Column by Scott Lazarowitz.
Exclusive to STR
Economist Robert Wenzel recently gave Libertarian Party presidential nominee Gary Johnson a tough interview . Wenzel pushed hard for honest answers on behalf of mainly his “hardcore libertarian” readers and listeners. By “hardcore,” he refers to those with a bias toward Austrian School economic thought, Rothbardian ethics and an emphasis on civil liberties.
But trying to get answers from Johnson to basic questions, such as what books on Austrian economics he’s read and who his top libertarian authors are, seemed like a dentist trying to extract a tooth. At times, it was very painful to hear.
In the end, we can conclude that Johnson is not really libertarian, and not really liberal or conservative. No, Gary Johnson is a politician. And a statist politician at that.
In that very revealing interview, we learned that Gary Johnson doesn’t really know or understand the basic moral, philosophical and economic underpinnings of libertarianism, of
liberty: the recognition of the rights of the individual to self-ownership, the importance of
non-aggression , the sanctity of
private property ,
voluntary contracts and
voluntary exchange .
If Johnson is a libertarian, then he is more of a “
lifestyle libertarian ,” without any particular regard to the aforementioned principles of liberty. But Johnson is much more of a statist than a libertarian, and not just a minimal statist or
minarchist , such as
Jacob Hornberger of the
Future of Freedom Foundation or Congressman Ron Paul, but a statist in general. To Johnson, it seems, the State comes first, followed by the people and whatever liberty or property the State lets them have.
For example, Johnson supports the legalization of marijuana, but
not other drugs . This shows that Johnson doesn’t understand the basic
moral principle of self-ownership, that
the individual owns one’s own body and has a right to put into it whatever one wants, as long as one takes responsibility for the consequences of one’s decisions.
Worse than that statist position on drugs, Johnson has stated that he would
tax marijuana . He also supports the “Fair Tax,” a national consumption tax. Johnson here doesn’t understand the moral sanctity of private contracts. In this instance, forcing an individual to pay government bureaucrats some extra fee just because of purchasing and consuming some product is as much theft as forcing an individual to report one’s earnings to the government and forfeit a portion of the fruits of one’s labor to a non-productive bureaucrat. Such a
consumer tax-theft is also regressive in that taxing consumers of any economic background generally negatively affects the lower and middle classes but not particularly the upper classes.
Additionally, in principle, any third-party intruding itself into the private contract between traders, between buyers and sellers, is engaging in acts of intrusion. To me that is the same as trespassing and ought to be considered as such.
Another example of Gary Johnson’s apparent view of the State as above principles are his
foreign interventionist views , and his proposal to cut “43%” from the military budget, and close only
some of the U.S.
foreign military bases . This shows a lack of understanding of the
moral principles of
No Trespassing and the
Golden Rule. Obviously, most of us in the U.S. would not want foreign governments to place their governmental apparatus and military bases here in Massachusetts, Idaho or Georgia, so we really should not have our governmental apparatus and military bases occupying and trespassing on other countries. We would not want foreign governments starting wars against us here, so morally, our government should not be starting wars against foreign peoples who are of no threat to us, such as Afghanistan and Iraq (or Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, Syria, Libya, etc.).
Another libertarian candidate for President who is not an anarchist but a minimal statist like Jacob Hornberger is Ron Paul. If elected to the presidency, Dr. Paul would close all U.S. foreign military bases and bring all the U.S. troops home, as he recognizes that we wouldn’t want Russian troops or Saudi troops stationed in Texas or California, so therefore U.S. troops should not be occupying those foreign lands that are not U.S. territories.
When asked by Robert Wenzel to cite some of his favorite libertarians or libertarian authors, Gary Johnson named the Reason Foundation, the Cato Institute and the late economist Milton Friedman. Johnson was asked specifically about Murray Rothbard, Ludwig von Mises and Henry Hazlitt, but seemed to show total ignorance of who those great masters of libertarianism were.
Milton Friedman was supposedly a self-proclaimed libertarian, but he
really was a true statist who
supported central banking and government control over the people’s money. Friedman only suggested that those institutions and policies
could be reformed or replaced with other government institutions and made to
work better.
Sorry, not really. When the state seizes control over the
people’s money and
banking , and over the people’s wealth, those agents of the State will use such monopolies and restrictive monetary laws
for their own enrichment , and that is what we have today. It is a corruptive system that is inherently doomed to fail, a system that inherently violates the people’s right to their own choice of media of exchange and trade, their right to the fruits of their labor and their right to establish voluntary contracts in the fields of banking and investments.
The party that nominated Gary Johnson for President, the
Libertarian Party , has been around for 40 years, and has not made any progress in making itself known to the general population, and it’s not solely the fault of the exclusive statist media. One true principled libertarian the LP nominated was
Ron Paul in
1988 , endorsed by Murray Rothbard, of course.
Harry Browne was
another one .
But the LP has more recently shown cluelessness in not really knowing who their nominees really are, particularly with Johnson now and their 2008 nominee Bob Barr. Barr was an inconsistent libertarian at best. But really, like Johnson, Barr is just another politician. How could a “libertarian”
endorse the socialist warmonger Newt Gingrich as Barr had done this election cycle, and not Ron Paul?
And also, the statist or
minarchist Libertarian Party is not really the “party of principle” when its platform shows one compromise of principle after another, and getting worse each election. As a group, they have not really taken seriously the ideas of the market-anarchists, anarcho-capitalists, voluntaryists, anti-statists, i.e. the people most of whom actually believe in the absolute rights of the individual, the sanctity of property, contracts and non-aggression.
While Ron Paul is a minimal statist and a “constitutionalist” (Doh!), at least Dr. Paul would close down those trespassing U.S. foreign
military bases and end the U.S. drone strikes that do nothing but murder innocent civilians abroad and provoke foreigners and create new “militants” (i.e. people who don’t like their innocent family members being blown up and murdered and don’t like their homes and schools bombed to smithereens, etc.). And Paul would end the Federal Reserve System and repeal legal tender laws, he would repeal all drug laws and let non-violent State-hostages out of the cages to resume their lives. It seems that Johnson would never consider doing any of those things.
I am glad that Robert Wenzel was able to out the statist in Gary Johnson, able to extract from Johnson the extreme ignorance of the principles of economic freedom and civil liberties that I’m sure many STR readers already understand.
The Libertarian Party sure needs to get its act together and start considering the real principles of freedom, and include people who oppose central banking and instead favor monetary and banking freedom, and they need to get rid of the warmongers.
But, in the end, the LP and everyone else need to realize that central planning doesn’t work, and DC can never be “reformed,” as Ron Paul seems to want to do.
Perhaps
voting for no one might be the best alternative going forward to a better future.
But the reality is, the federal government needs to be totally dismantled. Here is Lew Rockwell’s
30-day plan to accomplish just that. And then, after we get rid of the federal government, we can concentrate on each and every one of America’s 50
state governments. And then, we can remove each and every county and city and town government and all the non-productive bureaucrats and monopolists whose daily trespasses and thefts are the true crimes of our society.
Perhaps some day Gary Johnson will read Rothbard , Mises , Paul , Rockwell , Hornberger , and Hans Hoppe (among many other real libertarians), to give him a better understanding of what “libertarianism” really is all about.