Voting: The Seen and the Unseen

A certain line of thinking is all too prevalent among liberty-minded Americans. It runs as follows: "Candidate X may not be perfect, but he is better on domestic economic policy than candidate Y, and that is obviously what matters most for liberty." This way of thinking underlies "libertarian" endorsements of candidates such as Mitt Romney, and it implicitly throws the entire antiwar aspect of libertarianism under the bus.

This is in stark contrast to Ron Paul's way of thinking. Ron Paul may be in the Republican Party. But this by no means indicates that Paul himself would consider your average Republican to be better than your average Democrat in office. In fact, it is probably more likely that the prospect of the warmongering, imperialist neocons returning to full power is more frightening to Dr. Paul than the prospect of a Democratic domestic policy double-down.

Ron Paul, unlike some of his fans, never gave foreign policy a back seat to domestic economic policy: far from it. In his presidential campaign, he talked even more about ending the US empire than ending the Fed.

Moreover, Ron Paul wisely included foreign policy as an essential plank within his domestic economic policy, pointing out incessantly that the US empire is not only responsible for destruction abroad and insecurity at home, but it is also bankrupting and impoverishing us.

Foreign policy is an economic matter in another way as well. Foreign interventionists are essentially security-production socialists. For far too many conservatives, the same federal government that is too inept and corrupt to run a television station is somehow miraculously competent and virtuous enough to make the whole world a safer place through centrally planned invasions, occupations, sanctions, regime changes, and CIA ops.

Some may concede this point but argue that the danger of a new "New Deal" is more acute than that of a neocon renascence. But that is far from obvious, and is in fact rather dubious. What can be more acutely dangerous than an even more belligerent foreign policy that is more likely to lead to nuclear blowback?

When Murray Rothbard explained why he had rooted for (which is fundamentally different from endorsing) Lyndon Johnson over the allegedly "pro-liberty" candidate Barry Goldwater, he pointed out that Goldwater's advisers were crazy and wanted to "nuke Russia." Rothbard rightly said that problems like price controls "fade away" in significance in the face of prospects of nuclear conflict. There isn't much to price in a nuclear wasteland.

Rothbard, like Ron Paul, placed foreign policy center stage. Just as Ludwig von Mises was the Last Knight of Liberalism, Murray N. Rothbard was the Last Knight of the Old Right. As Mises was a laissez-faire Leonidas surrounded by socialists and money cranks, Rothbard was an antiwar Roland, fighting bravely and almost alone in the rear guard of the Old Right against the Cold Warriors of the New.

Rothbard spent much of the 50s writing an epochal economics treatise that made plain the case for the free market. However, by 1959, he was more concerned with matters of war and peace than with domestic economic policy. In that year, he wrote, "I am getting more and more convinced that the war-peace question is the key to the whole libertarian business," and that, in the face of an American arms budget exceeding $40 billion, "the fact that we might spend a few billion less on public housing or on farm support no longer thrills me."

Neither should the prospect of a "pro-business" candidate tinkering around the edges of the American welfare state (and probably actually expanding it) thrill, or even appease, libertarians in the face of American military spending which, in 2011, exceeded $700 billion.

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Voting: The Seen and the Unseen