IT
SEEMS LIKE ONLY YESTERDAY…
In
the first year or so of National Review’s founding,
back in 1956, its then-young tousle-haired editor, William
F. Buckley, Jr., solicited an article from the noted conservative
writer and radio commentator, John
T. Flynn, who promptly complied with a denunciation of
President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s policies as just another
variant on the socialistic "rackets" of the New Deal and Harry
Truman’s "Fair Deal": "It is," Flynn averred, "nothing more
than the use of government money, acquired through taxes and
created by debt, to buy the votes of numerous minorities and
thus remain in power." Well, so far, that’s some pretty uncontroversial
stuff, at least in conservative circles. But wait:
"In
pursuit of this racket, the politicians are confronted by
the problem of finding defensible activities on which to spend.
There must be visible in the spending some utility to justify
the heavy taxes. Of course the oldest of all rackets for spending
the people’s money is the institution of militarism. It creates
a host of jobs – at low wages – in the armed services plus
the far better paid and numerous jobs and dividends in the
industries which produce the arms, provide the sailors and
soldiers with food, clothes, medical care, and, juiciest of
all, the weapons of war."
~
"A Rejected Manuscript," from Forgotten
Lessons, by John T. Flynn [Greg Pavlik, editor] Foundation
for Economic Education, 1995.
WILLIAM
F. BUCKLEY, JR., YOUNG PUNK
Flynn,
a grizzled old America Firster who warned -- in 1954 -- against the dangers of US involvement in Southeast Asia, received
a letter from young Buckley not only rejecting the piece but
also upbraiding him for failing to see the "objective threat
from the Soviet Union" which "threatens the freedom of each
and every one of us." It was an outrage, of course: here was
the obstreperous young punk Buckley, solemnly lecturing Flynn
– the renown anti-Communist and best-selling author of While
You Slept: Our Tragedy in Asia and Who Made It,
and The Lattimore Story – on the dangers of the
Red Menace! Adding insult to insolence, Buckley enclosed a
"kill fee" of $100 – real money back in those days –
as if to underscore that the courageous old conservative warhorse
had indeed fallen on hard times.
Flynn
promptly returned the check, along with a note to Buckley
in which he assured the neo-conservative whippersnapper that
he was "greatly obligated" for "the little lesson." Although
Buckley apologized for his incredible arrogance the next day,
and tried to flatter Flynn by calling him "a mentor in whose
writings I never cease to delight and from whose courage I
draw strength," it was clear that there was no room for Flynn
and other libertarian conservatives in the "New Right" of
Bill Buckley and National Review.
BACK
TO SCHOOL
That
the Gen-X Buckley clones of today’s National Review
understand the dynamics of expanding state power no better
than the original is hardly surprising. What is astonishing,
however, is the childlike simplicity of Lowry’s ignorance,
almost touching in its plaintive appeal to anyone with "special
insight" to solve this conundrum. Out of charity, then, let
us clue the editor of the nation’s leading free market conservative
magazine in on the ABCs of market economics, as well as the
history of the last century:
WAR
AND BIG GOVERNMENT
War
has been the great
engine of State expansion in the twentieth and every other
century. State interventions enacted in wartime became permanent,
and constituted a "great leap forward" for Big Government
in every instance. A partial list: protective tariffs and
internal federal taxation (War of 1812), the income tax, bigger
tariffs, excise taxes, conscription (Civil War), large-scale
economic planning and pervasive government controls (World
War I), and the culmination of these trends was surely the
New Deal, which, during World War II, combined the welfare
state and the warfare state in one streamlined package. The
"war on poverty" of Lyndon Baines Johnson was accompanied,
appropriately enough, by an equally disastrous war abroad.
And we are already hearing, from the left, enthusiastic accolades
to Bush’s war policy on the grounds that it will lead, inevitably,
to bigger government – and defang the supposedly "anti-government"
conservatives. Their jubilation is, unfortunately, justified.
IT
WORKS BOTH WAYS
As
conservatives call for the iconization of Ronald Reagan in
honor of his recent birthday, one of their main arguments
for engraving his image on our currency, or adding it to the
other Presidents on Mount Rushmore, is that here, after all,
is the man whose military buildup so drained the Soviets that
their system went kaput. Forced to divert an increasing proportion
of limited resources to military hardware and research rather
than the production of consumer goods and capital investment,
the Soviet system eventually lost popular support and imploded
in on itself. Why couldn’t this process work in the same way
in the US?
Surowiecki
is absolutely correct because the immutable laws of economics
are universal. Under socialism, as the free-market economist
Ludwig von Mises was the first to point out, in the absence
of real prices, resources are misallocated. This leads to
massive error, and, eventually, complete collapse. Resources
better spent on research into some arcane but ultimately profitable
and beneficial field are, instead, spent on a "war on poverty,"
urban "renewal," and, say, an
$800,000 grant for research into "aromatherapy" and other
"alternative" remedies.
MILITARY
SOCIALISM
Conservatives
have a hard time applying the same principle to what free
market economist Robert Higgs calls the military-industrial-congressional
complex: the gigantic "national security" bureaucracy
and the big military contractors, who hardly operate in anything
remotely resembling a free market. What Lowry somehow misses
is that the major source of income for these defense mega-giants,
such as Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Raytheon, General Dynamics,
Northrup Grumman, Litton Industries, etc., is our tax dollars. As much creatures of government as they are
corporate entities, these guys gobble up resources
that might have been put to other, more efficient and
productive uses.
Why is that
so hard for Mr. Lowry to understand?
Socialism,
in which the state seizes and redistributes the wealth of
a nation, comes in many varieties, not all of them egalitarian.
While the left wants to redistribute the wealth and dole out
it to the poor, socialists of the rightist variety want handouts
for those who are already rich, and military contracts
are a rich source of corporate welfare. Military socialism
– in which the costs of acquiring and protecting, say, Middle
Eastern or Caspian oil fields, are funded by tax dollars,
but the profits are "privatized" – is the program of our
wartime neocons, as they forget everything they ever knew
about market economics and shout down calls to
rein in
the Leviathan State with cries of "Don’t you know there’s
a war on?"
THROWING
LIBERTY OVERBOARD
War,
as Randolph Bourne
famously put it, is the health of the State. It is the engine
of government power, the great regulator, the all-purpose
tax hiker, the one sure way to get conservatives to climb
on board the Big Government bandwagon. In his magazine’s current
love affair with budget deficits, its online
editor’s self-interested disdain for even the meekest criticism
of John Ashcroft’s war on our civil liberties, its constant
calls for sending military spending into the stratosphere,
the National Review crowd has thrown overboard its
always-weak support for economic freedom and individual liberty
in favor of "national
greatness" conservatism" – which means, as far as
they’re concerned, widening and intensifying this war.
SPLIT-SCREEN
REPUBLICANISM: IT DOESN’T WORK
Andrew
Sullivan fatuously proposed that "We do the national greatness
stuff abroad and the leave us alone stuff at home." It doesn’t
work that way. We can’t have an Empire abroad, and a Republic
at home (except in name only) for the simple reason that the
tax monies it takes to build mighty fleets and bases all around
the world, to police the earth and humble the wicked, must
be enormous. Furthermore, the sheer power it takes
to direct these armies, to say whether there shall be war
or peace on a global scale, is necessarily imperial, and cannot
be republican in any meaningful sense of the word. For this
sort of power, i.e. military power, must be highly
centralized in order to be effectively wielded: an interventionist
foreign policy necessarily turns the President into an Emperor,
as Congress has learned partly to its relief and often to
its sorrow.
BUCKLEY’S
BARGAIN
In
a [January 5] 1952 article for Commonweal, the liberal
Catholic magazine, in which the young Buckley sought to prove
that he was no real threat to the liberal welfare-warfare
state consensus, the enfant terrible of American conservatism
wrote that the inherent and "thus far invincible aggressiveness
of the Soviet Union" posed an emergency during which the normal
principles and practices of conservatives would have to be
suspended:
"We
have to accept Big Government for the duration – for neither
an offensive nor a defensive war can be waged … except through
the instrument of a totalitarian bureaucracy within our shores."
Forget
about opposition to confiscatory taxation: conservatives, Buckley wrote, must become apologists for
"The
extensive and productive tax laws that are needed to support
a vigorous anti-Communist foreign policy," not to mention
the "large armies and air forces, atomic energy, central intelligence,
war production boards and the attendant centralization of
power in Washington – even with Truman at the reins of it
all."
THE
GREAT NATIONAL REVIEW SELLOUT, 1952-2002
Today,
Buckley’s heirs are demanding that conservatives make the
same bargain with a nearly identical Devil: all this can be
yours – the oil fields of the Middle East, a terror-free world,
American hegemony from Baghdad to Pyongyang – if only conservatives
will stop griping about having to give up a larger share of
their income to the government every year. So stop complaining,
and go with the flow – don’t you know there’s a war on?
THE
REAL WAR
This
ubiquitous phrase is true enough, but not in the way our warrior
intellectuals mean it. For the State is perpetually at war
with its own citizens. It is, furthermore, loath to give up
any opportunity to expand its wealth and extend its reach
– which is why we have been promised that this war will last
a generation. The war on Communism, the war on terrorism,
there is always some alien "ism" that appears at just
the right moment to get conservatives to tone down if not
completely eliminate their opposition to tax-and-spend Big
Government. Will they fall for it this time around? So far,
it appears so – but not in all cases, and certainly over time
the faint rumblings of rebellion will grow louder. Until then,
will someone please help Rich Lowry out with a crash course
in economics? He really really needs your insightful
comments; email him at richardlowry@hotmail.com.
Please
Support Antiwar.com
A
contribution of $50 or more will get you a copy of Ronald
Radosh's out-of-print classic study of Old Right conservatives,
Prophets on the Right: Profiles of Conservative Critics
of American Globalism. Send contributions to
Antiwar.com
520 S. Murphy Avenue, #202
Sunnyvale, CA 94086
or Contribute Via
our Secure Server
Credit Card Donation Form
Your contributions
are now tax-deductible
|
