MLM Directory

Its the War and other : a Job well done? from government , or exact the opposite?

What is unique about our moment is that we live under a regime that has come to believe that the government itself can produce this result for us if we only give the government enough power, money, and managerial discretion to accomplish this goal. The Left is the major voice criticizing the war on terror, while the Right, much to my dismay, has enlisted in ways I could not have imagined back in the 1990s. The Right has led the call for war abroad, and called for speech controls, domestic spying, and more power to the president to arrest, jail, and even convict people in military courts without the slightest concern for human rights and liberties. Countless times I've had to explain to people who otherwise are suspicious of government that it is not a good thing to give the US government the power to overthrow any government in the world or torture people abroad or pass out trillions in reconstruction aid. When the Left makes a case for total government management at home and yet nonintervention abroad, while the Right argues for free markets at home and a global war on terror abroad, there is some sort of political schizophrenia alive in the land. People who have doubted the power of government to do much at home seem to take leave of their senses when it comes to war abroad. And it is hardly a surprise that they have been proven wrong. The debates about the war on terror have typically involved great detail about the validity of intelligence reports, investigations of terror networks, discussion of the reliability of this or that foreign regime, and the like. But none of this is really necessary if you want to make a sound judgment about whether to support the war in question. What we really need is more general knowledge about the nature of government and its limits. If we understand how it will lose the small wars against things such as cigarettes and liquor, we can more clearly understand how it loses the large wars. The attempt to ban liquor led to a vast increase in liquor distribution and consumption through black-market means. The campaign to wage a war on poverty resulted in more poverty. The war on literacy has created generations of illiterates. The wars on cigarettes and drugs have been spectacularly unsuccessful, and for proof you need look no further than prison, an environment that government fully controls and which is predictably swimming in cigarettes and drugs of all sorts. There are some things that a state just cannot do, no matter how much power it accumulates or employs. I'm sorry to tell this to the American Left, but the war on warm weather is not going to be any more successful than any other of these wars. And I'm sorry to tell this to the American Right, but there is no way that the American government can kill every person on the planet who resents US imperialism. The attempt to do so will generate more, not less, terrorism. We are now more than half a decade into this war on terror. The State Department now says, based on its own data, that the results of the war are "mixed." In government parlance, the admission of mixed results means, in regular language, total failure Gone was the rhetoric from 2002 about the great success. It was replaced with frenzied attacks on ever-increasing numbers of terror groups. Instead of 10 or 20, there were hundreds and hundreds of them taking the lives of ever more people. Incredibly, the State Department decided not to make public the 2005 figures since attacks rose yet again. Officials had to be hauled before a Congressional committee before they would give any specifics. Now they can't get away with hiding the numbers but you still have to look very hard to find them. The bottom line is that since the war on terror began, the incidents that qualify as terrorism have increased by an incredible 26 times. For every one incident in 2001, there are now 26 incidents. For every person killed by terrorism in 2002, 23 people were killed in 2006. Meanwhile, the polls reflect the perception that the world is more, not less, dangerous since the war on terror began. Indeed, among those polled, 81% now believe that the world is becoming more dangerous. Are we going to call this a job well done? It depends on what you call a good job. It fits precisely with what we might expect government to do: its wars always and everywhere make the problem worse, and not better. It is essential that we look at this war in light of history. At the end of World War II, the government and its elites were quite desperate for a massive global cause to keep spending high and the government in control. Communism was picked, and so our former allies in the war became our sworn enemies. Ten years ago, with communism gone, the American warmongers had little to do, other than intervene in small skirmishes. Finally they hit on a great idea: demonize Islamic radicalism. Here is a nation without borders that is terrifying to the American people, just like communism. Despite all the appearance of sadness and anger after 9–11, the elites also understood that it meant the continuation of the old war apparatus. And for that, they were not entirely regretful. At last there was a pretext for war preparedness and war itself that rivaled the old communist threat. So off we went into this structure. There has been no shortage of rhetoric. No expense is spared on arms escalation. There is no lack of will. The effort has the support of plenty of smart people. It is backed by threats of massive bloodshed. What is missing in the war on terror is the essential means to cause the war to yield beneficial results. Of all the billions of potential terrorists out there, and the infinite possibilities of how, when, and where they will strike, there is no way the state can possibly stop them, even if it had the incentive to do so. Behind terrorism is political grievance. This is not speculation. This is the word of the terrorists themselves, from Timothy McVeigh to Osama Bin Laden to innumerable suicide bombers. They are not acting randomly. They have goals. The goal is, first, get the US government and its troops out. And if history teaches us anything it is that no country wants to be ruled by a foreign power, whether that foreign occupation takes the form of colonialism or outright military dictatorship. People would rather run a country badly than have it run well from the outside. No one should understand this better than the American people, whose country was born in a revolt against foreign rule. The second goal of the terrorists is to gain access to the levers of power. In many cases, the United States created these, such as in Afghanistan and Iraq. We insist that there must be a single governing power. Then we are surprised when groups appear that are determined to control it. It would have been much better for everyone in Iraq and Afghanistan to have left them without states at all. The longer we continue in the failures of our war on terror, the more problems that we generate. The pool of actual terrorists (like the poor in the War on Poverty) is limited and can be known, and they are the ones the state focuses on. But the pool of potential terrorists (and potential poor people) is unlimited, and unleashed by the very means the state employs in its war. Hence, not only does the state not accomplish its stated goals, it recruits more people into the armies of the enemy, and ends up completely swamped by a problem that grows ever worse until the state throws in the towel. In the meantime, the target population is able to make a mockery of the state through sheer defiance. The means of conducting war has all the features and failings of every form of central planning. There is an overutilization of resources, and, when the results are the very opposite of the promise, they overutilize some more resources. They do not account for the possibility of error, even though error is more common than anything. Rather than admit error, the war planners shift the blame. The war planners do not account for basic traits of human nature, such as the will to resist. They assume that the world is theirs for the making and never confront the fact that there are forces beyond their control. The people who planned the war on Iraq dismissed suggestions that perhaps not everyone in Iraq is going to be overjoyed at the prospect of gaining freedom through bombing, destruction, and martial law administered by a US military dictatorship or a puppet regime. But can't the state just kill more, employ ever more violence, perhaps even terrify the enemy into passivity? It cannot work. Even prisons experience rioting. The theorist who first saw the collapse of the ideology of the nation-state, Israeli historian Martin van Creveld, was asked about this in an interview for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. He was refreshingly blunt: "The Americans in Vietnam tried it. They killed between two-and-a-half and three million Vietnamese. I don't see that it helped them much." Without admitting defeat, the Americans finally pulled out of Vietnam, which today has a thriving stock market. To a notable extent, the war on poverty has ended its most aggressive phases and poverty is declining. What does this experience tell us about the War on Terror? The right approach to this program, as to all government programs, is to end it immediately. But wouldn't that mean surrender? It would mean that the state surrenders its role but not that everyone else does. Had the airlines been in charge of their own security, 9–11 would not have happened. Bin Laden would have a hard time gaining recruits. Muslim fundamentalism would be dealt a serious blow, for no longer would US policy seem specifically designed to feed the madness of its lunatic fringe. In all the talk of war on Iraq, I've yet to hear anyone recently claim that taking out Saddam or bringing about a regime change made the world a more peaceful, happier place. No one really believes that. The 1990 war on Iraq gave rise to al-Qaeda, led to the bombing of the Oklahoma City federal building, and emboldened an entire generation of Muslims to devote their lives to fighting America. The new war in Iraq has done the same. And where did these fanatics come from in the first place? They were subsidized in the 1980s by US policy. We believed that they were good guys because they were fighting communism. Some of the same groups that we are now bombing in Afghanistan and Iraq we were wining and dining in the 1980s in the pursuit of the Cold War. Thus has one bad intervention led to another, precisely in the way that Mises spelled out in his 1929 book Critique of Interventionism. He explained that interventionism is not a stable policy. It creates imbalances that cry out for correction, either by abandoning the policy or pursuing it further to the point of collapse. For this reason, the War on Terror is impossible, not in the sense that it cannot cause immense amounts of bloodshed and destruction and loss of liberty, but in the sense that it cannot finally achieve what it is supposed to achieve, and will only end in creating more of the same conditions that led to its declaration in the first place. In other words, it is a typical government program, costly and unworkable, like socialism, like the War on Poverty, like every other attempt by the government to shape reality according to its own designs. Now let us look at the flip side of the impossibility thesis. If government wars are impossible, what is possible? The answer was provided by the old liberal school: freedom. Society contains within itself the capacity to self-organize. There is nothing that government can do to produce a better result. This is true in domestic and foreign policy. "The idea of liberalism starts with the freedom of the individual," Mises wrote. "It rejects all rule of some persons over others; it knows no master peoples and no subject peoples, just as within the nation itself it distinguishes between no masters and no serfs." The war on Iraq has enjoyed some measure of public support based on the desire for revenge. Even though Saddam had nothing to do with 9–11, people wanted someone to suffer. What we tend to forget is that this is an old motive for war, and it can lead to calamity. The I'm often asked what an average person can do to stop the madness and further liberty. The first and most important step is intellectual. We all need to begin to say no to the state on an intellectual level. When asked what we would like the government to do for us, we need to be prepared to reply: nothing. We should not ask it to save our children, nor provide security, nor vanquish all evil, nor give us anything at all. We should not ask government to win a war on terror, end poverty, make everyone healthy and literate, provide for us when we are old, or anything else. Nothing the government does takes place without a greater cost than benefit to society. Knowing this, we can still be good citizens. We can be good parents, teachers, workers, entrepreneurs, church members, students, and contributors to society in a million different ways. This is far more important to the future of liberty than anything else we do. We must regain our confidence in our capacity for self-governance. I believe this is happening already. Even if the public sector cannot and will not prepare for a future of liberty, we can. Let us look for and work toward the triumph of liberty unencumbered by Leviathan and its wars. ________________________________________ Ludwig von Mises said that the great accomplishment of economists was to draw attention to the extreme limits on the power of government. His point was not merely that government should be limited, but that it is limited by the very structure of reality. It cannot make all people rich by its own initiative. It cannot provide universal housing, literacy, and health. It cannot raise wages across the board. It cannot ban products. Those who seek to accomplish economic ends such as these are choosing the wrong means. That is because there is something more powerful than government: namely economic law. And what is economic law? It is a force that operates within the structure of all societies everywhere that governs the production and allocation of material resources and time according to strict bounds of what is possible. Some things are just not possible. It just so happens that this includes most of the demands that are made by the public and pressure groups on the government. This was the great discovery of the modern science of economics. This was not known by the ancients. It was not known by the fathers of the early church. It was the discovery of the medieval schoolmen, and the insight was gradually elaborated upon and systematized over the centuries, culminating in the classical and Austrian traditions of thought. The power of government to do what we desire is strictly limited. Those who do not understand this point do not understand economics. And the economic teaching has a broader implication that concerns the organization of society itself. Government is not free to make and unmake society as it sees fit. It is not a tool we can use to fulfill our private dreams. Society is too complicated, too far reaching, too much a reflection of the free volition of individual actors, for government to be able to accomplish its ends. Most often, what government attempts to do — whether abolish poverty, end liquor consumption, or make all citizens literate and healthy — ends up backfiring and generating the exact opposite.

Public Comments

1. No. Expose blunders and slip-ups with human errors in not worshiping God. Expose living human kind were doing things at own whims and fancy in making a mess out there. Expose blunders and slip-ups with human errors in the creation of living human kind into mankind of intelligent design being created into defective, malfunction humanoids in making a mess in kicking the butts of own children, own generation and living human kind living in misery with loss of our creator's universal gifts of life. Expose the blunders and slip-ups with human errors with communication problems communicating in ghostly and deadly words instead of living words from our creator. Expose the blunders and slip-ups with human errors over the loss of the "Spoils of the war" that was left behind after the Liberation of Freedom from world war two in making a mess out there. Joshua 7.11