The Wrong Hill

by John T. Kennedy

The problem with fighting the war of ideas on the wrong hill is that you can lose your war on that hill, but you can’t win it there. Many anti-war libertarians are choosing the wrong hill to fight on.  They argue against war as if it were bad public policy. They argue that war is bad, war is evil, war is unprofitable, or that war is senseless. Libertarians can lose a war of ideas with these arguments, but winning such an argument will yield no libertarian victory.

I am not an anti-war libertarian.  War can be moral; it is possible for there to be a right side in a war.  Contrary to what seems to be the prevailing opinion among libertarians, I hold that collateral damage can be moral – that there is no absolute moral requirement for me to hold the lives of innocent bystanders above my own when responding reasonably with deadly force to a dire threat to me and mine. In principle I am not against making war on those who collaborated in the destruction of the World Trade Center. And I hold that none of these views are inconsistent with principled libertarianism.

What I do oppose, on proper grounds of libertarian principles, is state war. Whether a war on terrorism is right or wrong is really irrelevant to the argument libertarians need to be making now. It’s irrelevant because even if a war were good, even if it produced great good for a very great number of people, there could still be no moral justification for compelling dissenters to collaborate in such a war.

Recently I saw the film Shenandoah for the first time. I recommend it as a terrific libertarian film. In perhaps his last great role Jimmy Stewart plays, I kid you not, an anti-war anarcho-capitalist. Stewart plays Charlie Anderson, the patriarch of a large family in Virginia during the Civil War.  Charlie Anderson takes the proper principled anarcho-capitalist stand on the war. He never publicly debates the merits of the war; instead he simply claims for himself the right of self-determination:

“Now let me tell you something Johnson, 'fore you get on my wrong side. My corn I take serious because it's my corn. And my potatoes and my tomatoes and my fences I take note of because they're mine. But this war is not mine and I take no note of it.”

It doesn’t matter if there is a right side in the war, neither side can have any right to require Charlie Anderson to participate in any way. This is the argument libertarians need to make, not that war is evil, but that it can never be moral to force others to participate.  It will do no good to win the argument that a war is evil while implicitly accepting that it is legitimately a collective decision; that’s the wrong hill. The right hill is the one where we reject the collectivist premise first.

We will not persuade the statists with words.  They will insist that they require our participation to achieve the common good.  We should decline to debate the merits of the contemplated collective action and instead answer them like Charlie Anderson:

Johnson: Virginia needs all of her sons Mr. Anderson.

Anderson: That might be so Johnson, but these are my sons! They don't belong to the state. When they were babies I never saw the state comin' around with a spare tit. We never asked anything of the state and never expected anything. We do our own living and thanks to no man for the right.