by David S. D'Amato
The state—the organization of the political means—is
the institution that allows an idle, unproductive class of parasites to live at
the expense of ordinary, working people, whose means are industrious activity
and consensual exchange in the marketplace. We ought not assume, however, that
the indigent segment of society, those who receive social welfare aid from the
state, are necessarily foremost among the parasites of the political means.
Rather, free-market libertarians from Albert Jay Nock to Murray Rothbard and
Butler Shaffer have demonstrated that in the statist economy of theft and
wealth redistribution, it is the elite—powerful, entrenched commercial
players—who most benefit. Historically and empirically, this phenomenon of
elite command of the apparatuses of government is readily apparent and
unmistakable in its expression, particularly as regards the twentieth-century
American economy. Economic historian Robert Higgs has argued that the American
economy developed into a variant of corporatism or “tripartism,” an economic
fascism defined by formal collusion between certain key interests and various
arms of the state. “Corporatism,” writes Higgs, “faces the problem of factions
directly; in effect, it resolves the problem of the people versus the interests
by forthrightly declaring that the interests, when properly organized and
channeled, are the people” (emphasis added).[1] Like every permutation of the authoritarian
idea, the corporatism described by Higgs attempts to submerge the individual
within the anatomy of the leviathan state—of which we must now regard many
nominally “private” actors as a part.
These firms, in their partnership with the state, are
“granted a deliberate, representational monopoly”[2] as payment for a level of control exercised by
government. The iron triangles that form the fascist tripartism detailed by
Higgs recall the thesis of C. Wright Mills’s groundbreaking sociological study, The Power Elite. In his masterwork, published first in
1956, Mills gives an account of an intermeshed elite made up of a “political
directorate,” the “warlords” of the military establishment, and “corporate
chieftains” at the helm of Big Business bureaucracies.[3]Hardly resulting from the legitimate free market
defended by libertarians, the social and economic problems and crises we see
all around us are in fact the moldering fruits of elite statism. And war, as
both the engine of an entire economic paradigm and its attendant psychological
and sociological substructure, has been the American state’s most preferred
expedient, burdening peaceful, productive society with class rule. The
permanent war economy, the unremitting exercise in plunder that now makes up a
terrifyingly large portion of the economy at large, must necessarily poise
itself upon antisocial state-worship. As Vicesimus Knox wrote, “Fear is the
principle of all despotic government, and therefore despots make war their
first study and delight.”[4] The existence of a corporate command-and-control
economy, whose configuration grows out of layered state interventions, depends
crucially on popular attitudes regarding the state. Only a public trusting of
elite judgment and expertise would abide a system built on just the kinds of
subjugation that the American ruling elite hypocritically claimed to defy in
two world wars.
Fundamentally related to these insights into the
practical relationships between Big Business and Big Government, is the
proposal of Rothbard’s short-lived journal, Left and Right.
Presenting the journal, Rothbard said that the title “highlights our conviction
that the present-day categories of ‘left’ and ‘right’ have become misleading
and obsolete.”[5] Left and right designations become particularly
troublesome when we consider modern American conservatism as a “barren defense
of the status quo.”[6]The concord of war statism reached by the political
elite during the twentieth century certainly wasn’t liberal in any coherent or meaningful sense—a near
antithesis of the liberalism of which Mises and Hayek regarded themselves as
the legatees.
Mises and Hayek inherited that consistent,
comprehensive liberalism from, among many others, Charles Comte and Charles
Dunoyer, French political thinkers writing in the early nineteenth century.
During Comte and Dunoyer’s time, many very different and contradictory ideas
all claimed liberalism; theirs was an “industrialist” rendering that placed the
state firmly and unambiguously in opposition to nonviolent, economic society,
the principles of which were not coercive, governmental machinations, but
harmonious trade. The “industrialisme” of Comte and
Dunoyer, then, was very much an antecedent to Oppenheimer’s famous distinction
between the political and economic means to wealth. Industry and exchange were
to be venerated as the defining hallmarks of a free and just social and
economic system, one loosed from the old privileges of ruling classes extending
back through history. As Rothbard put it, in contrast to the productive classes
(comprising “workers, entrepreneurs, producers of all kinds”), the
nonproductive classes used “the state to levy tribute upon the producers.”[7] Very much a rebuke of the established order, the
free market ideas of Comte and Dunoyer’s industrialist journal Le Censeur européen had radical and thus very unconservative implications: a hope to completely
replace government with “the administration of things”[8] (a phrase coined by Comte and only later used by
Saint-Simon). Just as did Rothbard hundreds of years later, Comte and Dunoyer
folded economic analyses—inherited primarily from Jean-Baptiste Say—in with
historical and philosophical narratives, fashioning a unique and libertarian
notion of class. Their economic propositions emerged from a holistic,
methodological approach, tracing a historical divide between “the devouring”
(“the hornets”) and “the industrious” (“the bees”).[9] Indeed, Comte and Dunoyer championed a classless
society, though not in the sense of absolute equality or the end of private
property. If the free market truly was the means of “dissolving the ruling
classes,”[10] then it was privilege and monopoly, upheld by
the coercive power of the state, and not legitimate property and trade, that
were to be opposed.
The political means may not be as plain to see, as
glaring or as straightforward as they were in Comte and Dunoyer’s time. Central
banking under the Federal Reserve System, today’s government subsidies, and
regulatory barriers to entry are perhaps not as easily ascertainable to the
layman as were affronts against the free market as they existed in Comte and
Dunoyer’s day. But these interconnected instruments for binding and exploiting
the society that is their host are just as menacing, if not more so. Where
those living under the tyranny of old monarchical systems could be expected to
understand full well the class nature of the statist rule around them, most
today are misdirected by the democratic rhetoric that clothes the American
state. Rothbard’s Wall Street, Banks, and American Foreign
Policy would prove an instructive read for those in, for example, the
Occupy crowd who misguidedly ascribe our current economic predicament to the
free market. The ties between the war economy, the Federal Reserve’s central
banking system, and the powerful Wall Street banks are, as demonstrated in
Rothbard’s monograph, a defining feature of the state monopoly capitalism that
has prevailed.
In the present day, following the maturation of the
connections identified by Mills, Rothbard, Higgs and others, the economy has
been “centralized . . . into a highly structured bureaucracy under the
effective direction and control of leading business interests.”[11] We can in no way be said to have a free market,
as the ties between powerful interests and the federal government are as strong
as ever. Politics is an expensive, high-stakes game of favors and bribery, a
fact that libertarians like Comte and Dunoyer saw clearly hundreds of years
ago.
Notes
[1] Robert Higgs, Against
Leviathan, page 178.
[2] Philippe Schmitter in Higgs, Against
Leviathan, page 179.
[3] Laurance S. Moss, "The Power Elite
Revisited", Left and Right.
[4] Vicesimus Knox, The
Spirit of Despotism, page 68.
[5] Murray Rothbard, The
General Line.
[6] Sidney Lens quoted in Leonard Liggio, Why the Futile Crusade.
[7] Murray Rothbard, Economic Thought Before Adam Smith, page 386.
[8] The work of Comte and Dunoyer therefore shares
at least one similarity with that of the socialist anarchist Pierre-Joseph
Proudhon, of disrepute among many libertarians for the declaration, “Property
is theft.” Many don’t know that Proudhon also extolled the idea of contract as
opposite that of government, advocating “thereign of contract,
the industrial or economic system,”
as substituted for “ military rule.”
To paraphrase him, Proudhon sought the eventual and gradual dissolution of the
governmental system within the economic system.
[9] Ralph Raico, Classical Liberalism and the Austrian School, page 193.
[10] Economic Thought Before Adam Smith, page 386.
[11] Butler Shaffer, In Restraint of Trade, page 22.
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