The new radicals
Philip Vander Elst
One of the principal themes that has domi- nated the American presidential campaign up till now has been the unpopularity of big government with electors of all classes. The widespread mood of disenchantment with Washington bureaucracy has already been remarked upon by most observers, but prac- tically no heed has so far been paid to the most interesting feature of this political sea- change : the rapid growth since 1971 of a new force in American politics, the American Libertarian Party, which is today fielding its own Presidential candidate.
The party's philosophy, as stated in its manifesto, is based on the concept of the absolute sovereignty of the individual—the idea that every human being has a right to live in any manner he or she chooses so long as force or fraud are not used in dealings with others. Consistent with this principle, the Libertarian Party platform calls for a strict respect for civil liberties, a free market economy, and a non-interventionist foreign policy.'
The Party's programme incarnates, with remorseless logic, its hostility to all forms of state intervention and regulation. On the one hand conservative voters are wooed with proposals to slash taxes and wind up the federal bureaucracy by, for a start, simply abolishing all the major federal agencies (the FTC, FCC, ICC and CAB); at the opposite end of the spectrum, radical support is canvassed with proposals to repeal all laws against 'victimless' crimes (sex, gambling, drug-taking) and with promises to refrain from ever en- gaging in Vietnam-type military adven- • tures. The rhetoric of the new libertarian- ism is calculated to appeal to both 'left' and 'right', as this further passage from its 1976 manifesto demonstrates : 'Beyond the virtual enslavement of tax- ation are the increasing number of govern- ment infringements on our civil liberties. US government agencies at home and abroad are continually prying into the private affairs of citizens . . . The federal government now tells the American people what we can view on`prime-time' television, how much money we can spend to support the candidate of our choice and the potency of the vitamins we can take. There are so many laws passed every year which attempt to regulate, control and mould us into what Big Brother deems appropriate that it's no wonder the average person is totally dis- illusioned with the Republicans and Democrats.'
Whether or not this original and challeng- ing approach will seduce large numbers of electors from their traditional loyalties in November, remains to be seen. What is undeniable, however, is the fact that the libertarians have already made astonishing progress in being taken seriously as a poli- tical phenomenon. At the time of its first convention in I9't2, when it chose a pro- fessor of philosophy (Dr John Hospers) to be its first candidate for the Presidency, the Libertarian Party was on the ballot in only two states. Today, it is organised in fifty states and its 1975 Presidential nominating convention in New York received nation- wide network television and radio coverage.
The 1976 Presidential ca-ididate is Roger MacBride, a forty-six-year-old graduate of Princeton University and Harvard Law School, who owns a farm in Virginia and has written and edited books on politics and law. To date, MacBride's main claim to fame is that he made history in 1972 when, as an uncommitted presidential elector from Virginia, he refused to vote for Nixon and Agnew, casting his ballot instead for John Hospers and his running-mate. From that moment on the Libertarians have been drawn into the limelight, winning praise from the most unexpected quarters. Thus Newsweek stated in a recent report : 'Liber- tarianism has surfaced in this election year as an ideology matched to the mood of many disgruntled Americans' ; while the Washington Post, for its part, conceded: 'For the overtaxed, over- regulated, overburdened and underpowered millions of the American middle class, Libertarians are the only people worth voting for.'
One characteristic that distinguishes the Libertarian movement from its political rivals, is the high intellectual calibre of its candidates and, even more so, of its major prophets. (While there is an equally dis- tinguished conservative movement in the United States, represented by such men as William Buckley, and magazines like National Review, the Alternative, • and Modern Age, it has as yet no effective national expression.) Philosophically, liber- tarians draw their inspiration from the old anarcho-isolationist right of the nineteenth century and the inter-war years; from such writers as Mencken, Lysander Spooner, and Albert Jay Nock, who habitually denoun- ced the American constitutions as a statist document and regarded the institution of government as a coercive instrument of class warfare and mutual sectarian plunder. Spooner's No Treason, the Constitution of No Authority (1870) and Nock's Our Enemy, the State are probably the most famous ex- positions of the old strain of American liberal anarchism. Among contemporary anarchists, the name of Professor Murray Rothbard is the most widely respected, mainly for his work in economics where he has further developed the theories and methodology of the 'Austrian School', building upon the foundations established by Carl Menger, von Mises, and the recent winner of the Nobel Prize, Friedrich Hayek.
Reading past and present libertarian literature is a captivating and at the same time infuriating experience. Brilliant in- sights into aspects of history, politics and morals, are mingled with arguments of the most threadbare kind; realism and utopian- ism are blended in the oddest proportions. Rothbard, more than any other person, em- bodies these contradictions. For example, his book, For a New Liberty, conquers the scepticism of the reader repeatedly, per- suading him against his will of the reason- ableness and viability of what at first sight appear to be the nuttiest schemes (e.g. for private currencies, roads, law courts, police forces etc); orthodox beliefs are subjected to pitiless and even ribald scrutiny and pre- judices overthrown one after the other. Did you know, for instance, that America's pri- vate railway companies used to employ their own security personnel and that the latter were so efficient that crime on the railroads was reduced by 90 per cent during their existence? Or that by 1840 the Federal Post Office had lost one third of its revenues to cheaper and more efficient private mad carriers and that it was for that reason that Congress closed all the loopholes in its monopoly ? These and many other com- parable facts and arguments are marshalled with enormous skill by the same Rothbard who, in other places, blames America for the Cold War, welcomes the communist victory in Indochina, and seemingly speaks a language more appropriate to the Soviet Ambassador at the United Nations. These aberrations aside, the refreshing and unique quality of American libertarian- ism is that its singleminded advocacy of freedom cuts across conventional political divisions and destroys the stereotypes of 'right' and 'left' that plague political dis- cussion on both sides of the Atlantic. If for that and no other reason, it is a movement that deserves attention, especially now that it has reached our shores in the form of a Godalming-based group of graduates call- ing itself the Radical Libertarian Alliance, connected with the young economists of the Carl Menger Society.
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