War As the Health of the State

Many libertarians are uncomfortable with foreign policy matters and prefer to spend their energies either on fundamental questions of libertarian theory or on such “domestic” concerns as the free market or privatizing postal service or garbage disposal. Yet an attack on war or a warlike foreign policy is of crucial importance to libertarians. There are two important reasons. One has become a cliche, but is all too true nevertheless: the overriding importance of preventing a nuclear holocaust. To all the long-standing reasons, moral and economic, against an interventionist foreign policy has now been added the imminent, ever-present threat of world destruction. If the world should be destroyed, all the other problems and all the other isms — socialism, capitalism, liberalism, or libertarianism — would be of no importance whatsoever. Hence the prime importance of a peaceful foreign policy and of ending the nuclear threat.

The other reason is that, apart from the nuclear menace, war, in the words of the libertarian Randolph Bourne, “is the health of the [p. 278] State.” War has always been the occasion of a great — and usually permanent — acceleration and intensification of State power over society. War is the great excuse for mobilizing all the energies and resources of the nation, in the name of patriotic rhetoric, under the aegis and dictation of the State apparatus. It is in war that the State really comes into its own: swelling in power, in number, in pride, in absolute dominion over the economy and the society. Society becomes a herd, seeking to kill its alleged enemies, rooting out and suppressing all dissent from the official war effort, happily betraying truth for the supposed public interest. Society becomes an armed camp, with the values and the morals — as the libertarian Albert Jay Nock once phrased it — of an “army on the march.”

It is particularly ironic that war always enables the State to rally the energies of its citizens under the slogan of helping it to defend the country against some bestial outside menace. For the root myth that enables the State to wax fat off war is the canard that war is a defense by the State of its subjects. The facts, however, are precisely the reverse. For if war is the health of the State, it is also its greatest danger. A State can only “die” by defeat in war or by revolution. In war, therefore, the State frantically mobilizes its subjects to fight for it against another State, under the pretext that it is fighting to defend them.8

In the history of the United States, war has generally been the main occasion for the often permanent intensification of the power of the State over society. In the War of 1812 against Great Britain, as we have indicated above, the modern inflationary fractional-reserve banking system first came into being on a large scale, as did protective tariffs, internal federal taxation, and a standing army and navy. And a direct consequence of the wartime inflation was the reestablishment of a central bank, the Second Bank of the United States. Virtually all of these statist policies and institutions continued permanently after the war was over. The Civil War and its virtual one-party system led to the permanent establishment of a neomercantilist policy of Big Government and the subsidizing of various big business interests through protective tariffs, huge land grants and other subsidies to railroads, federal excise taxation, and a federally controlled banking system. It also brought the first imposition of federal conscription and an income tax, setting dangerous precedents [p. 279] for the future. World War I brought the decisive and fateful turn from a relatively free and laissez-faire economy to the present system of corporate state monopoly at home and permanent global intervention abroad. The collectivist economic mobilization during the war, headed by War Industries Board Chairman Bernard Baruch, fulfilled the emerging dream of big business leaders and progressive intellectuals for a cartelized and monopolized economy planned by the federal government in cozy collaboration with big business leadership. And it was precisely this wartime collectivism that nurtured and developed a nationwide labor movement that would eagerly take its place as junior partner in the new corporate State economy. This temporary collectivism, furthermore, served as a permanent beacon and model for big business leaders and corporatist politicians as the kind of perman ent peacetime economy that they would like to impose on the United States. As food czar, Secretary of Commerce, and later as President, Herbert C. Hoover helped bring this continuing monopolized statist economy into being, and the vision was fulfilled in a recrudescence of wartime agencies and even wartime personnel by Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal.9  World War I also brought a permanent Wilsonian global intervention abroad, the fastening of the newly imposed Federal Reserve System and a permanent income tax on society, high federal budgets, massive conscription, and intimate connections between economic boom, war contracts, and loans to Western nations.

World War II was the culmination and fulfillment of all these trends: Franklin D. Roosevelt finally fastened upon American life the heady promise of the Wilsonian domestic and foreign program: permanent partnership of Big Government, big business, and big unions; a continuing and ever-expanding military-industrial complex; conscription; continuing and accelerating inflation; and an endless and costly role as counterrevolutionary “policeman” for the entire world. The Roosevelt-Truman-Eisenhower-Kennedy-Johnson-Nixon-Ford-Carter world (and there is little substantive difference among any of these administrations) is “corporate liberalism,” the corporate State fulfilled.

It is particularly ironic that conservatives, at least in rhetoric supporters [p. 280] of a free-market economy, should be so complacent and even admiring of our vast military-industrial complex. There is no greater single distortion of the free market in present-day America. The bulk of our scientists and engineers has been diverted from basic research for civilian ends, from increasing productivity and the standard of living of consumers, into wasteful, inefficient, and nonproductive military and space boondoggles. These boondoggles are every bit as wasteful but infinitely more destructive than the vast pyramid building of the Pharaoh. It is no accident that Lord Keynes’s economics have proved to be the economics par excellence of the corporate liberal State. For Keynesian economists place equal approval upon all forms of government spending, whether on pyramids, missiles, or steel plants; by definition all of these expenditures swell the gross national product, regardless of how wasteful they may be. It is only recently that many liberals have begun to awaken to the evils of the waste, inflation, and militarism that Keynesian corporate liberalism has brought to America.

As the scope of government spending — military and civilian alike — has widened, science and industry have been skewed more and more into unproductive goals and highly inefficient processes. The goal of satisfying consumers as efficiently as possible has been increasingly replaced by the currying of favors by government contractors, often in the form of highly wasteful “cost-plus” contracts. Politics, in field after field, has replaced economics in guiding the activities of industry. Furthermore, as entire industries and regions of the country have come to depend upon government and military contracts, a huge vested interest has been created in continuing the programs, heedless of whether they retain even the most threadbare excuse of military necessity. Our economic prosperity has been made to depend on continuing the narcotic of unproductive and antiproductive government spending.10

One of the most perceptive and prophetic critics of America’s entry into World War II was the classical liberal writer John T. Flynn. In his As We Go Marching, written in the midst of the war he had tried so hard to forestall, Flynn charged that the New Deal, culminating in its wartime embodiment, had finally established the corporate State that important elements of big business had been seeking since the turn of the twentieth century. “The general idea,” Flynn wrote, was “to reorder the society by making it a planned and coerced economy instead of a free one, in which business would be brought together into great guilds [p. 281] or an immense corporative structure, combining the elements of self-rule and government supervision with a national economic policing system to enforce these decrees . . . . This, after all, is not so very far from what business had been talking about . . . .”11

The New Deal had first attempted to create such a new society in the National Recovery Administration and the Agricultural Adjustment Administration, mighty engines of “regimentation” hailed by labor and business alike. Now the advent of World War II had reestablished this collectivist program — “an economy supported by great streams of debt under complete control, with nearly all the planning agencies functioning with almost totalitarian power under a vast bureaucracy.” After the war, Flynn prophesied, the New Deal would attempt to expand this system permanently into international affairs. He wisely predicted that the great emphasis of vast governmental spending after the war would continue to be military, since this is the one form of government spending to which conservatives would never object, and which workers would also welcome for its creation of jobs. “Thus militarism is the one great glamorous public-works project upon which a variety of elements in the community can be brought into agreement.”12

Flynn predicted that America’s postwar policy would be “internationalist” in the sense of being imperialist. Imperialism “is, of course, international . . . in the sense that war is international,” and it will follow from the policy of militarism. “We will do what other countries have done; we will keep alive the fears of our people of the aggressive ambitions of other countries and we will ourselves embark upon imperialistic enterprises of our own.” Imperialism will ensure for the United States the existence of perpetual “enemies,” of waging what Charles A. Beard was later to call “perpetual war for perpetual peace.” For, Flynn pointed out, “we have managed to acquire bases all over the world . . . . There is no part of the world where trouble can break out where . . . we cannot claim that our interests are menaced. Thus menaced there must remain when the war is over a continuing argument in the hands of the imperialists for a vast naval establishment and a huge army ready to attack anywhere or to resist an attack from all the enemies we shall be obliged to have.”13

One of the most moving portrayals of the change in American life wrought by World War II was written by John Dos Passes, a lifelong [p. 282] radical and individualist who was pushed from “extreme left” to “extreme right” by the march of the New Deal. Dos Passes expressed his bitterness in his postwar novel, The Grand Design:

At home we organized bloodbanks and civilian defense and imitated the rest of the world by setting up concentration camps (only we called them relocation centers) and stuffing into them

American citizens of Japanese ancestry . . . without benefit of habeas corpus . . .

The President of the United States talked the sincere democrat and so did the members of Congress. In the Administration there were devout believers in civil liberty. “Now we’re busy fighting a war; we’ll deploy all four freedoms later on,” they said . . . .

War is a time of Caesars . . . .

And the American people were supposed to say thank you for the century of the Common Man turned over for relocation behind barbed wire so help him God.

We learned. There are things we learned to do but we have not learned, in spite of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence and the great debates at Richmond and Philadelphia how to put power over the lives of men into the hands of one man and to make him use it wisely.14

• 8For more on a libertarian theory of foreign policy, see Murray N. Rothbard, “War, Peace and the State,” in Egalitarianism As A Revolt Against Nature and other Essays (Washington, D.C.: Libertarian Review Press, 1974), pp. 70-80.
• 9Numerous revisionist historians have recently developed this interpretation of twentieth-century American history. In particular, see the works of, among others, Gabriel Kolko, James Weinstein, Robert Wiebe, Robert D. Cuff, William E. Leuchtenburg, Ellis D. Hawley, Melvin I. Urofsky, Joan Hoff Wilson, Ronald Radosh, Jerry Israel, David Eakins, and Paul Conkin — again, as in foreign policy revisionism, under the inspiration of William Appleman Williams. A series of essays using this approach may be found in Ronald Radosh and Murray N. Rothbard, eds., A New History of Leviathan (New York: Dutton, 1972).
• 10On the economic distortions imposed by the military-industrial policies, see Seymour Melman, ed., The War Economy of the United States (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1971).
• 11John T. Flynn, As We Go Marching (New York: Doubleday, Doran & Co., 1944), pp. 193-94.
• 12Ibid., pp. 198, 201, 207.
• 13Ibid., pp. 212-13, 225-26.
• 14John Dos Passes, The Grand Design (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1949), pp. 416-418.