I have four children, one of whom is grown, and all of them have grown up under a government that has continually waged elective and aggressive wars. There has never been a time in any of my children’s lives that Washington politicians were not incessantly haranguing the public about how “we are at war” and that anyone who opposes the regime is “with the terrorists,” “a foreign agent,” “unpatriotic,” or “anti-Semitic.” There has never been a time in their lives that the United States government was not calling for “regime change” somewhere, or actively occupying at least one foreign country. In other words, the United States is now a country devoted to a permanent state of war.
Not surprisingly, the federal government then uses these wars as excuses to eviscerate American freedoms, spend trillions of dollars and rack up gargantuan deficits that will impose a heavy financial burden for decades to come.
Many millions of Americans fall for this trick over and over again. In recent centuries, though, there have been many who were not quite so easily fooled. These were the defenders of liberty we now call “classical liberals” or “radical liberals” or “libertarians.” Indeed, the more radically these activists were opposed to state power, the more radically they opposed militarism and war. They understood, decades before Randolph Bourne coined the phrase “war is the health of the state,” that war is among every regime’s favorite tool in growing state power and destroying freedom.
For the radical liberals of that time, the fight for freedom was synonymous with the fight for peace. To fight for freedom meant to oppose imperialism, colonialism, standing armies, and the profligate spending that comes with it all.
For instance, the great Frédéric Bastiat wanted to abolish the French standing army, end conscription, and drastically reduce military spending. The influential libertarian publisher Charles Dunoyer, an ally of Jean-Baptiste Say, called standing armies “the shame and scourge of civilization.” In America, George Mason came to similar conclusions.
In Britain, the radical free-trader Richard Cobden said the British imperialists had “carried bloodshed into every quarter of the globe.” Cobden also succinctly summarized how states use militarism against the people: “The ‘true secret’ of despots … is to employ one nation in cutting the throats of another, so that neither may have time to reform the abuses in their own domestic government.”
Similarly, Herbert Spencer denounced British foreign interventions, refusing to “support the troops” in the name of patriotism. He wrote that when British troops willfully kill foreigners in imperial wars, “I don’t care if they are shot themselves.”
At the turn of the 20thcentury, when Americans embraced global interventionism with the Spanish-American war, the libertarian William Graham Sumner composed a eulogy for the freedoms Americans would soon lose. Sumner sadly noted that true republican freedom “was a possibility which was within our reach if we had been wise enough to grasp and hold it.” Instead, Sumner believed Americans had thrown away their freedoms in their quest for imperial glory.
Not surprisingly, Ludwig von Mises fully carried this tradition into the 20th century. He reminds us that “Society has arisen out of the works of peace; the essence of society is peacemaking. Peace and not war is the father of all things.” Like the liberals of the previous century, Mises denounced imperialism and colonialism. He understood that the fight for peace is the fight against state power.
Today, the Mises Institute preserves this tradition in the 21st century.
