Here’s a worthwhile article by monarcho-symp Rothbardite PC victim Hans-Hermann Hoppe: The Intellectual Incoherence of Conservatism. The point of the article is that there is no “Disraelian,” “big government,” “social nationalist” or even “compassionate” conservatism, at least not today and not as the last is now understood. The basic problem is that you aren’t going to have individual integrity, family values, community cohesion or religion if you have the welfare state, because the welfare state says that government is the hand of providence, and that individual integrity, family values and community cohesion don’t really matter because the government sees to it that everyone ends up in an OK place anyway.
Since he’s an economist Hoppe insists on economic law: taxes on productive behavior inhibit it, and subsidies for improvidence and antisocial behavior call forth supplies thereof. There are other ways to make the same points if it doesn’t seem humanistic enough to say that “immutable economic laws” (Hoppe uses the expression) determine human behavior. You can say, for example, that the attempt to administer well-being centrally is an attack on the irreducible dignity and significance of the choices made by the human person, and it’s at odds with the social nature of man as expressed through his free self-organization. Hoppe’s way of speaking has the value of vigor and clarity, but there are other considerations as well, and to each his own.
For Hoppe, “welfare state” includes middle class benefits like public education and social security. I’m inclined to agree, at least for the most part. The point of public education is that the state takes over raising our children, and the point of social security is that the state looks after members of our immediate family (our parents) if they run into problems because of lack of cash. It is unclear why either is a good idea in the long run.
The general point is that the state can’t have general responsibility for results in individual cases. “Social justice” might be OK as a background regulatory ideal, but not as something for social policy to try to bring about directly. I’m inclined to think that Hoppe’s overly strict in some ways. I would think that without ruining everything local governments could run some social benefit programs, for example free prenatal clinics or homes for old people with no money and no family. You can do this or that as a particular accommodation without creating a general policy. On the other hand, if Hoppe wants to argue that today you have to have clear lines to avoid sliding into the modern megastate he might be right.
It does seem to me that Hoppe’s theory runs away with him a bit in his vehement opposition to tariffs. Division of labor aids production, but once you divide labor among ten or a hundred million workers, is the benefit from further subdivision and specialization really going to be that great? At some point it seems to me that other considerations, like promoting social solidarity through increased density of local contacts and dealings, would become more pressing.
Incidentally, if you’re inclined to think it’s morally obligatory to make individual welfare and equality direct goals of policy, you should take into account new studies suggesting that black males in the United States are falling ever further behind other groups in health, education and employment. The studies confirm what social statistics have always made clear: massive government interventions produce social disruptions that are bad for the vulnerable, and in particular the wonderful liberating civil-rights social-welfare 60s weren’t good for either poor or black people.
This paragraph in Hoppe’s pie
This paragraph in Hoppe’s piece caught my eye:
“In any case, what should be clear by now is that most if not all of the moral degeneration and cultural decline—the signs of decivilization—all around us are the inescapable and unavoidable results of the welfare state and its core institutions. Classical, old-style conservatives knew this, and they vigorously opposed public education and social security. They knew that states everywhere were intent upon breaking down and ultimately destroying families and the institutions and layers and hierarchies of authority that are the natural outgrowth of family based communities in order to increase and strengthen their own power. They knew that in order to do so states would have to take advantage of the natural rebellion of the adolescent (juvenile) against parental authority. And they knew that socialized education and socialized responsibility were the means of bringing about this goal.”
This is a pretty good summary of the destructive instincts of liberalism, and points to its nemesis—“family based communities.” Liberals have a whole package of programs, policies, slogans, assumptions, and banalities created and designed to destroy the family, beginning with the central paradigm of the fully autonomous individual endowed with a panoply of abstract “rights,” particulary the right not to be bogged down in meaningful, long-term commitments and embedments like a family (this “right” is usually phrased as a positive rather than a negative: “liberation” or “emancipation,” and it is typically glorified as a result to be pursued and celebrated).
Liberals will levy taxes to sustain programs calculated to subsidize behavior destructive of families; this is central to their project, and I think this is one of Hoppes’ points.
It also reminds me of some demography conducted by Steve Sailer since the presidential election: the marriage gap, the children gap, the “dirt gap.” Liberals dominate politically where the family is either in decline or is non-existent, and republicans dominate where family is still a core institution. If one looks at the red/blue COUNTY map of the 2004 election, one will see there are no “blue states;” there are only “blue reservations,” usually centered around urban areas. In contrast, there are some truly “red states.”
Hoppe
I like Hoppe’s work although like you I don’t agree with him 100% down the line.
I’m not an anarcho-capitalist. Government is a result of original sin, it is an inescapable fact of human society. I do appreciate Hoppe’s development of the monarchial state as a “privately owned” government (see Democracy: The God that Failed ). Although Hoppe expressly denies the label you stick him with, monarchist, he does recognize that monarchy is the “best form of government”, if there indeed must be a government at all.
The value of radically reducing the state apparatus is simple, nature abhorrs a vacumn. Just as when the Roman state collapsed, the Church would once again take over the reins of society. Can that happen in a modern, apostate world? I don’t know, but I think we are going to find out since the nanny-state is unsustainable without reduction to totalitarian tyranny and eventual total collapse to anarchy.
I’ve posted the same article you are referring to on FreeRepublic, Apologia and our Catholic Monarchist forum for discussion. The conversations on those three places are predictable of course – Freepers hate anyone that questions the authenticity of modern neo-conservativitism, traditional Catholics on Apologia are suspicious of capitalism in general and monarchists are generally pretty receptive with some of the reservations of the Catholic crowd.
Kevin V.
(God asks for our obedience, not our opinion)
Liberals dominate politically
Liberals dominate politically where the family is either in decline or is non-existent
Yes, and if one is trying to raise a family in one of these areas (I’m in SF) one becomes rapidly either conservative or totalitarian, depending on one’s SEC.
Hoppe v. Buchanan
Whatever else Hoppe’s article is, it certainly seems a long argument against paleoconservatism, at least as he thinks Patrick Buchanan conceives it.
In any case, do I misread Hoppe as suggesting that cultural/social/moral decline in the West in the last half-century is largely due to the welfare state? And that if this form of Big Government were slain, all would be set right, or even significantly improved, for *social* conservatives? Does anyone really believe that? That without Social Security, Medicare, and the rest, we’d return to an age of faith, humane social order, and traditional esthetic and moral standards?
WW
In any case, do I misread Hop
In any case, do I misread Hoppe as suggesting that cultural/social/moral decline in the West in the last half-century is largely due to the welfare state? And that if this form of Big Government were slain, all would be set right, or even significantly improved, for *social* conservatives?
Yes you do read that correctly. His argument, and I think it’s a good one, is that the welfare state, including the programs you mention, has a highly corrosive effect on family structure and public morals. After all the causes of most poverty are moral causes ie people do things to make themselves poor eg drop out of school, children out of wedlock, divoirce, etc. The welfare state provides financial assistance but no spiritual or moral assistance, in effect subsidizing the immoral behavior. Furthermore it is his thesis that the welfare state leads to the “infantilization” of society and de-civilization. Finally, the welfare state itself is an inevitable result of democracy.
In fact Hoppe goes farther than that in his prescription than the dissolution of the welfare state, he calls for the dissolution of the whole concept of the modern nation state and the concept of “public” property. Included in this concept of public property is the very notion of popular sovereignty ie we are the government, that is the core of philosophical tenet of democracy.
Kevin V.
(God asks for our obedience, not our opinion)
Hoppe is thus an anarcho-capitalist and not a neo-monarchist
Your last paragraph confirms my opinion that Hoppe is an anarcho-capitalist. I paged through the foreword to his book against democracy, and as I recall he explictly defines himself as such. He seems to argue for monarchy in service to a thought experiment that segues into an advocacy for right-wing anarchism.
Ah. kjvail already made my point later in the thread.
Nevermind.
He complains about Buchanan a
He complains about Buchanan and Sam Francis, but I think most paleoconservatives tend to be skeptical of state power. Paul Gottfried for example sees connections between the welfare state and the cultural tendencies of advanced liberalism.
In this piece I don’t see that he says that reversing the welfare state in and of itself will reverse the damage. It’s harder to make an aquarium out fish soup than fish soup out of an aquarium. I think it’s fair though to say that for him any attempt to reverse the damage would have to involve radical cutbacks in government responsibilities.
Rem tene, verba sequentur.
No public money for education before age 12
Could local government run elementary schools? Yes, but why would it want to other than for purposes of indoctrination and providing jobs for political allies? Elementary education ought to be the domain of women, and it ought to be possible for a single or widowed woman to support herself by running a school. I suppose it’s possible to imagine government schools and dame schools competing, but as far as I’m aware this has never actually worked. Elementary education is one of the most perfect examples of something that gets horribly mucked up once bureaucrats at any level get their paws on it; once education becomes a concern of centralized government – and even at the most local level, any kind of government is centralized in comparison to a household – bureauraticrazation and rationalization of childhood inevitably follow.
You’ve got a point there.
You’ve got a point there.
Rem tene, verba sequentur.
Thank you. I hope to see in
Thank you. I hope to see in my lifetime a more general acknowledgement that public elementary education can’t ever be more that the educational equivalent of a soup kitchen. It should never be the norm and using it should be something people want to stop doing.
He Got One Thing Right
Hoppe has got at least one thing right – American conservatism is deeply incoherent – “confused and distorted.” The problem, however, is the right’s infection with the disease of classical liberalism (ie, libertarianism). Hoppe’s claim that traditional “anti-egalitarian, aristocratic” conservatives were ideological anti-statists is ludicrous. Traditional conservatives (and, no, I don’t mean Albert J. Nock or Frank Chodorov) were always deeply skeptical about the effects of the unrestrained play of the free market.
Similarly, Hoppe’s contention that the social and moral decline of the US began with the New Deal is also absurd. Changes in family life, for example, as a result of urbanization/suburbanization, industrialization, affluence and mobility began well before that. (An interesting book in this regard which I just started is Paula Fass’s The Damned and the Beautiful, American Youth in the 1920’s, Oxford U Press. From Fass’s account one can really see how the 20’s prefigured the 60’s. If the Depression and WW2 had not intervened we might have had our cultural revolution decades earlier.) In any case, the disruption of traditional social arrangements was hardly the result of social security or welfare and began long before that.
Modern mass consumption capitalism is far more subversive of traditional ways of life than is the state. The ideology of mass consumption which underpins capitalism today (as opposed to capitalism during its period of “primitive accumulation”) is necessarily one of hedonism, of immediate and endless wants satisfied (momentarily) through the market. It is fundamentally hostile to the sense of restraint which is necessary to any moral order. Further, as capitalist enterprises lose all connection with and management by individuals grounded in particular communities or even particular nations, the cultural elements which might limit this tendency lose their effect.
Every nation needs a state. How strong this state should be depends on the circumstances in which the nation finds itself. The American nation (and we can argue about exactly what that is) faces enormous challenges from without and within. It needs a strong state – not a non-existent one – to face these.
(And, BTW, maybe it’s just me, but when I hear people lecturing about “elementary and immutable economic laws”, I reach for my…. earplugs)
Hoppe’s basic argument in thi
Hoppe’s basic argument in this piece is that comprehensive state care for individual well-being and emphasis on national power as a sort of supreme principle both tend to destroy traditional social arrangements such as the family. I think he’s right. Since the modern state favors the former, and since I see no reason why traditional aristocratic types would like that, it seems sensible to think of such people as anti-modern-statists. The point is that tradition can’t exist without a great deal of distributed responsibility and autonomy, and a militarized welfare state destroys those things.
Naturally that leaves the question open whether things other than big government also contribute to the current social and cultural state of affairs. It also leaves open whether traditional conservatives or sensible people should favor a strong but small state and various non-centralized public agencies and limitations on business.
Rem tene, verba sequentur.
Fusionism
The synthesis of libertarianism and conservatism has at various times been called fusionism or in http://www.lewrockwell.com/orig5/katz6.html this article “reactionary libertarianism”. I think this might be where I fall.
There are two very powerful essays in the http://www.mises.org/jlsdisplay.asp Journal of Libertarian Studies by Edward Feser in this stream of thought that really impressed me.
http://www.mises.org/journals/jls/17_1/17_1_2.pdf Hayek on Tradition
and
http://www.mises.org/journals/jls/18_3/18_3_5.pdf Self-Ownership, Abortion, and the Rights of Children: Toward a More Conservative Libertarianism
Kevin V.
(God asks for our obedience, not our opinion)
Robert Locke and Daniel McCarthy have at it over at Amconmag.com
There’s also this and this, an exchange between Robert Locke and Daniel McCarthy over at The American Conservative Magazine on the subject of Libertarianism. I find Locke the more convincing of the two (of course). I have the sense that McCarthy is trying to tone down or ignore some of Libertarianism’s more unacceptable positions (or in certain cases omissions, failure to take positions where positions are called for), as if what you don’t like about a political philosophy can just be glossed over in order to get at what you do like. It can’t work that way, obviously. No libertarian on the planet is able in a principled way, for example, to oppose the degenerate proliferation of opium dens on every street in every city in the country; unrestricted abortion-on-demand from eleven-year-olds going to abortion mills without parental notification to some ghoul getting filthy-rich off of fully-protected partial-birth abortions; the full homosexualist agenda including of course homosexual “marriage” but even the agenda of NAMBLA; or the ultimate destruction of certain targeted races/ethnicities/ethnocultures and/or their associated traditional nation-states. No libertarian can oppose any of this on principle. A libertarian world fully consistent with its own mixture of principles and lack of principles would be a jungle.
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Long live Flanders!
Pro-life, pro-family libertarians
No libertarian on the planet is able in a principled way, for example, to oppose the degenerate proliferation of opium dens on every street in every city in the country; unrestricted abortion-on-demand from eleven-year-olds going to abortion mills without parental notification to some ghoul getting filthy-rich off of fully-protected partial-birth abortions; the full homosexualist agenda including of course homosexual “marriage” but even the agenda of NAMBLA; or the ultimate destruction of certain targeted races/ethnicities/ethnocultures and/or their associated traditional nation-states.
That’s not altogther true. To state that the government should not have the power to regulate those things is not the same thing as to say no one should have the authority to regulate those things. Properly understood, to be libertarian is to be pro-life a point well made by the organization http://www.l4l.org Libertarians for Life . In fact the essays I linked by Feser do exactly what you say no libertarian can do, supporting traditional morality on libertarian grounds. In fact many authors have done that, so-called “right libertarians” – Hoppe is one, Thomas Woods, FA Hayek and EvKL (who called himself a “liberal of the far Right”) are other great examples.
The “left libertarians” you describe are the more common variety in the US, the American Libertarian party is dominated by them and therefore I can never support their platform. Interestingly enough tho the only Libertarian elected to a federal office, Rep. Ron Paul, is a “right” Libertarian
Libertinism is a perversion, let’s not devolve into polemics and carciatures here.
Kevin V.
(God asks for our obedience, not our opinion)
Thanks for posting the links.
Thanks for posting the links.
The Hayek on Tradition piece is a good discussion of tradition. Whether it’s a good discussion of Hayek I don’t know. His piece on why he isn’t a conservative seems to point in other directions.
The other piece presents an interesting technical development of libertarian doctrine. It wasn’t clear to me that you couldn’t do a series of equally plausible developments and end up with something that makes extensive altruistic demands and so is not recognizably libertarian. I didn’t read the whole thing though.
Rem tene, verba sequentur.
Why a small, weak state?
The reason I support the libertarian attacks on the state is because I believe it to be the only way to restore the proper social order where “one sword ought to be subordinated to the other and temporal authority, subjected to spiritual power.” ([Url=http://www.papalencyclicals.net/Bon08/B8unam.htm Unam Sanctam ).
In the last several hundred years that proper order has become inverted. (see http://www.jesusradicals.com/library/cavanaugh/Wars_of_Religion.html A FIRE STRONG ENOUGH TO CONSUME THE HOUSE: THE WARS OF RELIGION AND THE RISE OF THE STATE .
Civilization cannot be restored by offically agnostic states that refuse to submit to the authority of the Successor of Peter.
Kevin V.
(God asks for our obedience, not our opinion)
Hoppe’s Argument
The aristocratic conservatives of times past would certainly have found the modern welfare state uncongenial and rejected many aspects of it, but it’s hard for me to imagine them celebrating the end of nations and the Walmartization of the world along with the von Mises crowd. (See here and here.)
Really, I think that the core of Hoppe’s argument is that, via its provision of a social safety net the state has usurped the family’s role and made it less and less relevant to people’s lives. For example: The compulsory old age insurance system in particular, by which retirees (the old) are subsidized from taxes imposed on current income earners (the young), has systematically weakened the natural intergenerational bond between parents, grandparents, and children. The old need no longer rely on the assistance of their children…
There is some (small) merit to this argument, but it totally ignores the myriad of other ways in which the traditional role of the family has been minimized – and far more often by technological and market-driven changes. Think, for example, about how the medical industry – doctors, hospitals, medical insurance, healthcare advances – means that I no longer have to depend on my family members to nurse me through the next smallpox epidemic. How about life insurance? Now I no longer need that big family since, in the event I die tomorrow, my widow won’t need them all to drop out of school and support her. How about my pension, 401K, IRA, stocks, bonds, etc? Does anyone (besides Hoppe) really believe that the only reason most Americans are no longer planning to live off their children in their old age is because of the luxurious life one enjoys on social security (or, even better, welfare)?
The commodification of all aspects of life has done far more to replace the family as a functional unit than has the expansion of the welfare state, especially in the US. And, indeed, if there is one element of this process (both as cause and effect) that has probably played the largest role in recent years, it is the movement of women out of the house and into the work force.
Hoppe won’t recognize any of this because he is an ideologue who knows before he even has to think about it that whenever anything bad happens, the state is to blame. (I guess that’s what the knowledge of “inexorable economic laws” will do to you.)