Libertarians and War part II

Originally posted July 26, 2006 (Listening notes: The Jams “Setting Sons“)

Ilya Somin has followed up the previous wonderful discussion of Libertarians and war with another. Once again it is a fascinating discussion made all the more so for me because I got my first link from a fairly big time blog. It was quite thrilling (I had assumed it would be months before anyone even noticed I existed so I thank Ilya for being so gracious as to welcome a new and unknown blogger.)

I want to expand on the point I made at the end of the previous post on my own view:

My own view is that I do not engage in action merely for my own liberty, I do so as well for my fellow citizens. Many will no doubt conclude that that concern for our fellow men does not stop at our nations boundaries. One view is as libertarian as another.

First however I want to discuss a bit of what I heard in the discussion following his post. One argument goes to the effect that war and an active foreign policy has on our institutions. War, it is claimed, inevitably leads to the expansion of the state and the loss of liberty at home. Certainly that is a threat and it certainly has led to the expansion of the state in this century. It is not however always true as Stephen Cox’s wonderful piece at Liberty unbound shows:

But predictions of this kind are not infallible. During the 18th century, the British colonies in North America assisted the empire in winning a series of wars on their soil and near it, but no appreciable increase of either the military or the civilian establishment resulted. The colonies’ refusal to support a serious military establishment was a principal reason for Britain’s disgust with them. The War of the Revolution produced many of the worst features of big government: conscription, indebtedness, confiscation, monstrous inflation, and as much centralization of authority as could be achieved under the existing political system; yet the American armed forces melted away immediately after the war, and the bank that was created to manage the war debts was eventually liquidated also. Big government was hardly the obvious winner of the revolution.

I live in California; I am one of the victors of the Mexican War.

Nor was it the winner of America’s next declared war, the War of 1812. During that conflict, the capital of the United States was destroyed and much of its territory occupied by the enemy. One might have predicted that such events would produce demands for a large standing army, to prevent the same thing from happening again. If such demands were made, they fell on deaf ears. Again the army melted away. While the early republic remained warlike, its habits were much more adventurist than defensive. Its military involvements were many and diverse, but they entailed no large military establishment.

Cox goes on to give other examples and more detail, but it is not necessarily true that war need lead to a larger more intrusive government. Even in this war the greatest restrictions on our own liberty are due to the fear of terrorist attacks upon us. They are not necessarily linked to our offensive actions. Certainly it can be argued that these defensive measures are more necessary because of our offensive actions, but most likely they would have been pursued regardless. Still I think that is a powerful rationale for being leery of military action. It is not an argument about war per se, but the cost of war to us in lost liberty as well as the more easily calculated costs. In the end it takes a utilitarian view of war, and a utilitarian view geographically contained.

The second argument is related in that war inevitably leads to the denial of others rights, such as the right to live. It is inherently an act of the state and should be resisted. Ilya refers to this as the absolutist tendency in libertarianism in which any action that deprives an individual of his liberty, even if it holds out the possibility of increasing the total amount of liberty, cannot be pursued.

I look at it differently. Many libertarians view the idea of maximizing liberty, and defending it, as something that occurs within a defined sphere. If the Pacific Northwest were to be seized by a right wing cult of fascists undoubtedly they would consider it acceptable to resist. They would also undoubtedly consider it justified for the rest of the country to send in the military to remove the would-be dictator. What they have done is arbitrarily drawn the line at our borders. I do not see that as inherently logical, though it is not illogical either. We have to draw the line somewhere.

Let us move that back a little. It is certainly true that we are all concerned with our own liberty and well-being. It is not wrong though to care for our families as well. Nor would it be illogical or wrong for us to care more about them than ourselves. We also care about our friends and neighbors. It would be unusual, but not wrong or illogical to care for them even more than themselves. We can extend that argument form our city to our state to the country as a whole. This ends up being an argument more akin to Adam Smith’s The Theory of Moral Sentiments:

To man is allotted a much humbler department, but one much more suitable to the weakness of his powers, and to the narrowness of his comprehension: the care of his own happiness, of that of his family, his friends, his country…. But though we are … endowed with a very strong desire of those ends, it has been entrusted to the slow and uncertain determinations of our reason to find out the proper means of bringing them about.

None of this argues against the many practical reasons for why we should have a modest foreign policy, and libertarians (well, anyone) should be wary of such policies for these reasons. We also have every right to care about our fellow countrymen and ourselves more than those far away. However, it is not reasonable to insist that concern necessarily stops at our border or to suggest that people who extend that concern are somehow less libertarian. In the end there is no easy rational way to decide where to draw that line. We have to decide based on our feelings (as human beings we cannot avoid them) our weighing of the costs and the likelihood of achieving our aims and the costs of inaction as well to our liberty and those we choose to fight and/or aid. Once again from Steven Cox:

Piling up statistics about wars is useful in showing the scale of choice and preference, and in that sense it can be very persuasive. Few people would object on practical grounds to any military adventure if they could be assured that only ten lives would be lost in it, and none of those lives would be their own. Few people would fail to object if they were assured that the cost would be hundreds of millions of lives.

Therefore in forming policy choices no hard line such as that nothing but defensive war is warranted can be maintained without deciding arbitrarily where that line of defending our fellow men stops. We are left with vague methods of guiding us that depend on our perceptions of threats from enemies, threats to our liberty and the costs of action or inaction. Jon Henke has done a good job in my mind of defining a workable modest foreign policy framework that we might use here and here. There are other frameworks including reflexive isolationism.

Whatever framework we use we are inevitably going to vary in how we perceive threats, costs, benefits, etc. People using the same framework will come to radically different conclusions. Even reflexive isolationism will have its difficulties in uniting its adherents. Is a massing army on the border a reason for offensive action or do they have to attack first? If the opponent has the ability to strike from a distance do we have a rationale? Is that really any different than a massed army other than it is maybe more obvious the potential enemy is intending to attack? What about the harboring of those we feel are parts of movements we fear or have attacked us? Isolationism or the belief in a modest foreign policy does not tell us how to judge such things.

This, needless to say, leads to claims that those who are in favor of or opposed to a given course of action (such as Iraq or Afghanistan) do not actually use the framework. However the perception of the various actors precludes such an agreement. The principal being up-held exists in a world where we do not know the outcome, costs, benefits, threats or any of the things that we would use to implement any given framework. As libertarians (especially those of us influenced by Hayek) we should be especially cognizant of the lack of knowledge we all bring to the table when it comes to foreign policy.

This is a huge topic and this post is already long, so I suggest reading Stephens piece. I’ll be drawing on it myself in subsequent posts as it puts down a number of things that relate to how I view this question very well. Special thanks to fuz in Ilya’s comments for providing the link.

Updates: I also suggest Daniel Drezner’s take on progressive realism here.

Tyler Cowen makes a short point, leading to a large discussion in the comments, about moral arithmetic that is not unrelated.

[tags] libertarianism, isolationism, Adam Smith [/tags]