of the poet; was held that famous conference, when the barons presented, in writing, the articles of agreement upon which they insisted; and the king gave an explicit consent to their demands. The articles were then reduced into the form of a charter; to which the king affixed his great seal; and which, though it was of the same nature with the charters obtained from the preceding monarchs, yet, as it was obtained with difficulties which created more attention, and as it is extended to a greater variety of particulars, has been called, by way of distinction, the great charter of our liberties.

Millar claimed that “feudal superiority of the crown, over the nobles” had been the rule since William the Conqueror, so “it would probably have been a vain project to attempt the abolition of it.” Then what was the point of the gathering at Runnymede on June 15, 1215?

The chief aim of the nobility, therefore, in the present charter, was to prevent the sovereign from harassing and oppressing them by the undue exercise of those powers, the effects of their feudal subordination, with which he was understood to be fully invested….

The jurisdiction exercised by the king, as a feudal superior, was another source of oppression, for which a remedy was thought requisite; and several regulations were introduced, in order to facilitate the distribution of justice, to prevent the negligence, as well as to restrain the corruption, of judges: in particular, it was declared, that no count or baron should be fined unless by the judgment of his peers, and according to the quality of the offence.

Millar then made an intriguing point about Magna Carta’s application beyond the barons' concerns:

While the barons were thus labouring to secure themselves against the usurpations of the prerogative, they could not decently refuse a similar security to their own vassals; and it was no less the interest of the king to insist upon limiting the arbitrary power of the nobles, than it was their interest to insist upon limiting that of the crown. The privileges inserted in this great transaction were, upon this account, rendered more extensive, and communicated to persons of a lower rank, than might otherwise have been expected. Thus it was provided that justice should not be sold, nor unreasonably delayed, to any person. That no freeman should be imprisoned, nor his goods be distrained, unless by the judgment of his peers, or by the law of the land; and that even a villein should not, by any fine, be deprived of his carts and implements of husbandry. [Emphasis added.]

I think that king and barons were aware of the fact, articulated by Étienne de La Boétie, that since the few rule the many, the ruled have it in their power to overthrow their rulers. Therefore, “liberal” measures are sometimes necessary to pacify the many to keep them from having revolutionary thoughts or to keep particular groups (such as the rising merchant class) from shifting allegiance to another contender for power. More often than not, acts of political kindness are the result of such motives.

Thus,

It is worthy of notice, however, that though this great charter was procured by the power and influence of the nobility and dignified clergy, who, it is natural to suppose, would be chiefly attentive to their own privileges; the interest of another class of people, much inferior in rank, was not entirely overlooked: I mean the inhabitants of the trading towns. It was declared, that no aid [tribute] should be imposed upon the city of London, unless with consent of the national council; and that the liberties and immunities of this, and of all the other cities and boroughs of the kingdom, should be maintained.... The insertion of such clauses must be considered as a proof that the mercantile people were beginning to have some attention paid to them; while the shortness of these articles, and the vague manner in which they are conceived, afford an evidence equally satisfactory, that this order of men had not yet risen to great importance. [Emphasis added.]

With the Great Seal of the king affixed, copies of Magna Carta were distributed throughout the country. But, Millar wrote, “nothing could be farther from [John’s] intentions, than to fulfil the conditions of the charter."

No sooner had he obtained a bull from the pope annulling that deed, and prohibiting both the king and his subjects from paying any regard to it, than, having secretly procured a powerful supply of foreign troops, he took the field, and began without mercy to kill and destroy, and to carry devastation throughout the estates of all those who had any share in the confederacy. The barons, trusting to the promises of the king, had rashly disbanded their followers; and being in no condition to oppose the royal army, were driven to the desperate measure of applying to Lewis, the son of the French monarch, and making him an offer of the crown. The death of John, in a short time after, happened opportunely to quiet these disorders, by transmitting the sovereignty to his son Henry the third, who was then only nine years of age.

Under the prudent administration of the earl of Pembroke, the regent, the young king, in the first year of his reign, granted a new charter of liberties, at the same time that the confederated barons were promised a perpetual oblivion for the past, in case they should now return to their allegiance.

There is much more to this story, of course. Suffice it to say here that Millar draws three broad conclusions from his account.

First, he saw significance in the fact that Magna Carta was not the only charter issued by a king; as noted, others had been issued before and were issued afterward. “Taking those charters, therefore, in connexion with one another, they seem to declare, in a clear and unequivocal manner, the general and permanent sense of the nation, with respect to the rights of the crown; and they ascertain, by express and positive agreement between the king and his subjects, those terms of submission to the chief magistrate...."

Second, contrary to “common opinion,” Millar wrote, “from the Norman conquest [1066] to the time of Edward the first [reign, 1272-1307]; while the barons were exerting themselves with so much vigour, and with so much apparent success, in restraining the powers of the crown, those powers were, notwithstanding, continually advancing.”

The repeated concessions made by the sovereign, had no farther effect than to prevent his authority from increasing so rapidly as it might otherwise have done. For a proof of this we can appeal to no better authority than that of the charters themselves; from which, if examined according to their dates, it will appear, that the nobility were daily becoming more moderate in their claims; and that they submitted, in reality, to a gradual extension of the prerogative; though, by more numerous regulations, they endeavoured to avoid the wanton abuses of it. Thus, by the great charter of Henry the third, the powers of the crown are less limited than by the charter of king John; and by this last the crown vassals abandoned some important privileges with which they were invested by the charter of Henry the first. [Emphasis added.]

If Magna Carta was a key moment in the West's advancement toward liberalism, the trajectory was neither straight nor smooth. But progress was undeniably made over the long haul.

Finally, we come to the law of unintended consequences. Millar says students of history “will easily see that the parties concerned in [the procurement “these great charters”] were not actuated by the most liberal principles; and that it was not so much their intention to secure the liberties of the people at large, as to establish the privileges of a few individuals.”

He summed up:

A great tyrant on the one side, and a set of petty tyrants on the other, seem to have divided the kingdom; and the great body of the people, disregarded and oppressed on all hands, were beholden for any privileges bestowed upon them, to the jealousy of their masters; who, by limiting the authority of each other over their dependants, produced a reciprocal diminution of their power. But though the freedom of the common people was not intended in those charters, it was eventually secured to them; for when the peasantry, and other persons of low rank, were afterwards enabled, by their industry, and by the progress of arts, to emerge from their inferior and servile condition, and to acquire opulence, they were gradually admitted to the exercise of the same privileges which had been claimed by men of independent fortunes; and found themselves entitled, of course, to the benefit of that free government which was already established. The limitations of arbitrary power, which had been calculated chiefly to promote the interest of the nobles, were thus, by a change of circumstances, rendered equally advantageous to the whole community as if they had originally proceeded from the most exalted spirit of patriotism. [Emphasis added.]

The power of apparent precedent worked in the common people’s favor; a small measure of liberty was parlayed into a larger measure, despite the efforts of the privileged classes.

When the commons, in a later period, were disposed to make farther exertions, for securing their natural rights, and for extending the blessings of civil liberty, they found it a singular advantage to have an ancient written record, which had received the sanction of past ages, and to which they could appeal for ascertaining the boundaries of the prerogative. This gave weight and authority to their measures; afforded a clue to direct them in the mazes of political speculation; and encouraged them to proceed with boldness in completing a plan, the utility of which had already been put to the test of experience. The regulations, indeed, of this old canon, agreeable to the simplicity of the times, were often too vague and general to answer the purposes of regular government; but, as their aim and tendency were sufficiently apparent, it was not difficult, by a proper commentary, to bestow upon them such expansion and accommodation as might render them applicable to the circumstances of an opulent and polished nation. [Emphasis added.]

Can classical liberals today roll back government power by appealing to "an ancient written record, which had received the sanction of past ages"? That is a tall order, considering who now reigns, but we must try, mustn't we?

(Learn more about Magna Carta at Liberty Fund.)

Benevolence

I don't understand why conventional moralists often see benevolence and self-interest as being at odds. Living--action in pursuit of life-sustaining ends, that is, of values--is a challenge, even a struggle. Success is not guaranteed. "There's many a slip 'twix cup and lip." So why wouldn't reasoning pursuers of self-interest view other beings who are similarly situated with favor? Egoists should rejoice over success stories. Examples of triumph in all constructive realms should inspire because they demonstrate that success is possible in this world. This is certainly the case in a positive-sum free-market society, in which entrepreneurs constantly push back the limits of scarcity. Remember what Ludwig von Mises wrote, "The fact that my fellow man wants to acquire shoes as I do, does not make it harder for me to get shoes, but easier." In a deep sense, one person's success is another person's encouragement to succeed. Ayn Rand understood this, especially in terms of art, but her nonfiction writing did not emphasize it in the context of human relations.

We should reject the conventional refrain that if you embrace the pursuit of self-interest, you are--at best--indifferent to other people beyond purely transactional considerations.

By the way, this goes toward answering the British moral sentimentalists, such as Adam Smith and David Hume, who argued that empathy is something additional to, and moderating of, "selfishness." I contend that it is not. It's entailed in egoism. Smith and Hume were bad empiricists, as Thomas Reid pointed out.

Egoists unite! You have nothing to lose but your guilt!

TGIF: On "Public Property"

A dubious theory held by some libertarians has been knocking about. It goes something like this:

The claim that government-controlled land is actually unowned—and thus not properly subject to government rulemaking—would lead to consequences that reasonable people would find abhorrent. Therefore, in the U.S. case, such land should be regarded as owned by Americans with the government as their representative. While privatization is the best course, it is unlikely to occur anytime soon. In the meantime, the government should make policy as though it were a private owner or the agent of private owners. For example, if the politicians think that private owners would want to restrict immigration, that is, keep them off the land, the politicians should do that.

Is government-held land owned or unowned? It is not a simple question. As Simon Guenzl reminds us, some of that land was obtained from its rightful owners by force through eminent domain. Those owners or their heirs could probably be identified. But much government-held land was obtained not by theft but through preemption. Since the government forbade and continues to forbid homesteading, the land has never had private owners. Hence, no owners could be identified. (The complicated matter of the Indians must be reserved for another day.) Guenzl thus distinguishes between state-claimed land and state-seized land.

Stolen land should not be regarded as unowned; it was taken from its owners. The government took it by force (even if it paid some cash), and now it is owned (controlled) by the government—but illegitimately.

What about the never-owned land? Is it unowned? Control is at the core of ownership. The government controls the land. Therefore, it makes more sense to regard it as illegitimately owned rather than as unowned. (How to privatize state-held land is not today's topic.)

Reasonable people will agree that the consequences of treating government-held land as unowned would be substantially negative. The homeless, drug-soaked, unsanitary encampments on public parks and sidewalks have degraded life in some "progressive" big cities. Responsible, self-supporting individuals and their families can't simply walk to shops and enjoy other amenities. That should not stand. Protest demonstrations have sometimes blocked major roads, impeding ambulances and the normal conduct of life.

We may thus regard the unowned status of government-held land as seriously problematic, and I am happy to reject it. The question, then, is: having rejected that status, must we prefer that the government make policy as though it were the private owner?

I'm not sure what that means, but I can't see how it would be possible under any interpretation. Sometimes it's said to mean that the government ought to act on behalf of the true private owners. "How would private owners want the land to be used?" I've already shown that much of the land never had owners. The state would have to imagine how private owners, had they existed, would have wanted the land to be used. But how can politicians and bureaucrats know that? Maybe those imaginary owners wouldn't want schools or libraries on their land.

With government-seized land, a similar problem would confront the policymakers. Moreover, why assume that all the dispossessed owners (if alive) would want the same thing? The socialist-calculation problem is relevant here. People don't really know what they will do until they confront alternatives, prices, and opportunity costs of particular circumstances. How arrogant for the politicians to presume to know what hypothetical people would want! How realistic is "the collectivist notion of the state [making policy] that emulates the market decisions and choices of the taxpayers?" Walter Block and Anthony Gregory write. Not very, I say.

A further problem plagues this approach. Along with the federal government, state, county, and local governments have seized land under eminent domain. Why should the federal government make policy for those lower levels of government, which would also be obliged to legislate on behalf of hypothetical owners? It's an all-around mess.

So where do we go from here? Again and alas, privatization is off the table for now. (How to privatize government assets is no easy question; thankfully, I don't have to deal with it today.)

Before answering my question, I'll raise a matter that is closely related: safety. Part of what governments at all levels have done is reserve to themselves the power to safeguard the people they rule. To be sure, governments endanger us all the time, but they also protect us in various ways, however ineptly. Some police activity protects innocent people from murderers, rapists, and thieves. Politicians have a (self-)interest in this. I remember a button that libertarians sold at conventions: "Don't Steal. Government Hates Competition." Officials will tend to want to discourage private criminals from attacking us if for no other reason than they want the booty for themselves. Plus, they want to be re-elected.

Since the government has forced itself on us as our protector, it seems obligated to carry out that function (in ways that don't further violate individual rights). Here's an imperfect analogy. A pilot friend with a small plane takes you on a flight. At 10,000 feet he informs you he's about to parachute home and leave the flying to you, whom he knows can't fly. (Some friend.) I submit that this would be a serious breach. The same with a surgeon who opens his patient's chest and then decides he'd rather be playing golf.

Similarly, if the government, without notice, closed all the police departments and courts without giving us a chance to form private protection agencies, we'd be in a right fix, especially the poorest, most vulnerable parts of town.

Thus, the government owes the taxpayers protection from private aggression. Among other things, its agents may properly keep public facilities free of real threats, for example, adult strangers using a bathroom in a public school. Further, the state is obligated to forbid aggressive interference with peaceful people who use the facilities as intended. Protest demonstrations that block streets are properly banned, not because of their views, but because others have a right to use the streets too. Noisy, grossly unwashed people may be excluded from public libraries. And so on. (As always, hard cases can arise.)

But assertions of state power that have objectives other than safe and appropriate use should not be allowed to sneak in under what I call the "nondisruption principle (NDP). Immigration control is an example. The general power to restrict immigration is unrelated to keeping "public" facilities safe and usable.

Concerning "public" property, then, we have two conflicting standards for how the government should behave. The first is that it should minimize its own aggression against non-aggressors, whoever they are, and permit the maximum peaceful use of "public" facilities as they were intended to be used. If you violate no one's rights, you're okay.

The second standard is that the government should seek to represent the hypothetical owners of currently government-held land. As we've seen, that is impossible. This standard is often invoked to justify restrictions on immigration, but it could easily license state aggression regarding drugs, guns, gambling, prostitution, and religion, restrictions libertarians rightly oppose. There is no limiting principle. Once you allow the standard to control immigration, you have no grounds to oppose it in other matters. The second standard is tantamount to assuming the government legitimately owns all the property it controls.

Defenders of the second standard will try to defend their position by claiming that people who have not paid taxes in the past have no claim to use public facilities now. That proves too much. Interstate travel entails people using facilities they have not contributed to previously. Children have not paid taxes. In fact, today's taxpayers once used the facilities before they had paid any taxes. Were they free-riding? But here's another problem: people who relocate (from wherever) will, alas, soon start paying sales, excise, income, property, and gasoline taxes and hence contribute to the upkeep of the facilities, including those they'll never use.

So, is it the case, as some have said, that libertarians have nothing reasonable to say about public property except that it should be privatized—that there are no right answers in a statist world? Resoundingly, I say no.

Immigration Conversation with Jacob Hornberger

Some Recent Social Media Posts

(Check back periodically to see what I've added.)

If the choice is between a welfare state and a police state (I despise both), I know which one I would choose.

He who wills the end, wills the means. Serious immigration restriction requires police-state measures.

Simply put, if you want what others have produced, you have to offer them something they want in trade.

Border crossing without government permission is a victimless crime.

Think of all the horrible things that can happen in the absence of a total surveillance state. Is that an argument for the surveillance state?

If you can't see the difference between a Stop sign at an intersection and a Do Not Enter sign at a border, you need an eye doctor.

Libertarians don't bat an eye over law-breakers who violate no rights. But when it's a person without papers -- watch out!

Statists have long tried to scare people into supporting big government. Today even some libertarians do it. It's a topsy-turvy world.

Dear Free Speech Absolutists: I assume it's okay with you if businessmen discuss pricing strategies among themselves. It's fine by me.

What's the point of being the exceptional nation if you can't throw your weight around?

The anti-free-immigrationists know where they want to go and are prepared to pay any price in other people's freedom to get there. The questions are: why do they want to go there, and what aren't they telling us?

Life is inherently risky. In a world of nation-states, do we want a state powerful enough to address all conceivable risks? If so, what else is it likely to be capable of?

When ICE agents burst into restaurant kitchens to round up people without papers, are they trespassers? How about when agents take property by eminent domain to build border fences? Is that trespass and theft? Immigrants don't do that.

Anti-state anti-immigrationists don't hate the state enough.

The essential case for liberty has never been a matter of data. (Sorry, consequentialists.) It's been a matter of moral principle.

If drugs were legalized, more people would use "public" health services. Same if people could ride motorcycles without helmets or ride in cars without seatbelts. Should libertarians oppose those freedoms because people might use tax-funded programs?

The regime intends to rid America of all "undocumented" persons. But a free society would not have *documented* persons. That's how far down we've gone.

Welfare recipients are not aggressors. The aggressors are the tax collectors and the politicians who empower them.

Libertarian border guardians say there's no freedom to move because other people own property. (We never thought of that one!) By the same standard, there's no freedom of speech.

If capitalism is about survival of the fittest, why do capitalists mass produce inexpensive eyeglasses, hearing aids, etc.? Why do they promote the flourishing of the "unfit"?

Libertarian border guardians say there's no freedom to move because other people own property. (We never thought of that one!) By the same standard, there's no freedom of speech.

How great is this: You can get fabulously rich by providing valued goods and services to the masses. Wow!

If you had told people that [see above] a few hundred years ago, you'd have been locked up in a looney bin.

TGIF: The Worst Are Already on Top

After Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem made a fool of herself by defining habeas corpus as "a constitutional right that the president has to be able to remove people from this country," Justin Amash, the libertarian former congressman, posted an apt quotation on X:

Since it is the supreme leader who alone determines the ends, his instruments [staff] must have no moral convictions of their own. They must, above all, be unreservedly committed to the person of the leader; but next to this the most important thing is that they should be completely unprincipled and literally capable of everything. They must have no ideals of their own which they want to realise, no ideas about right or wrong which might interfere with the intentions of the leader.

The quote comes from Nobel laureate F. A. Hayek, one of the most important social scientists of the 20th century. You can find the quote in Chapter 10 of Hayek's invaluable 1943 classic, The Road to Serfdom. Hayek called that chapter “Why the Worst Get on Top.”

That chapter is worth paying close attention to. Let's start by acknowledging the purpose of Hayek's book. During World War II, Hayek, who lived and taught in England, sought to counter an argument made by prominent intellectuals, namely, that if central planning works well in war, it ought to work well in peacetime. Postwar economic planning seemed inevitable.

Hayek dissented. For him, the economic case for socialism had already been demolished by Ludwig von Mises's 1922 book, Socialism: An Economic and Sociological Analysis. That book had expanded on Mises's stunning 1920 paper, "Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth," which showed that since socialist planners would not have access to market prices—markets after all were to be abolished—they could not rationally plan a great industrial economy that would efficiently serve consumers.

Why couldn't the planners have access to prices? Because information-rich prices can emerge only through market exchanges. Markets must exist not only for consumer goods, but for the means of production, which for socialists was a no-no: that is, labor, land, raw materials, tools, equipment, machines, and buildings. But trade presupposes private property in the means of production, another no-no for the socialists. You cannot trade what you do not own.

In short: no private property = no trade. No trade = no prices. No prices = no rational planning. Market prices (a redundancy) reflect supply and demand; they also permit disparate things to be expressed in a common unit of account, for example, the dollar. This makes cost comparisons possible. If the planners could not engage in economic calculation through money prices, they could not devise the most efficient production strategies for the countless goods that consumers want.

Why does that matter? It matters because resources and labor are scarce. At any time, our large and varied demand exceeds supply. Many methods could be chosen to produce any particular good, but waste is contrary to our interests. We want the most efficient methods used because the fewer the inputs employed, the more outputs for consumers. Without prices, there would be no way to determine which method is most efficient and least wasteful. The planners would be like blind pilots flying in the dark with no instruments. As Mises said, socialism is impossible.

Before pointing to the late Soviet Union, China, Cuba, Venezuela, or North Korea as proof that Mises was wrong, remember that these systems existed in a world of semi-free-market prices. Worldwide socialism would be a nightmare.

In The Road to Serfdom, Hayek's critique of central planning went beyond the calculation problem. He demonstrated that if politicians took central social planning seriously, the people would have to be turned into serfs. Contrary to popular misunderstanding, he did not argue that if a society takes the first step toward the welfare state, serfdom would inevitably follow. As objectionable as it is, the welfare state is not socialism. It does not abolish private property, markets, and money.

One of Hayek's points—these were not predictions because he observed them in the Soviet Union, Nazi Germany, and fascist Italy—was that central planning required the concentration of all power in a few hands, perhaps one set of hands. It cannot be imagined otherwise. (We're not talking about syndicalism, which has its own problems.)

For example, imagine a society that embarks sincerely on democratic socialism. (Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez take heed.) Hayek pointed out that the people and their legislature might agree 100 percent that the economy should be planned. It does not follow, however, that they will agree 100 percent on the contents of the plan. How much steel should be produced next year? How much plastic? How many refrigerators? How many cars? How many smartphones? How many dolls? Etc., etc., etc. Socialism could not repeal scarcity. Making more of X requires making less of Y. Making more producer goods requires making fewer consumer goods now. You have a problem with that? Sue God.

The chance of substantial agreement over the details of The Plan is near zero. Because of the disagreement, the legislature would be locked in endless debate with no prospect of finalizing The Plan. An unfinished plan cannot be implemented. The deadlock would be fertile ground for the emergence of a strongman. That would appeal to the people who favored action over talk. "Give us a plan!" Democratic socialism would be exposed as a chimera.

In our context, see what Donald Trump said when the U.S. Court of International Trade said that only Congress can impose tariffs: "The horrific decision stated I would have to get the approval of Congress for these Tariffs. In other words, hundreds of politicians would sit around D.C. for weeks, and even months, trying to come to a conclusion as to what to charge other Countries that are treating us unfairly.” (Emphasis added.)

Hayek would not be surprised:

We must here return for a moment to the position which precedes the suppression of democratic institutions and the creation of a totalitarian regime. In this stage it is the general demand for quick and determined government action that is the dominating element in the situation, dissatisfaction with the slow and cumbersome course of democratic procedure which makes action for action's sake the goal. It is then the man or the party who seems strong and resolute enough "to get things done" who exercises the greatest appeal.

Hayek noted that the strongman would need loyal, unquestioning lieutenants to faithfully carry out his decrees.

The chance of imposing a totalitarian regime on a whole people depends on the leader first collecting round him a group which is prepared voluntarily to submit to that totalitarian discipline which they are to impose by force upon the rest.

[The preempted socialist legislators] had, without knowing it, set themselves a task which only the ruthless, ready to disregard the barriers of accepted morals, can execute.... [Emphasis added.]

[A] numerous and strong group with fairly homogeneous views is not likely to be
formed by the best but rather by the worst elements of any society. [Emphasis added.]

The man and party best suited to impose the collectivist project will not be friendly to individual liberty or the free, spontaneous social process that liberalism calls for. Indeed, the "old" values would block their path and would have to be eliminated. In other words, a brutal program will be carried out by a brutal leader and brutal officers of the state, cheered on by worshipful followers.

As I've noted, Hayek's subject was totalitarian central planning. But I (among others) submit that similar dangers loom with any big-government interventionist system. The current U.S. regime claims the autocratic authority to do all sorts of things that violate individual liberty. It does not seek congressional authorization, and it damns the courts for obstruction.

The potential for such concentrated power has existed in the U.S. political system for a long time. Congress has repeatedly and illegally delegated broad "emergency" powers to the executive. What makes the current regime different from its predecessors is that it invokes those powers flagrantly, arbitrarily, and often. While it does not seek to impose a comprehensive plan (yet), it nevertheless has substantial plans on a variety of matters, such as international trade, domestic industry, and labor (immigration). That makes Hayek's analysis relevant.

Hayek opened the chapter with Lord Acton's famous aphorism: "All power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely." But Hayek went beyond Acton to suggest that power attracts the corrupt or corruptible.

A key Hayekian point is that to the extent the regime carries out its plan, which will need public support, its attitude toward common-sense morality will be lax, to say the least, if not outright disdainful.

The principle that the end justifies the means is in individualist ethics regarded as the denial of all morals. In collectivist ethics it becomes necessarily the supreme rule; there is literally nothing which the consistent collectivist must not be prepared to do if it serves "the good of the whole", because the "good of the whole" is to him the only criterion of what ought to be done. The raison d'etat, in which collectivist ethics has found its most explicit formulation, knows no other limit than that set by expediency—the suitability of the particular act for the end in view. And what the raison d'etat affirms with respect to the relations between different countries applies equally to the relations between different individuals within the collectivist state. There can be no limit to what its citizen must not be prepared to do, no act which his conscience must prevent him from committing, if it is necessary for an end which the community has set itself or which his superiors order him to achieve.

Who would relish the chance to round up masses of peaceful "illegal" border-crossers without due process and force them onto planes bound for prisons in El Salvador, South Sudan, or Djibouti? The current U.S. regime will reward people who would enjoy that sort of work.

There is thus in the positions of power little to attract those who hold moral beliefs of the kind which in the past have guided the European peoples.... The only tastes which are satisfied are the taste for power as such, the pleasure of being obeyed and of being part of a well-functioning and immensely powerful machine to which everything else must give way.

Yet while there is little that is likely to induce men who are good by our standards to aspire to leading positions in the totalitarian machine, and much to deter them, there will be special opportunities for the ruthless and unscrupulous.... [T]he readiness to do bad things becomes a path to promotion and power. The positions in a totalitarian society in which it is necessary to practice cruelty and intimidation, deliberate deception and spying, are numerous. Neither the Gestapo nor the administration of a concentration camp, neither the Ministry of Propaganda nor the SA or SS (or their Italian or Russian counterparts) are suitable places for the exercise of humanitarian feelings. Yet it is through positions like these that the road to the highest positions in the totalitarian state leads.

It's too late to worry that the worst will get on top. He and they are already there.

 

TGIF: Maestro Trump and Drug Prices

When encountering a public problem, people tend to fall into one of two camps: one camp, the larger one, says, "There oughta be a law." The other one asks, "How has the government created or aggravated the situation?" We know which camp Maestro Trump belongs to.

Take prescription-drug prices. Because Americans pay higher prices on average for prescription drugs under patent (but not for generics) than people in other countries pay, Trump, who used to call price controls "socialist," has ordered the drug companies "to offer American consumers the most-favored-[developed-]nation lowest price." He wants private companies to lower their prices at home and raise them abroad.

Is this a command? Trump's executive order goes on: "should drug manufacturers fail to offer American consumers the most-favored-nation lowest price, my Administration will take additional aggressive action." We know what that means. "If ... significant progress towards most-favored-nation pricing for American patients is not delivered," his order says, "to the extent consistent with law,... the Secretary [of health and human services] shall propose a rulemaking plan to impose most-favored-nation pricing." Got that? Impose.

Why did Trump change his mind about price controls? Because now it fits with his demagogic populist politics of national grievance, which has served him so well. He vows to end "global freeloading" by foreigners who pay less. He believes that Americans subsidize foreigners. But do we? Good economics says otherwise. (We'll get to that.)

The Maestro seems not to realize that price controls have failed for 4,000 years! They bring shortages, reduce innovation, and cause other distortions, which the government then tries to fix by expanding its restrictions. Never mind that the government makes drugs more expensive than they would be in an unhampered market.

Prices will differ from country to country for sensible reasons. Economists call this market segmentation and price discrimination. Some people in certain circumstances are willing and able to pay more than others whose circumstances differ. We see this with airline fares and off-peak movie ticket prices. Americans are richer than other people and can afford to buy things that others couldn't and wouldn't buy at American prices. Sure, everyone prefers all prices to be lower—except his own, of course—but does that mean the government could mandate lower prices without negative consequences for all? No.

Once a modern drug is produced and sold in the rich American market at a price high enough to yield a profit and recoup the stratospheric R&D costs, the drug maker can produce additional quantities at a low marginal cost and profitably expand sales to poorer people abroad at a lower price. This is good for the foreign buyers who otherwise wouldn't have access, but it does not harm Americans: regardless of what others pay, they buy the drug because they think the benefits exceed the cost.

A government decree to make prices more equal would be harmful all around. As economist Alex Tabarrok writes, banning price discrimination "will end up hurting patients in low-income countries while delivering minimal gains to Americans. Worse, by reducing pharmaceutical profits overall, it weakens incentives to develop new drugs. In fact, in the long-run U.S. consumers are better off when poorer countries pay lower prices—just as airline price discrimination makes more routes viable for both economy and first-class passengers." Likewise, if movie theaters couldn't price-discriminate, we'd have fewer theaters and less service from surviving theaters because profitably filling seats at off-peak times would not be an option. When the government restricts profits, it restricts supply and innovation.

That we lack a fully free market today does not substantially change the analysis. We can be confident that government intervention makes medical care artificially expensive by imposing artificial costs, restricting supply, and stimulating demand. A ban on global price discrimination would hardly help improve things. We'd have fewer new drugs. (Watch Alex Tabarrok and Robert Murphy discuss this and related issues.)

This case against Trump's executive order is valid even when we acknowledge that foreign buyers of American drugs are governments that impose price controls. As many have pointed out, importing other countries' price controls makes no sense.

No discussion of drug prices is complete without noting the burdens imposed by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the patent system. Bringing a drug to market costs upward of $2 billion, and most never make it. Private competitive testing and certification firms (analogous to Consumer Reports) could replace the FDA and the prescription requirement. With informed consent, people should be free to take medicines that have undergone different degrees of testing. Life is risk. The government can't change that.

Regarding the patent system, while 15-year monopoly pricing to some extent offsets the FDA burden, it should be abolished along with that agency. Because of vigorous competition, Americans pay far less for out-of-patent generic drugs than the rest of the world. Intellectual property is inconsistent with property rights because it prohibits manufacturers from using their own physical property to produce things. Unlike finite physical property, ideas aren't properly ownable: when an idea is communicated to others, the first person still retains it. Its economic value may fall, but no one has a property right in a thing's market value. For those who fear that the end of drug patents would spell the end of innovation, see Michele Boldrin and David K. Levine's Against Intellectual Property, which has a chapter on the international pharmaceutical industry.

Trump's plan to tamper with drug prices will reduce profits to "Big Pharma"—ooh, what a scary term!—impede innovation, and make everyone less healthy in the future. Drugs currently under patent may seem expensive, but as Tabarrok points out, many modern drugs reduce the need for more costly and dangerous surgeries, and most drugs are paid for through insurance policies. (The government also makes insurance artificially expensive through mandated coverage and discriminatory tax treatment.)

Moreover, as Tabarrok says, Americans get new drugs first. So, all things considered, drug prices don't look so bad after all. The moral and economic case for freeing the market is watertight, but that doesn't mean what we have now is worthless and could not become worse with more intervention. 

America's interventionist medical system must be replaced by a free market in medicine. Most of every dollar spent on medical care today is paid for or mandated by the U.S. government. Barack Obama's Affordable Care Act made a flawed system worse. Coercion, which includes medical licensing, hospital certification, and official accreditation of medical schools, should be eliminated because nothing has proved better at delivering goods and services than the competitive profit-and-loss system directed at consumer satisfaction.

TGIF: Individuals, Not America, First

Let's hear no more about America First! It's a fraud, a cover for collectivist nationalism, and a distraction from what matters. (It also looks like camouflage for Trump Family First, but let's take it at face value for now.)

On foreign policy, America First does not exclusively describe the supposed noninterventionist side of the public debate. The openly interventionist side supports meddling because, in its view, that's in "America's interest." That view is wrong and needs to be refuted, as it has been often. But that does not mean the interventionists don't believe it. Doubt their sincerity if you wish. I can't read their minds. The point is this is not a debate between those who want to promote the "national interest" and those who want to promote something else. Rather, it's a debate over what constitutes that interest and whether unilateralism or multilateralism best promotes it.

That's one problem with America First. The deeper problem is the belligerent nationalism of the movement led, but not founded by, Donald Trump. This flows from its anti-individualism. The nation is the irreducible unit, and conflict must happen. See how Trump picks fights with Canada, Mexico, Europe, China, and others with whom we have no reason for conflict. Look at his incoherent, destructive trade policies. For as long as anyone can remember, Trump's shtick has been that America has been "ripped off" and that only he can change this. What's he talking about? Since when is offering desirable goods at affordable prices a rip-off? But seeing trade as it really is would deprive Trump of his cherished trademark grievance politics. Narcissistic demagogues thrive on grievances. They don't gain votes by promising to stop the U.S. government's global bullying of others.

America is an abstraction, which means different things to different people. In one sense, it's a country but not a single organism. It's an association of individuals who have different interests built on their fundamental interest in peace and freedom. Government tampering with freedom always favors some over others. One person's subsidy is another person's burden. Which one represents the real America? Steel tariffs help steel producers (in the short term) but harm steel users, who far outnumber the producers. This is an old story. Does it have to be pointed out?

So, what is America First? It's putty in the hands of a demagogue.

"American interests" are interests as seen by the people who run the government, that is, America's rulers. They are a filter, an interpretation by interested parties. This affords abundant opportunities to pursue narrow and even personal agendas. Rulers need not have any common interest with regular people. They need votes, however, so rulers will strike the required poses, especially in election season.

America First is about power and devotion to the ruler, without whom we cannot prosper. You know the song and dance. When John F. Kennedy said, "Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country," he was properly rebuked by Ayn Rand, Milton Friedman, and other advocates of individual liberty. Rand called Kennedy's program of self-sacrifice "the Fascist New Frontier." They said that Americans should ask neither question. Nationalism is anti-individualism and antithetical to the ideas that motivated many people at the American founding. Trump doesn't openly ask for self-sacrifice, but it's subtly built into his agenda. He requires self-sacrifice while promising to make us rich. Fat chance.

Where is the individual in a vision of national greatness? The individual is a tool, a servant, and even a hostage—but little more. The everyday lives of regular people are expendable because, it is said, something bigger matters more. Greatness is not really for them.

Nationalist intellectuals—MAGA and otherwise—like to say that America is more than a marketplace. No one denies it, but people live a good part of their lives in the market, and its openness or closeness makes a big difference in their lives. As for the other parts of life, what makes the nationalists so sure that people cannot take care of themselves through voluntary association? Community is a good, but it should be a freely chosen community. People need meaning, but for it to be real, they need to make their own meaning. The last place to find it is in the words of a demagogue who believes his word creates truth.

When nationalists say America is more than a market, they mean the nation is more than a free association of individuals cooperating to pursue their own interests. We should reject that view. "Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" is not a collectivist slogan. It's impeccably individualist. Jefferson didn't write "life, liberty, and the pursuit of American greatness." A contemporary of Jefferson's, Abraham Bishop, understood:

A nation which makes greatness its polestar can never be free; beneath national greatness sink individual greatness, honor, wealth and freedom. But though history, experience and reasoning confirm these ideas; yet all-powerful delusion has been able to make the people of every nation lend a helping hand in putting on their own fetters and rivetting their own chains, and in this service delusion always employs men too great to speak the truth, and yet too powerful to be doubted. Their statements are believed—their projects adopted—their ends answered and the deluded subjects of all this artifice are left to passive obedience through life, and to entail a condition of unqualified non-resistance to a ruined posterity.

Here was a prophet.

TGIF: On the Importance of Undesigned Order

Carl Menger, the founder of the Austrian approach to economics, was not the first or last thinker to see similarities between a society and a living organism, suggesting the existence of undesigned, spontaneous order. The names Adam Ferguson and Adam Smith, before Menger, and Herbert Spencer and F. A. Hayek, after Menger, come to mind.

Ferguson wrote in An Essay on the History of Civil Society (1767), "Every step and every movement of the multitude, even in what are termed enlightened ages, are made with equal blindness to the future; and nations stumble upon establishments, which are indeed the result of human action, but not the execution of any human design." (Emphasis added.) 

The result of human action, but not human design. The importance of this idea cannot be overstated. More than a century after Ferguson's book, Menger elaborated this unappreciated phenomenon in his Investigations into the Method of the Social Sciences (1883). 

Undesigned order may be the most counterintuitive idea around, but it is crucial to understanding how free societies work. Trump and his gang don't get it. Observe that he thinks he knows when the Federal Reserve should cut interest rates or how national trade statistics should look. The price system, of which interest rates are a part, is generated, not by a central plan, but by the countless daily decisions of buyers, sellers, and abstainers acting according to their articulated, unarticulated, and even inarticulable personal information, know-how, preferences, and purposes. That "data" cannot be recorded in a central and accessible place for use by anyone, bureaucrats included. So attempts at conscious government planning will only muck up the price system, along with everything else. A bull in a china shop is an apt image.

If you don't get this, you don't get freedom. Unfortunately, unplanned order is, as noted, counterintuitive. People construct some order in their lives, so it's natural to think that social order must have been designed by the government. That's a mistake.

But it shouldn't take much thought to overcome this incorrect intuition. After all, to use one of Menger's cases, no one thinks everyday languages were consciously designed. (How's Esperanto doing?) It's only a short leap from language to other spontaneous orders: custom, law, markets, and money. Menger made a lasting contribution to this subject. (See Lawrence H. White's Introduction in the Menger volume.)

Menger wrote (pp. 130ff):

The normal function and development of the unit of an organism are thus conditioned by those of its parts; the latter in turn are conditioned by the connection of the parts to form a higher unit; and finally the normal function and development of each single organ are conditioned by those of the remaining organs. 

We can make an observation similar in many respects in reference to a series of social phenomena in general and human economy in particular. Here, too, in numerous instances, phenomena present themselves to us, the parts of which are helpful in the preservation, the normal functioning, and the development of the unit, even conditioning these.... It is obvious that we have here a certain analogy between the nature and the function of natural organisms on the one hand and social structures on the other.

The same is true with respect to the origin of a series of social phenomena. Natural organisms almost without exception exhibit, when closely observed, a really admirable functionality of all parts with respect to the whole, a functionality which is not, however, the result of human calculation, but of a natural process. Similarly we can observe in numerous social institutions a strikingly apparent functionality with respect to the whole. But with closer consideration they still do not prove to be the result of an intention aimed at this purpose, i.e., the result of an agreement of members of society or of positive legislation. They, too, present themselves to us rather as "natural" products (in a certain sense), as unintended results of historical development.

Menger gave an example, for which he is justly famous:

One needs, e.g., only to think of the phenomenon of money, an institution which to so great a measure serves the welfare of society, and yet in most nations, by far, is by no means the result of an agreement directed at its establishment as a social institution, or of positive legislation, but is the unintended product of historical development. One needs only to think of law, of language, of the origin of markets, the origin of communities and of states, etc.

However, Menger warned that the analogy has limits:

Natural organisms are composed of elements which serve the function of the unit in a thoroughly mechanical way. They are the result of purely causal processes, of the mechanical play of natural forces. The so-called social organisms, on the contrary, simply cannot be viewed and interpreted as the product of purely mechanical force effects. They are, rather, the result of human efforts, the efforts of thinking, feeling, acting human beings. Thus, if we can speak at all of an "organic origin" of social structures, or, more correctly, of a part of these, this can merely refer to one circumstance. This is that some social phenomena are the results of a common will directed toward their establishment (agreement, positive legislation, etc.), while others are the unintended result of human efforts aimed at attaining essentially individual goals (the unintended results of these).... In the second case social phenomena come about as the unintended result of individual human efforts (pursuing individual interests) without a common will directed toward their establishment. [Emphasis added.]

Menger was implying that the rough analogy between society and living organisms can in no way be used to justify ideologies that view society as the body (corpus) of an organism, with the state or strongman as the head. Since a society is distinguished from an organism by its separate conscious, acting, choosing human beings, it follows that freedom is indispensable to the “health” of society, which cannot be conceived apart from the “health” of the individuals who comprise it.

Score another point for Carl Menger.

TGIF: On Value and Freedom

To live is to act. To act is to choose. To choose is to prefer. To prefer is to pursue values—that is, to value. That's logic-guided observation. Ego sum, ergo aestimo: I am, therefore I value. (HT: Aristotle, Ayn Rand, and Ludwig von Mises.)

Next: to think is to act. "[T]hinking itself [is] an action," Ludwig von Mises wrote in Human Action, "proceeding step by step from the less satisfactory state of insufficient cognizance to the more satisfactory state of better insight."

Shortcut: to think is to value. (James Ellias of Inductica calls this the "value axiom.") Like it or not, we're immersed in the world of "ought." To assert a proposition is to imply: "This is true, so you ought to pay heed." That's the case even if your proposition is something like, "'Ought' statements have no cognitive content." Hume and his fellow emotivists were and are wrong.

Aristotle noticed that human action in the pursuit of ends that are not sought for their own sake—but rather are sought as means to further ends—must aim at some ultimate end: the good life, happiness, contentment, call it what you will. Otherwise, you'd have an infinite series of means leading nowhere, which would make no sense. As he put it:

If, then, there is some end of the things we do, which we desire for its own sake (everything else being desired for the sake of this), and if we do not choose everything for the sake of something else (for at that rate the process would go on to infinity, so that our desire would be empty and vain), clearly this must be the good and the chief good.... [W]e call final without qualification that which is always desirable in itself and never for the sake of something else.... Now such a thing happiness, above all else, is held to be; for this we choose always for self and never for the sake of something else.... Happiness, then, is something final and self-sufficient, and is the end of action.

Note the irony: morality is associated with choice and free will. But "[f]or Aristotle, this ultimate end or good is not chosen; it is implicit in every desire and every choice, and all our other ends are to be understood as subordinate to it. The end is, as it were, forced on us; and the task of practical reason is simply to identify it," Roderick T. Long writes in Reason and Value: Aristotle versus Rand. (Emphasis added.) The ultimate end, therefore, is not pre-moral. Since we are fallible, we need practical reason to make sure the means we select are suited to the ultimate end.

This brings us to political theory and the objective case for freedom. Spoiler alert: as acting, thinking, choosing, valuing beings, we need liberty. But each person needs more than liberty for himself. He needs it for everyone else. Why? Because value pursuers need facts, knowledge, and truth (oh that word), and no individual can acquire all the relevant information on his own. 

I'm drawing on Frank Van Dun's 1986 paper "Economics and the Limits of Value-Free Science." Van Dun points out that economics is value-free in the sense that economists' values should not shape how they observe market phenomena. For example, even someone who dislikes markets for moral or aesthetic reasons should be able, in principle, to see that tariffs raise prices and shrink supply. However, no science, including economics—no truth-seeking project—can be value-free in a broader sense: its practitioners must value truth seeking and conduct themselves accordingly.

The bridge from there to politics is the fact that all truth seeking, even the mundane, everyday sort we all engage in, is a social process. This is not to deny individualism. It's a recognition that individuals cannot truth-seek alone. We learn from what others say and do. The self-interested truth seeker needs others to check him, for it is too easy to slip into complacency without realizing it. As Van Dun puts it,

There is no way an individual can break out of the prison of "the evident," no way he can even identify, let alone begin to question, his prejudices, unless he has come to understand that what is evident to him may not be evident to another and that his point of view is not the only one. Science is a dialogical undertaking: it requires that we make public what we think and try to refute what we believe we ought not to accept, and try to prove what we believe we ought to believe — it requires that we give our reasons.

...A dialogue is an argumentative, not a persuasive, not a rhetorical exchange: the aim of participation is to understand others in order to make one oneself understood in order to allow others the opportunity to indicate just why their understanding of one's point of view does or does not appear to them sufficient reason to share it.

John Stuart Mill put it nicely in On Liberty: "He who knows only his own side of the case, knows little of that."

This suggests a self-interested "ethics of dialogue," which a truth seeker is committed to by his own search for truth. (This is in the spirit of Aristotle; see Roderick Long's paper linked to above.) It is a code, Van Dun writes, "to allow others to question one's most sincere convictions … to refrain from using rewards or punishments—promises or threats—as means for securing the agreement of others; to refuse to argue against one's better judgment; and to insist that others do likewise. But most of all: to respect the dialogical rights of others—their right to speak or not to speak, to listen or not to listen, to use their own judgment."

That we ought to respect these rights, recognized in the practice of science, follows from the fundamental norm that we ought to be reasonable—that one ought to respect rational nature, both in oneself and in others; that one ought to cultivate one's own reason and ought to allow others to do the same. This requirement of respect for the rational autonomy of every participant turns the dialogue into the primary political institution for preventing prejudice from establishing itself as an impregnable barrier against free and independent thought, and so for making science possible.

Fine, the critic might say, but what has this got to do with the rights of people who are not scientists and philosophers? Van Dun anticipates this objection: "[T]he requirement of reasonableness applies across-the-board to every human endeavor. It applies to action no less than speech. Human action always rests upon and involves judgment. Scientific or theoretical knowledge is not essentially or qualitatively different from 'ordinary' or practical knowledge."

He quotes Ludwig von Mises in this regard: Production "is not something physical, material, and external; it is a spiritual and intellectual phenomenon.... Man produces by dint of his reason...: the theories and poems, the cathedrals and the symphonies, the motor-cars and the airplane."

"There is, then," Van Dun adds, "a glaring inconsistency in the views of those who defend 'free speech' and 'the free market of ideas' but attack freedom of action and the free market in goods and services."

Respecting reason entails respecting persons. But respecting persons requires more than respecting their bodies. In pursuit of their projects in a finite world, people need to transform matter into means to their ends, endowing those things with purpose. They cannot pursue projects or respect others' pursuits if they cannot know what objects they may use by right, that is, without permission. "In order to respect others as rational agents we must know the distinction between 'mine' and 'thine,'" Van Dun writes. "…If we are to respect the person we ought to respect what is his, otherwise we would deny him the right to act on his own judgment, and thereby destroy the dialogical relationship."

This upends a common argument against private property, namely, that a land owner aggresses against others by excluding them; thus, it is said, nonaggression implies collective ownership. But this is wrong. The first to mix his labor with an unowned parcel transforms a mere thing into a means to an end. Further, the homesteader aggresses against no one in the process. If someone else interferes, he is the aggressor by withholding respect from the homesteader. This is not a matter of arbitrary definition. It is a fact—for if the first person to transform the parcel has no right to it, how can the second person to come along have a right? (This is not to deny that property law is complicated and that details would be shaped by local custom. But a coercive monopoly government is unqualified for that job. It takes a competitive market to get it right. See David Friedman's The Machinery of Freedom for details.)

The appeal of Van Dun's argument is palpable. It might look like an additional case for freedom, but it seems more like another demonstration that freedom is an objective condition for the life of man qua rational being. (I commend Rand's case read in conjunction with Roderick Long's Reason and Value. By the way, Van Dun's case is not to be confused with dubious "argumentation ethics," which holds that the very act of making an argument logically commits one to the self-ownership rights of one's interlocutor. That's reality-detached rationalism.)

The upshot is that a truth seeker undercuts his own project when he advocates government interference with other truth seekers, aka everyone else. He thereby relinquishes his truth-seeker credentials.

(I first explored Van Dun's paper years ago at the Foundation for Economic Education website.)

The "Ought" World

To live is to act (because life is conditional).

To act is to choose.

To choose is to prefer.

To prefer is to value or to pursue values. (Being fallible, we can err in thinking something is good when it is in fact bad.)

To think is to act.

Therefore, to think is to value. (James Ellias of Inductica calls this the "value axiom.")

Whether we like it or not, we're immersed in the "ought" world. Hume et al. were wrong. 

Note the irony: "ought" is associated with choice and free will, yet as long as we are alive, we cannot avoid valuing. No pre-moral choices exist. As Aristotle noticed, all action, logically, aims at an ultimate end--the good, happiness, contentment, call it what you will--because an infinite series of means leading nowhere is incoherent. (How would one resolve conflicting subordinate ends?) Aiming at a certain kind of life is intrinsic to action. It's baked in, pre-"chosen" for us by the logic of action. "For Aristotle, this ultimate end or good is not chosen; it is implicit in every desire and every choice, and all our other ends are to be understood as subordinate to it. The end is, as it were, forced on us; and the task of practical reason is simply to identify it," Roderick T. Long writes in Reason and Value: Aristotle versus Rand.

Ludwig von Mises, the praxeologist, understood this too. Yet Roderick Long has shown elsewhere that Mises, who thought reason could not judge ultimate ends, mistook constitutive means to the ultimate end for the ultimate end itself. A constitutive, or internal, means--as opposed to an instrumental, or external, means--is that without which the end cannot be conceived. To use Long's example, wearing a tie is constitutive of traditional dressing up. Buying a tie is instrumental. In other words, every time a man dresses up, he must wear a tie to be considered dressed up, but every time he dresses up, he need not buy a tie.

Paine on War

"It may with reason be said, that in the manner the English nation is represented, it signifies not where this right resides, whether in the Crown, or in the Parliament. War is the common harvest of all those who participate in the division and expenditure of public money, in all countries. It is the art of conquering at home: the object of it is an increase of revenue; and as revenue cannot be increased without taxes, a pretence must be made for expenditures. In reviewing the history of the English government, its wars and its taxes, a by-stander, not blinded by prejudice, nor warped by interest, would declare, that taxes were not raised to carry on wars, but that wars were raised to carry on taxes."

—Thomas Paine

TGIF: More on Menger on Value

Consumer goods are also called finished goods. The products we buy at the supermarket and other retail stores have, in less finished form, passed through many stages (including distribution), reaching back to the original factors of production: land and labor. Land includes anything nature-given and not produced. We think of those things as natural resources, but as Julian Simon taught us, it takes human ingenuity to convert nature-given stuff, which may have no apparent value for human well-being, into a resource that makes our lives better. (See Simon's invaluable The Ultimate Resource 2.)

We consumers want finished, not unfinished goods. Imagine you ordered a car online, and the next day, the dealer dumped a pile of metal, glass, plastic, computer chips, rubber, and so on on your front lawn. You would not be happy. "I don't want this pile of stuff. I want a car!" What's missing? Labor, producer goods (tools and machines), and time. That's also what you paid for. While you paid for the end product, all you received was some of the means.

Supply and demand in competitive markets set the prices of finished products. Sellers ask prices, and consumers ask themselves, "Is Product X important enough to me to justify giving up what I'm being asked to give up in exchange?" If I spend $5 on something, I forgo the good or service on which I might have spent that $5. Saving the money for a rainy day or lending it at interest are two such services I might have chosen instead.

Since the production of useful finished goods is the object of an economic system, it should be obvious that finished goods cannot be valued according to the presumed value of the factors—land, labor, tools, and semifinished goods—that went into producing them. It's got to be the other way around. This insight was not always apparent to economists. The classical economists, starting with Adam Smith, thought the cost of production, especially labor, determined the exchange value (price) of finished goods. One of the great achievements of Carl Menger, founder of the Austrian school, is his insight into why that is wrong.

As Menger wrote in his world-changing book, Principles of Economics (1871), "Among the most egregious of the fundamental errors that have had the most far-reaching consequences in the previous development of our science is the argument that goods attain value for us because goods were employed in their production that had value to us." In other words, people assumed that finished goods fetched money in the marketplace because valuable land, labor, and capital went into making them. They were wrong: "this argument is ... strictly opposed to all experience," Menger wrote. He went on (pp. 149-52):

[The argument] offers an explanation only for the value of goods we may designate as “products” but not for the value of all other goods, which appear as original factors of production. It does not explain the value of goods directly provided by nature, especially the services of land. It does not explain the value of labor services. Nor does it even ... explain the value of the services of capital. For the value of all these goods cannot be explained by the argument that goods derive their value from the value of the goods expended in their production. Indeed, it makes their value completely incomprehensible.

...The value of goods of lower order cannot, therefore, be determined by the value of the goods of higher order that were employed in their production. On the contrary, it is evident that the value of goods of higher order is always and without exception determined by the prospective value of the goods of lower order in whose production they serve. The existence of our requirements for goods of higher order is dependent upon the goods they serve to produce having expected economic character and hence expected value.

Higher-order goods are further from the consumer. Lower-order goods are closer. The lowest order is retail. We value means and ends. The question is: in which direction must the imputation of value run? Do we value the ends because we value the means? Or vice versa?

In securing our requirements for the satisfaction of our needs, we do not need command of goods that are suitable for the production of goods of lower order that have no expected value (since we have no requirements for them). We therefore have the principle that the value of goods of higher order is dependent upon the expected value of the goods of lower order they serve to produce. Hence goods of higher order can attain value, or retain it once they have it, only if, or as long as, they serve to produce goods that we expect to have value for us.

Who would argue with that? Imagine a machine that can produce only widgets, which consumers buy in great numbers. If one day, no one wanted widgets anymore, the machine would be worthless (except perhaps for scrap metal).

If this fact is established, it is clear also that the value of goods of higher order cannot be the determining factor in the prospective value of the corresponding goods of lower order. Nor can the value of the goods of higher order already expended in producing a good of lower order be the determining factor in its present value. On the contrary, the value of goods of higher order is, in all cases, regulated by the prospective value of the goods of lower order to whose production they have been or will be assigned by economizing men.

He wrapped up:

Only the satisfaction of our needs has direct and immediate significance to us. In each concrete instance, this significance is measured by the importance of the various satisfactions for our lives and well-being. We next attribute the exact quantitative magnitude of this importance to the specific goods on which we are conscious of being directly dependent for the satisfactions in question—that is, we attribute it to economic goods of first order.... In cases in which our requirements are not met or are only incompletely met by goods of first order, and in which goods of first order therefore attain value for us, we turn to the corresponding goods of the next higher order in our efforts to satisfy our needs as completely as possible, and attribute the value that we attributed to goods of first order in turn to goods of second, third, and still higher orders whenever these goods of higher order have economic character. The value of goods of higher order is therefore, in the final analysis, nothing but a special form of the importance we attribute to our lives and well-being. Thus, as with goods of first order, the factor that is ultimately responsible for the value of goods of higher order is merely the importance that we attribute to those satisfactions with respect to which we are aware of being dependent on the availability of the goods of higher order whose value is under consideration.

Why does this matter? It matters because the free market is an undesigned institution that serves consumers and their idea of well-being. True, a risk-taking entrepreneur may offer something consumers haven't asked for. (Henry Ford said consumers would have asked for faster horses.) How does that turn out? Sometimes consumers are delighted and make an entrepreneur fabulously wealthy. At other times they tell him to get back to the drawing board or lose control of his assets in favor of someone more competent.

Consumers rule! Power to the consumers! Politicians: out of the way!