Remnant Review
Someone wrote a letter to Walter Block.
Based on all the reading I’ve done up to this point it seems Mises was not an advocate of Anarcho-capitalism like Rothbard. I know Mises wrote highly of Man, Economy, and State but besides that it seems he never spoke much about it; in fact I recall seeing some fairly critical quotes by Mises on anarchism. Did Mises support the ancap philosophy near the end of his life or am I just misinterpreting his attitude in general towards it?
Dr. Block responded.
To the best of my knowledge, Mises wrote nothing explicitly about anarchism. Yes, he explicitly supported government financed opera houses, and the military. On the other hand, he also favored secession down to the individual level, which amounts to anarchism. My best answer to your very important question was that Mises was ambivalent about anarcho-capitalism. He spent his entire professional career doing economics, not political philosophy.
I have good news for Dr. Block. There is no evidence that Mises defended the government support of opera houses. That story goes back to Leonard Read's mention on an unnamed economist's support of the idea. He did not identify this person. It was Max Thun, who remains unknown. Read told me this in private. I wrote about it here.
MISES ON DEMOCRACY
Mises wrote on political philosophy in his book, Liberalism (1927). The Mises Institute keeps it available as a free PDF here. In Chapter 1, Section 8, "Democracy," he wrote this.
Liberalism is therefore far from disputing the necessity of a machinery of state, a system of law, and a government. It is a grave misunderstanding to associate it in any way with the idea of anarchism. For the liberal, the state is an absolute necessity, since the most important tasks are incumbent upon it: the protection not only of private property, but also of peace, for in the absence of the latter the full benefits of private property cannot be reaped.These considerations alone suffice to determine the conditions that a state must fulfill in order to correspond to the liberal ideal. It must not only be able to protect private property; it must also be so constituted that the smooth and peaceful course of its development is never interrupted by civil wars, revolutions, or insurrections.
He explained this in terms of the division of labor. Government bureaucrats are specialists. Society needs them.
It is not at all shameful for a man to allow himself to be ruled by others. Government and administration, the enforcement of police regulations and similar ordinances, also require specialists: professional civil servants and professional politicians. The principle of the division of labor does not stop short even of the functions of government. One cannot be an engineer and a policeman at the same time. It in no way detracts from my dignity, my well-being, or my freedom that I am not myself a policeman. It is no more undemocratic for a few people to have the responsibility of providing protection for everyone else than it is for a few people to undertake to produce shoes for everyone else. There is not the slightest reason to object to professional politicians and professional civil servants if the institutions of the state are democratic.
This sentence is crucial: "There is not the slightest reason to object to professional politicians and professional civil servants if the institutions of the state are democratic."
He favored democracy.
Here is where the social function performed by democracy finds its point of application. Democracy is that form of political constitution which makes possible the adaptation of the government to the wishes of the governed without violent struggles. If in a democratic state the government is no longer being conducted as the majority of the population would have it, no civil war is necessary to put into office those who are willing to work to suit the majority. By means of elections and parliamentary arrangements, the change of government is executed smoothly and without friction, violence, or bloodshed.
In his 1944 book, Bureaucracy, which is posted here, he wrote favorable words about bureaucracy in a limited government.
To these objections we must answer again that bureaucracy in itself is neither good nor bad. It is a method of management which can be applied in different spheres of human activity. There is a field, namely, the handling of the apparatus of government, in which bureaucratic methods are required by necessity. What many people nowadays consider an evil is not bureaucracy as such, but the expansion of the sphere in which bureaucratic management is applied. This expansion is the unavoidable consequence of the progressive restriction of the individual citizen's freedom, of the inherent trend of present-day economic and social policies toward the substitution of government control for private initiative. People blame bureaucracy, but what they really have in mind are the endeavors to make the state socialist and totalitarian (p. 44).
He continued: "This book looks upon the rules and regulations not merely as measures for the protection of the people and for safeguarding the citizen's rights and freedom but as measures for the execution of the will of the supreme authority" (p. 45).
MISES ON WORLD GOVERNMENT
In Liberalism, he included a chapter on "Liberal Foreign Policy." Here, we read the following:
Just as, in the eyes of the liberal, the state is not the highest ideal, so it is also not the best apparatus of compulsion. The metaphysical theory of the state declares—approaching, in this respect, the vanity and presumption of the absolute monarchs—that each individual state is sovereign, i.e., that it represents the last and highest court of appeals. But, for the liberal, the world does not end at the borders of the state. In his eyes, whatever significance national boundaries have is only incidental and subordinate. His political thinking encompasses the whole of mankind. The starting-point of his entire political philosophy is the conviction that the division of labor is international and not merely national. He realizes from the very first that it is not sufficient to establish peace within each country, that it is much more important that all nations live at peace with one another. The liberal therefore demands that the political organization of society be extended until it reaches its culmination in a world state that unites all nations on an equal basis. For this reason he sees the law of each nation as subordinate to international law, and that is why he demands supranational tribunals and administrative authorities to assure peace among nations in the same way that the judicial and executive organs of each country are charged with the maintenance of peace within its own territory (pp. 147-48).
In 1927, world government meant the League of Nations. Mises was a very cautious supporter of the League. He said it did not go far enough.
It is impossible to build a real League of Nations, capable of assuring lasting peace, on the principle that the traditional, historically determined boundaries of each country are to be treated as inalterable fixed. The League of Nations retains the fundamental defect of all previous international law: in setting up procedural rules for adjudicating disputes between nations, it is not in the least interested in creating any other norms for their settlement than the preservation of the status quo and the enforcement of existing treaties. Under such circumstances, however, peace cannot be assured unless it be by reducing the whole world situation to a state of frozen immobility.To be sure, the League does hold out, even though very cautiously and with many reservations, the prospect of some future boundary adjustments to do justice to the demands of some nations and parts of nations. It also promises—again very cautiously and qualifiedly—protection to national minorities. This permits us to hope that from these extremely inadequate beginnings a world superstate really deserving of the name may some day be able to develop that would be capable of assuring the nations the peace that they require (p. 150).
HUMAN ACTION: 1949 VS. 1966
Mises did write on political philosophy in a crucial section in Human Action: Chapter XV, Section 6: "Freedom." To answer the question on Mises' view of the state, begin here.
In the first edition of Human Action (Yale University Press, 1949), Section 6 barely mentioned government. The Mises Institute keeps a free PDF of this edition online here. Scroll down to page 279. I suggest that you read the entire section.
The state, the social apparatus of coercion and compulsion, is by necessity a hegemonic bond. If government were in a position to expand its power ad libitum, it could abolish the market economy and substitute for it all-round totalitarian socialism. In order to prevent this, it is necessary to curb the power of government. This is the task of all constitutions, bills of rights, and laws. This is the meaning of all the struggles which men have fought for liberty.
In the 3rd edition (Regnery, 1966), he completely rewrote this section. The Liberty Fund offers an HTML version of this section here. Scroll down to Chapter 15, Section 6. It has a great deal to say about government.
In order to establish and to preserve social cooperation and civilization, measures are needed to prevent asocial individuals from committing acts that are bound to undo all that man has accomplished in his progress from the Neanderthal level. In order to preserve the state of affairs in which there is protection of the individual against the unlimited tyranny of stronger and smarter fellows, an institution is needed that curbs all antisocial elements. Peace--the absence of perpetual fighting by everyone against everyone--can be attained only by the establishment of a system in which the power to resort to violent action is monopolized by a social apparatus of compulsion and coercion and the application of this power in any individual case is regulated by a set of rules--the man-made laws as distinguished both from the laws of nature and those of praxeology. The essential implement of a social system is the operation of such an apparatus commonly called government.
This was consistent with his emphasis on peace as the basics of the market's division of labor, which he saw as the basis of civilization. He saw the state as fundamental to the maintenance of peace. He said that the state is basic to civilization. Its coercion, when restrained, leaves people free to choose.
The concepts of freedom and bondage make sense only when referring to the way in which government operates. . . . As far as the government--the social apparatus of compulsion and oppression--confines the exercise of its violence and the threat of such violence to the suppression and prevention of antisocial action, there prevails what reasonably and meaningfully can be called liberty. What is restrained is merely conduct that is bound to disintegrate social cooperation and civilization, thus throwing all people back to conditions that existed at the time homo sapiens emerged from the purely animal existence of its nonhuman ancestors. Such coercion does not substantially restrict man's power to choose. Even if there were no government enforcing man-made laws, the individual could not have both the advantages derived from the existence of social cooperation on the one hand, and, on the other, the pleasures of freely indulging in the rapacious animal instincts of aggression.In the market economy, the laissez-faire type of social organization, there is a sphere within which the individual is free to choose between various modes of acting without being restrained by the threat of being punished. If, however, the government does more than protect people against violent or fraudulent aggression on the part of antisocial individuals, it reduces the sphere of the individual's freedom to act beyond the degree to which it is restricted by praxeological law. Thus we may define freedom as that state of affairs in which the individual's discretion to choose is not constrained by governmental violence beyond the margin within which the praxeological law restricts it anyway.
This was the view of classical liberalism. It rested on the concept of a free market protected by the state. Mises made this plain.
This is what is meant if one defines freedom as the condition of an individual within the frame of the market economy. He is free in the sense that the laws and the government do not force him to renounce his autonomy and self-determination to a greater extent than the inevitable praxeological law does. What he foregoes is only the animal freedom of living without any regard to the existence of other specimens of his species. What the social apparatus of compulsion and coercion achieves is that individuals whom malice, shortsightedness or mental inferiority prevent from realizing that by indulging in acts that are destroying society they are hurting themselves and all other human beings are compelled to avoid such acts.
This led him to the issue of military conscription and taxation.
From this point of view one has to deal with the often-raised problem of whether conscription and the levy of taxes mean a restriction of freedom. If the principles of the market economy were acknowledged by all people all over the world, there would not be any reason to wage war and the individual states could live in undisturbed peace16. But as conditions are in our age, a free nation is continually threatened by the aggressive schemes of totalitarian autocracies. If it wants to preserve its freedom, it must be prepared to defend its independence. If the government of a free country forces every citizen to cooperate fully in its designs to repel the aggressors and every able-bodied man to join the armed forces, it does not impose upon the individual a duty that would step beyond the tasks the praxeological law dictates. In a world full of unswerving aggressors and enslavers, integral unconditional pacifism is tantamount to unconditional surrender to the most ruthless oppressors. He who wants to remain free, must fight unto death those who are intent upon depriving him of his freedom. As isolated attempts on the part of each individual to resist are doomed to failure, the only workable way is to organize resistance by the government. The essential task of government is defense of the social system not only against domestic gangsters but also against external foes. He who in our age opposes armaments and conscription is, perhaps unbeknown to himself, an abettor of those aiming at the enslavement of all.
A free society needs the state to survive.
The maintenance of a government apparatus of courts, police officers, prisons, and of armed forces requires considerable expenditure. To levy taxes for these purposes is fully compatible with the freedom the individual enjoys in a free market economy. To assert this does not, of course, amount to a justification of the confiscatory and discriminatory taxation methods practiced today by the self-styled progressive governments. There is need to stress this fact, because in our age of interventionism and the steady "progress" toward totalitarianism the governments employ the power to tax for the destruction of the market economy.Every step a government takes beyond the fulfillment of its essential functions of protecting the smooth operation of the market economy against aggression, whether on the part of domestic or foreign disturbers, is a step forward on a road that directly leads into the totalitarian system where there is no freedom at all. . . .
The state, the social apparatus of coercion and compulsion, is by necessity a hegemonic bond. If government were in a position to expand its power ad libitum, it could abolish the market economy and substitute for it all-round totalitarian socialism. In order to prevent this, it is necessary to curb the power of government. This is the task of all constitutions, bills of rights, and laws. This is the meaning of all struggles which men have fought for liberty.
The detractors of liberty are in this sense right in calling it a "bourgeois" issue and in blaming the rights guaranteeing liberty for being negative. In the realm of state and government, liberty means restraint imposed upon the exercise of the police power.
Then he praised what he called "the old liberalism."
Freedom, as people enjoyed it in the democratic countries of Western civilization in the years of the old liberalism's triumph, was not a product of constitutions, bills of rights, laws, and statutes. Those documents aimed only at safeguarding liberty and freedom, firmly established by the operation of the market economy, against encroachments on the part of officeholders. No government and no civil law can guarantee and bring about freedom otherwise than by supporting and defending the fundamental institutions of the market economy. Government means always coercion and compulsion and is by necessity the opposite of liberty. Government is a guarantor of liberty and is compatible with liberty only if its range is adequately restricted to the preservation of what is called economic freedom. Where there is no market economy, the best-intentioned provisions of constitutions and laws remain a dead letter. . . .
There words are clear: "Government is a guarantor of liberty and is compatible with liberty. . . ." Mises was a late-nineteenth-century classical liberal. He defended limited government.
Why did he rewrite Section 6? I think it was his response to Murray Rothbard's anarcho-capitalism, especially his views on the military draft. Re-read Mises' paragraph on conscription, which did not appear in the 1949 edition. Compare this with the final paragraph of Rothbard's 1963 essay, "War, Peace, and the State." It is posted here.
A final word about conscription: of all the ways in which war aggrandizes the State, this is perhaps the most flagrant and most despotic. But the most striking fact about conscription is the absurdity of the arguments put forward on its behalf. A man must be conscripted to defend his (or someone else's?) liberty against an evil State beyond the borders. Defend his liberty? How? By being coerced into an army whose very raison d'être is the expunging of liberty, the trampling on all the liberties of the person, the calculated and brutal dehumanization of the soldier and his transformation into an efficient engine of murder at the whim of his "commanding officer"? Can any conceivable foreign State do anything worse to him than what "his" army is now doing for his alleged benefit? Who is there, O Lord, to defend him against his "defenders"?
CONCLUSION
There was a fundamental disagreement between Mises and Rothbard. Mises was a classical liberal. Rothbard was an anarchist.
It is important that those nonacademic readers who align themselves with the Austrian School of economics be aware of this fundamental distinction between the two men.
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