| Topic: |
Politics > Politics-USA |
| User: |
"Radio Free America" |
| Date: |
24 Jun 2005 12:42:02 PM |
| Object: |
Working Around Leviathan |
http://www.mises.org/story/1850
Working Around Leviathan
by Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr.
[Posted on Thursday, June 23, 2005]
Here is what strikes me as a profound political paradox. The US
government is larger, more consolidated, more powerful, and more
intrusive than it has ever been in its history—indeed our sweet
land of liberty is now host to the most powerful leviathan state
that has ever existed.
Never before has a government in human history owned more weapons
of mass destruction, looted as much wealth from a country, or
assumed unto itself the power to regulate the minutiae of daily
life as much as this one. By comparison to the overgrown behemoth
in Washington, with its printing press to crank out money for the
world and its annual 2.2 trillion dollars in largess to toss at
adoring crowds, even communist states were powerless paupers.
At the same time—and here is the paradox—the United States is
overall the wealthiest society in the history of the world. The
World Bank lists Luxembourg, Switzerland, and Norway as
competitive in this regard, but the statistics don't take into
account the challenges to mass wealth that exist in the US
relative to small, homogenous states such as its closest
competitors. In the United States, more people from more classes
and geographic regions have access to more goods and services at
prices they can afford, and possess the disposable income and
access to credit to put them to use, than any other time in
history. Truly we live in the age of extreme abundance.
What is the relationship between the rise of big government and
the rise of American prosperity? It seems that people on the
right and left are quick to confuse correlation with causation.
They believe that the US is wealthy because the government is big
and expansive. This error is probably the most common of all
errors in political economy. It is just assumed that buildings
are safe because of building codes, that stock markets are not
dens of thieves because of the SEC, that the elderly don't starve
and die because of Social Security, and so on, all the way to
concluding that we should credit big government for American
wealth.
CAUSE AND EFFECT
Now, this is where economic logic comes into play. You have to
understand something about the way cause and effect operates in
human affairs to understand that big government does not bring
about prosperity. Government is not productive. It has no wealth
of its own. All it acquires it must take from the private sector.
You might believe that it is necessary and you might believe it
does great good, but we must grant that it does not have the
ability to produce wealth in the way the market does.
Lasting prosperity can only come about through human effort in
the framework of a market economy that allows people to cooperate
to their mutual advantage, innovate and invest in an environment
of freedom, retain earnings as private property, and save
generation to generation without fear of having estates looted
through taxation and inflation. This is the source of wealth.
This is the means by which a rising population is fed, clothed,
and housed. This is the method by which even the poorest country
can become rich.
Now, does this system as described characterize the United
States? Yes and no. This is, after all, the country that recently
jailed Martha Stewart, the world's most successful woman
entrepreneur, for the crime of having not disclosed to the
inquisitors every last detail about the circumstances surrounding
her choice to sell a stock before its bottom dropped out.
Some of our most successful magazines celebrate entrepreneurship,
but recently enacted laws, such as the Sarbanes-Oxley Act,
empowered the federal government to oversee the books of every
publicly listed company and even manage their methods and
operations in every detail. Some have compared this act to FDR's
National Industrial Recovery Act.
This is a country with cradle-to-grave security promises that
just recently added a benefit of low-price prescriptions for
seniors that is going to cost hundreds of billions over time.
This is a country that, when faced with a problem of airport
security, created a whole new federal bureaucracy to gum up the
workings of every airport in the country.
These are incredibly bad policies, enterprise killers in every
way. Why, then, does enterprise continue to thrive? The answer is
complex. In many ways we continue to live off the borrowed
capital of previous generations. Some economic sectors benefit
too greatly from an artificial injection of created credit,
making prosperity seem more real than it is in sectors such as
housing and perhaps stocks. There is a bitter irony at work here
too in that the larger the economy is, the more there is to tax,
and so government grows as an after effect of economic growth.
PEOPLE RESIST CONTROL
But here I would like to concentrate on what I think is an
explanation that is too often overlooked. It requires that we
understand something about the extraordinary capacity of the
human mind to overcome obstacles put in its path. In all the
history of states and the history of reflection on social
organization and economics, this component is the most
underestimated because it is the least predictable and the most
difficult to comprehend. Human beings are creative and
determined, and, if they have a love of liberty, and cooperate
through exchange, they can overcome seemingly impassable
obstacles.
It is because of this power of human ingenuity and determination
to improve the world around us, despite the state, that a vast
gulf has come to separate the accumulated power of the nation
state from its effective power in the management and guidance of
society and the world economy.
Now, there is a sense in which the state is nowhere as effective
as it claims. Economic law limits what the state can do. The
state cannot raise wages for everyone. It cannot dampen prices
that want to rise without causing shortages, or increase prices
that want to fall without causing surpluses. It cannot predict
the course of markets or human events. It can control
surprisingly few forces that work in the world.
In all it's central planning, government is forever declaring the
major combat operations are over, whether in foreign or domestic
policy, only to discover that its real struggles and battles last
and last. A good example is in the area of foreign trade. If a
good or service is more efficiently produced abroad, the logic of
the market will reassign production patterns until they conform.
An attempt to protect domestic industry can do nothing to change
this reality. Instead, protection only increases prices for
consumers, subsidizes inefficient firms, and brings about ever
increasing amounts of wasted time, work, and resources.
I only mention these few examples of the limits of the state as a
prelude to my general claim. It's my view that the gulf between
accumulated power and effective power is going to grow ever wider
in the coming years, to the point where the nation state itself
will grow effectively weaker, more anachronistic, and finally
irrelevant to the course of social development.
In these minutes, I would like to explain more in depth what I
mean, and provide an account of how the relationship of society
to the state has been dramatically changed over the last fifty
years and will continue to do so in the years ahead. This change
has fundamentally altered our view toward public life and our
expectations concerning what institutions we depend upon for our
security and well being. We have come to depend on the state less
and less in our daily lives, even as the state has accumulated
ever more power. Indeed, unless we work directly for the state,
and sometimes even if we do, our activities and affairs owe ever
more to the private sector.
In saying this, I am to some extent agreeing with what has become
a common complaint made by neoconservative writers and left-
liberal pundits. They have said for years that the civic culture
is no longer coherent and cohesive. They complain that the nation
state has lost its hold on the public imagination. They whine and
wail about how we have all retreated into our suburbs and
Internet connections and no longer rally around grand national
projects that inspire us with a vision of all that government can
do.
Or to put it another way, they worry that the government has run
out of good excuses for spending money, taxing us, regulating us,
drafting our kids, and getting us embroiled in wars. For the
neoconservative crowd, 9-11 really was a godsend, just as the
Oklahoma bombing was a godsend to the left-liberals of the 1990s.
They were equally adept at exploiting these horrible tragedies to
the great advantage of the state, and to browbeat the rest of the
population into going along with the political priorities of the
regime in power. But in retrospect, it is clear that these events
only represented a brief parenthesis in the long-run decline of
the nation state in our social consciousness.
THE MYTHOLOGY OF THE NATION STATE
Before proceeding further, it is useful to back up just a bit to
remember that the nation state as we know is a modern invention,
and not an essential feature of society. In many ways, it is, as
Bastiat said, nothing but an artifice that permits some to live
at others' expense. He was of course speaking of the modern
state, particularly that of 19th century France, and all that he
wrote applies in our time as well.
But states were not always structured as we know them today. From
the fall of the Roman Empire to the late middle ages, societies
in Europe were governed not by bureaucrats, elected councils,
regulations, or any kind of permanent structural apparatus of
coercion and compulsion, but by competing cells of authority that
were woven together not by ideology but by separate function. The
merchant class managed its affairs, the Church had its purview
and courts, the international traders developed their code,
feudal lords were masters of their domain, free cities managed
themselves, the family was largely autonomous, and the state,
such as it was, consisted of extended families and lines of
rulers who dared not transgress their traditional authority.
Every institution was supremely jealous of its power and
authority. The emergence of liberty from feudalism occurred not
because any institution brought it about but because they all
stayed within their realms, cooperating where necessary but also
competing for the loyalty of the public. All the institutions we
associate with civilization—universities, stock markets,
charities, global trade, scientific establishments, vocational
schools, courts of law—were born or recaptured from the ruins of
the ancient world in these supposed dark ages without nation
states.
Voltaire once wrote of how kings would conduct their wars,
raising their own money and employing their own soldiers, always
acquiring or losing territory and usually always up to no good.
But for the most part, though they dominate the history books,
their activities had little or no impact on the people. It was
during this time, historian Ralph Raico reminds us, that the
process of accumulating capital began and the division of labor
began to expand—two features that are essential to rising
population and prosperity.
The nation-state as we know it—defined by a fixed governing class
that enjoys the legal monopoly on the right to use aggressive
force against person and property and holds a status that is
higher in authority than any other institution—was a development
of the break-up of Christendom and the wars of the late 16th
century and early 17th century. As competitive sources of
authority weakened, the state as an entity separate from its
ruler came to be strengthened and consolidated, sometimes in
opposition to competing authority centers and sometimes in
cooperation with them.
The emergence of the modern state immediately gave rise to a
countervailing force: the great liberal movement all over Europe
and, shortly thereafter, in the United States. This liberal
movement emphasized a single theme in its writings. It is as
follows: society contains within itself the capacity for managing
itself in all its affairs, especially its economic affairs, and
states, to the extent that they do more than merely punish
criminals, are a source of despotism and tyranny.
It was this conviction that was accepted as commonplace during
the founding period of the United States, and not just by
statesmen but also by merchants, farmers, ministers, and
intellectuals. The conviction that society requires no central
management, and should thereby be left alone by the governing
class, had a name: it meant to love liberty.
The structure and founding ideology of the United States was
intended to protect that idea of liberty, under the belief that
if people are free to pursue their dreams, cooperating with each
other and also competing with each, freely associating to their
mutual betterment, and governing their own affairs rather than
permitted themselves to be governed from on high, the result will
be human flourishing as never before known in history.
THE AGE OF LEVIATHAN
Now, it should be obvious that this model was rejected in the
20th century, the century of government control. It began with a
horrible war that brought the communists to power in Russia and
the managerial class to power in the United States. Thomas
DiLorenzo has discussed how we came to be saddled with an income
tax, a central bank, and direct democracy all in one year. The
interwar years provided an ever-so-brief respite before the world
became uglier with two models of central control having presented
themselves as the only viable systems: fascism and communism. We
flatter ourselves if we think the New Deal represented a third
choice, for it borrowed from the other two and added only the
ingredient of democratic expediency.
World War Two cemented into place the planned society in which
all attention was directed toward the public sector as liberator
and savior of mankind. The words economic development,
technology, and security were bound up with one institution only:
the nation state. It was the nation state that fought and won the
war, launched the bomb, reconstructed economies, rescued the
aged, educated the youth, stabilized the economy, and planned the
exploration of space.
The nation state was the new god: supposedly omniscient,
omnipotent, and omni-competent.
The Mises Institute recently published an unpublished essay by
Murray Rothbard written in the late 1950s on the subject of
technology and the state. In it he departed from the whole of
conventional wisdom at the time by arguing that the government
was not the appropriate institution to trust with our
technological future. Research and development is best done by
the private sector, he said. All major innovations in world
history have come about this way, he wrote, and it is from within
the private sector that we should expect the next revolution.
From government we can only expect technology that reinforces
political priorities, but no real innovations that are both
useful for the mass of the consuming public and economically
viable.
These days the paper is not shocking to read at all. Not so in
those times. The paper was not published because there was no one
around to publish it. It was an argument that all his colleagues
would have rejected outright. In those days, it didn't even seem
to have superficial plausibility. Even those who commissioned the
piece found themselves squeamish about its contents. When you
think about the public consensus that existed for the state in
those days, it does indeed strikes us as a different world.
In 1955, the federal government was relatively small but
exercised enormous effective power. The federal budget was $68
billion, which is about one thirty-sixth as large as today's
government. In fact, the whole federal government was smaller
than a single department of the government today: the Department
of Education, which, ironically is the one that the Republicans
keep saying that they will abolish.
But the size of the state by today's standards masked its
effective hold on the public mind. The G.I bill, it was believed,
would educate all soldiers, while the federal government would
reconstruct the Europe the Nazis destroyed even while it
protected us from the demonized Soviets who had been our allies
in the war the day before yesterday.
The Cold War purported to pit US capitalism against USSR
communism but the truth was that there was very little enthusiasm
for market economics in the United States. It was not taught in
the classrooms. Mises himself could not find a paid position as
professor of economics. Keynesian thinking—which imagined the
government to be an effective manager of the macroeconomy—was
seen at the only real alternative to socialism.
The technological advances of the period mostly involved
television and commercial flight, advances widely attributed to
government wartime spending. Our information came from three
approved networks and a handful of wire services. Publishing
books was too expensive so self publishing was out of the
question. Intellectual and economic life was dominated by a kind
of forced conformity and the culture seized by an unrelenting
fear of nuclear holocaust.
The planned economy that had become fashionable in the 1930s
continued its hold on public policy in the 1950s, and successful
kept many innovations at bay. The cell phone is a good example of
this. Probably many people in this room carry one. As with most
new technology that enters into mass distribution, we all wonder
how we got along without them before. The development and
expansion of this industry—which was born in 1994—has been
entirely a result of private-sector initiative. We own our
phones, manage our accounts, deploy the phones for email, web
surfing, and even for taking and sending pictures.
The prices and plans are entirely market based, and accessible to
a vast amount of the buying public. The industry is incredibly
competitive. In every mall in America, cell phone dealers have
their booths. When I was a kid we dreamed of personal
communication devices that we read about in James Bond books. We
imagined that they would be in our cars. But even Ian Fleming
couldn't have imagined their portability or the advance of
wireless communications. Nor could we have imagined that they
would be a mass product, available not just to spies or the rich
but to everyone.
It is highly significant that this industry is rooted so deeply
in the private sector. It was not too long ago when economists
and political scientists believed that communication technology
must always fall within the purview of the state. This belief was
the basis of the creation of the old Bell system. I can recall as
a young adult that the phone strapped to the wall was the only
real-time contact we had with the outside world. It was owned by
the one phone company, and maintained by the government. Our
right to communicate was sustained and controlled by the state.
No more.
So too with the mails. There was only one way to deliver a letter
or package when I was a young adult, and very few imagined that
it could be done any other way. A few exceptions in the law were
made and now look what we enjoy: vast choice in package delivery,
with the private sector offering far more choices than the public
sector ever dreamed of offering. Here again it was the federal
government had finally permitted an exception to the rule against
using any provider but the federal government. Thus a slight bit
of light into darkness has brightened the whole world.
Not enough can be said about the way the web has completely
reshaped the world. While the internet was frozen and nearly
useless after the government put it in place for purposes of
military and bureaucratic communication, the private sector
transformed this creaking and poorly constructed structure into
the institution that would change the whole world.
A PRIVATIZED WORLD
So it is in sector after sector. We have in these examples the
story of the modern world, shaped by private enterprise, driven
forward by the power of entrepreneurship, improving in a hundred
million ways by employing private property toward the common
good. It is done largely outside the government's purview.
Sometimes it seems as if government works as little more than an
absentee mafia lord, showing up to collect a check and then
retreating again to his private estate. You don't want to make
him angry but neither do you let the prospect of his sudden
appearance deter your activities.
Most of our daily lives are conducted as if we are all striving
to live in absence of government—precisely as the critics say. We
live increasingly in private communities and use technologies
that are provided for us by private enterprise. We depend on the
matrix of exchange and enterprise to give us security in our
homes and in our financial affairs. We manage our finances with
no sense of anticipation that government will care for us in the
future. Our churches and schools and workplaces and families have
become the units that draw our social attention. Government and
the old-fashioned civic religion just can't find a place for
itself in this scenario. But rather than a bad thing, this
strikes me as a wonderful thing, a return to the world of
Tocqueville rather than the regimented national life of the
postwar period.
To celebrate this is not really a matter of ideology. If the
market had not been working spectacularly well despite attempts
by government to hobble it and channel its energies, we would
certainly find ourselves much poorer today than we were 50 years
ago. And yet here we are, a country with a population that has
fully doubled in size in that period and a GDP that has increased
by a multiple of 28. This much we can say: by historical
standards, this is a miracle, and the market, not the government,
is responsible.
In the meantime, the market has outrun the state to such an
extent that the whole planning apparatus of the postwar period,
always based on a kind of pseudo-science, has become
preposterously untenable.
This is especially true given the size and expanse of the global
economy. In 1953, the dollar value of world merchandise trade
between all countries totaled $84 billion, not a small sum but
about one fourth the size of the total US GDP in the same year.
Today, the dollar value of world merchandise trade is 7.3
trillion, or nearly two-thirds the size of the totally US GDP.
This increasing integration of the world economy, which was given
a huge boost by the collapse of Soviet satellites and the opening
of China, has shattered the dreams of anyone who hope national
economic planning had a future.
If I can present the following metaphor of how I imagine the
relationship of the productive matrix of human voluntarism to
exist alongside the leviathan state. Imagine a vigorous game of
football with fast and effective players, cooperating with their
teams and competing with the other team. These, we might say,
constitute the activities of the market economy: consumers,
producers, savers, investors, innovators, workers, and all
institutions associated with the voluntary sector of society such
as houses of worship, educational institutions, charitable
endeavors, families, and artistic and literary associations of
every sort. They are the players in this game.
However, right on the 50 yard line sits a huge and overgrown
elephant, enormously strong but also swelled up, slow, and
completely unsuited to being a player in this game. Everyone
knows that this monstrous animal is there, and they wish it were
not. But rather than attempt to slay it and drag it away, the
game proceeds apace, with runners, kickers, and throwers zipping
around it. The elephant is powerful and authoritative, more so
than ever, but it can hardly move. It can bat its trunk at
players that prove especially annoying but it cannot finally stop
the game from taking place. And the longer these players confront
this strange obstacle, the better they become at working around
it, and growing stronger and faster despite it.
I'll block that metaphor before it becomes too implausible, but
let me just say this about the future of this elephant state:
like a dying large and once-dangerous animal, the state will
continue to be an annoyance and even deadly under certain
conditions, but it will not be an effective player in our daily
lives. The reason is this. The state cannot deal with change, and
ours is a time of constant and relentless change. It does not
navigate the world with attention to outcomes, and ours is a
world in which all human endeavors are expected to achieve. Its
bureaucratic structures are fine for dealing with repetitive
tasks but it cannot face new challenges. It can consume resources
but it is incapable of producing them. It is uninventive,
unresponsive, unintelligent, uninformed, and unmotivated to
succeed.
Ludwig von Mises provided the first full account for why this is
so. The government exists outside the matrix of exchange. There
are no market prices for the goods and services it endeavors to
produce. The revenue it receives is not a reward for social
services but rather money extracted from the public by force. It
is not spent with an eye to return on investment. As a result
there is no means for the government to calculate its own profits
and losses. Its inability to calculate with attention to economic
rationality is the downfall of governments everywhere. It
decision making is ultimately economically arbitrary and
politically motivated.
This feature of government can doom whole societies, as it did in
the Soviet Union where the government presumed ownership over the
whole capital stock. Because government control was complete, and
there were few legal channels of escape, society and economy
withered and died over time. Eventually the situation became so
absurd that even the elite in the Soviet Union did not live as
well as the middle class in most other well developed countries.
As much as power can be its own reward for some, this situation
was clearly unsustainable.
But government control doesn't always take that path. It always
impoverishes relative to what might otherwise have been the case.
But when its control is not comprehensive—or to extend that
football metaphor, when the elephant doesn't entire cover the
field but still leaves room for the game to take place—the
miracle that is the marketplace can still do remarkable things.
Sometimes it only takes the government lessening control over one
area of life to inspire stunning achievements. The government
keeps trying to pave the world but private enterprise keeps
growing through the cracks.
SOCIALIST ISLANDS
If you want a picture of the contrast between what Murray
Rothbard called power and market—or the state and the private
sector—consider what you see at most major airports in this
country. You have two structures working side by side: the public
sector as represented by the Transportation Safety Administration
and the semi-private sector as represented by the airlines.
So you arrive with your luggage, and the TSA is the first to
swing into action. And there you have it: the very picture of the
bureaucrat: alternatively inattentive and belligerent, completely
disregarding of customer well being, so slow that they seem to
exist out of time itself. They laugh amongst themselves as if
they experience a real class identity and pay no mind to others.
They treat mere citizens as subordinates, and are quick to accuse
as mere mortals of wrong doing.
Most of all, they don't do their job well. They will apply a
strict chemical test to a tube of Crest but will let a black ball
with fuse in it go right through unnoticed. They will give a
thorough search to a young mother, and think nothing of ripping a
baby out of her arms, only because she came up randomly on the
list of those to get a thorough check.
Private enterprise could never work this way. If you applied a
profit and loss test to such state services, bankruptcy would be
a foregone conclusion. Once we get past the TSA, we are greeted
with smiles and warmth hitherto unknown in the history of airline
travel. They seem very-much aware that the travelers have likely
gone through Hell in dealing with the TSA. Even these unionized
employees do all they can to serve others. Somehow we arrive at
our destinations in one piece and not suffering total
humiliation, but this is not due to the TSA. It is due to the
forces of private enterprise that still exist in the airlines.
We can think of this airport scene as a kind of microcosm of the
whole economy. It is burdened, vexed, harassed, hampered, and
hobbled by the state. But through the miracle of human creativity
and determined effort, private enterprise has created a grand and
glorious world that has surpassed the most far-flung dreams of
the old utopians, a world where food once inaccessible to kings
is available to the poorest of the poor, where no one need be
without clothing or shelter, where even those we call poor would
have been seen as enormously blessed only decades ago.
All of this leaves the question of what our political priorities
should be. If it were up to me, I would push a button and reduce
government to the size it was after the American Revolution under
the Articles of Confederation, and then look forward to debating
whether we should get rid of the rest.
But because that is not likely to happen soon, my own sense is
that if present trends continue, the years ahead will bear more
in common with the Gilded Age of the late 19th century than the
country and world as we knew it between the years of the 2nd
World War to the end of the Cold War.
Unlike the planned and regimented economy of the postwar period,
the Gilded Age was a time when technological advance and
demographic shifts made the society essentially ungovernable,
even given the vast power of the state. Not that this is any
reason for the lovers of liberty to let down their guard: the War
on Spain and the Great War that followed the post-civil war peace
shattered civilization. The same can happen again to the great
civilization being created and renewed in our own time. After
all, the elephant can still do a lot of damage.
We can do our part to encourage the good developments and
forestall the bad. What should our priorities be? Two politicians
I saw on C-SPAN recently gave a speech to instruct us on the
first question we should ask when we go to vote.
The first one said that we should think mainly about the
children, that we should elect politicians who put their interest
first. As an extension of that principle, we should ask the state
to further the interests of our families and communities, this
person said. Now, if all this means anything, it strikes me as
highly dangerous. The state does not own the children and we
don't really want to live in a society in which the state is
permitted to do with our children, family, or communities what it
wishes.
Moreover, there is no such thing as the collective interests of
children, families, and communities, and to pretend that there is
potentially despotic. In any case, it solves no political issue,
since right and left both have different plans for what they
believe is best for our children. These days, their plans reach
into every area of their lives, from what program they should be
using to learn to read to the conditions under which they are
permitted to take their first job. I can't but think of Hannah
Arendt’s warning that politicians who invoke the children are
potential totalitarians.
The second politician said that we should think mainly about our
security when we go to vote. The Constitution, he said, empowers
the federal government to collect taxes to provide for the common
defense, so that is what we should do. He proceeded to justify
the whole of the American military empire that has generated so
much hatred and opposition around the world, and interfered so
seriously with our trading relationships. He was the classic case
of a person who completely ignores the founders' warnings against
war, standing armies, and militarism.
NEITHER WELFARE NOR WARFARE
Now, these politicians disagree profoundly on what the political
priorities should be and what we should be asking of the state.
The first says we should ask for welfare. The second says we
should ask for warfare. They agree to disagree, and spend our
money on both. Why? Because, well, because it's no skin off their
noses. Such is the nature of public government as Hans Hoppe
describes it: there is no real ownership so of course there is a
squandering of resources and ever higher costs.
The only real restraint against all forms of government is public
opinion. A public that says no to the state is the best defense
against despotism, and the best cultural and political context in
which liberty grows and thrives. Our times have taught that the
world economy does not need the state. As the old liberals said,
society contains within itself the capacity for self management.
Our experience in our families and communities has taught that
the state does very little for our benefit. Our experience in our
workplaces has taught us that the state makes productivity more
difficult and gives us very little to nothing in return.
I'm often asked what an average person can to do further liberty.
I say that the first and most important step is intellectual. We
all need to begin to say no to the state on an intellectual
level. When you are asked what you would like the government to
do for you, we need to be prepare to reply: nothing. We should
not ask it to save our children, nor provide security, nor give
us anything at all.
We can still be good citizens. We can be good parents, teachers,
workers, entrepreneurs, church members, students, and
contributors to society in a million different ways. This is far
more important to the future of liberty than how we vote. We must
regain our confidence in our capacity for self governance. I
believe this is happening already. The empire is shrinking
despite its every attempt to expand. Even if the public sector
cannot and will not prepare for a future of liberty, we can. Let
us look for and work toward the triumph of liberty unencumbered
by leviathan.
____________________________
Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr. (Rockwell@mises.org) is president of
the Ludwig von Mises Institute in Auburn, Alabama, and editor of
LewRockwell.com. This speech was delivered at Walsh College. See
his Mises.org archive. Purchase his book, Speaking of Liberty.
Post comments on the blog.
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