Sunday, September 6, 2020

Nationalist Libertarianism

 


Nationalist Libertarianism
Libertarian Nationalism

The Prolegomena to a Libertarian International Policy
Divesting Globalist Governance of Authority
To Micro-Manage Our Lives
Is the Only Path to World Peace
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This Essay
In Memory of a Peace Warrior

Maj. Gen. Bert Stubblebine
06 Feb 1930 - 06 Feb 2017
 

We live in a World System where the promise of peace and prosperity has become a distortion used to empower globalist elites with their demonstrated eugenocide agenda; most recently, through the Declared COVID 'Pandemic', where relations among nation-states resemble the brutal behavior of thugs – where cultural Nations are plundered at will -- a true Hobbesian international order.

As the lack of intellectual viability of Statism in its various racial, religious, national, international, bureaucratic, imperialist and other forms becomes increasingly exposed, the need to articulate an alternative libertarian nationalist approach to relations among people of different cultures, and thus Nations, becomes critical. As the nation-state and its institutions (including international agencies, such as the UN) become increasingly irrelevant in an economically globalized, blockchain-enabled, post-singularity world, a market-oriented, cosmopolitan nationalism is urgently needed.

L. von Mises pointed the way toward such an approach with his understanding of classical liberalism’s cosmopolitanism – “nationalism does not clash with cosmopolitanism, for the unified nation does not want discord with neighboring peoples, but peace and friendship.”[1]

The juridical subjects of International Law, "International Actors," include nation-states (even micro-states like the Vatican), a certain few private associations (like the Red Cross or Sovereign Knights of Malta), and international agencies like the UN and its associated institutions (such as certain privileged NGOs and "specialized agencies"  -- WHO and FAO, for example). What are not included in this list are actual private persons, such as you and me, natural or cultural Nations, and even juridical persons such as private associations and registered corporations.

The humans and human organizations with which we usually interact are missing from the globalist structure of international relations.

We individuals do not exist in the currently dominant statist view of international law.

In the eyes of Globalist International Actors, we real people and our associations are little more than disregarded entities. This state of affairs is entirely unsatisfactory to libertarians. Libertarians understand, taught by Mises' brilliant philosophical exposition in his master work Human Action, that there is only one set of actual actors in human affairs: individual humans.

To paraphrase Mises: only individuals think, plan and engage in Human Action. 

The belief that collective nouns such as "state" or "corporation" or "class" and the like engage in human action is a superstitious delusion that has led to much human suffering.

Any truly humane, libertarian international law must, going forward, take this grave error into account.

Consider the long march of human history and how treating individual humans as objects led us to endless millennia of statist imperial warfare, culminating the 20th Century's killing fields and nuclear incinerations. Consider the necessary role of Statism in the imposition of what Lysander Spooner saw as the Great Monopolies: the horror of slavery, vicious state churches, the legal "incapacities of women" and the King's trade monopolies.

Consider therefore the false "glories" of the State as a human institution. Consider it and condemn this most vile of accretions of a brutal past.

 

“A state, is called the coldest of all cold monsters. Coldly it also lies; and this lie creeps from its mouth: "I, the state, am the people." It is a lie! ... Destroyers, are they who lay snares for many, and call it the state: they hang a sword and a hundred cravings over them. Where there is still a people, there the state is not understood, but hated as the evil eye, and as sin against laws and customs.” ― Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra

“Where there is still a people...” – that is, a natural, cultural Nation – “there the state is... hated as the evil eye, and as a sin against laws and customs.”

Even as the vicious old concepts: chattel slavery, religious and racial bigotry, institutionalized inequality of women and various others, have become anathema to civilized people, so called,  the very concept a "sovereign" State, not subject to the same rule of law that applies to private persons, must be rejected.

Then we will see the great sweep of human history as the (not always steady) advance in knowledge and enterprise. We will see the inventors, creators, entrepreneurs, as the proper subjects of human admiration, leaving behind childish fascination with bright war medals, glittering crowns and presidential pomp.

Jefferson understood the essence of libertarian foreign policy: “Peace, commerce, and honest friendship with all nations...entangling alliances with none”. 

The natural implementation of that view is the non-interventionist foreign policy of the Founders of the American Federal Republic, guaranteed by the powerful role of the original US Senate in international treaty relations and federal appointments, as ‘ambassadors of the sovereign states.’  

That glorious era of non-interventionism lasted for over a hundred years (with notable lapses regarding the indigenous nations, Mexico, Mormons, and two failed invasions of Canada). TR's reckless charge up San Juan Hill ended the policy of libertarian non-interventionism. The debacles of the Philippine conquest, and of World War One led to militant world socialism, embodied in states such as Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union and Red China. This resulted in unparalleled death and destruction. The USA became the not-so-reluctant World Policeman.

However, Libertarians always stand against war. Whether Thoreau asking Emerson why his friend was not in the jail cell with him for refusing to pay the Mexico War Tax, or Murray Rothbard telling my Viet Nam bound contemporaries exactly how "the coldest of all cold monsters" used selective service conscription to centrally plan the welfare/warfare state.

Whether Warren, Tucker and Spooner all decrying the uncivil war between the States to make America safe for the Federal bureaucracy or Mencken poking at the hubris of the world war warriors, libertarian-Americans stood against every war after the Rebellion of 1776; stood with every resistance to Federal Power from the Whiskey Tax Rebellion of 1791.

[1] So the very first principle of a libertarian nationalist approach to foreign affairs is Peace -- Anti-War.

Standing for peace, we stand with the victims of war, including those murdered "in our names" and those forced to pay for the carnage, "Trillions and trillions wasted..." Hon. Ron Paul


Libertarians understand that the main result of an interventionist foreign policy is death; millions of deaths... and the resulting "blow back" that brings the war back home. Do Americans really think we can escape the results of violating other people? For most of the years since the adoption of the Constitution of 1787 the Federal Republic has been at war. It is our moral responsibility as citizens to join in the call, “War no more; war never again.”

"War no more; war never again." Pope Paul VI. 

Does that mean I oppose people overthrowing tyrannies by force? No. I applaud self-determination. Americans, however, have a special obligation to keep our "coldest of cold monsters" within its assigned borders. That means bringing all the troops home. The Founders understood that a standing army spread across the globe would be an invitation to disaster. We need to respect the borders of other nations if we expect our borders to be respected. A Nation without borders is an Empire about to expire. 

The abandoning of the Founder’s wise non-interventionism proved this. We need to stop it. A Nation defends its borders.  An Empire ignores them. The best we could do for peace and freedom is to bring all the troops home.

[2] The second principle must be Individualism. 

There is no "collective action" and no collective guilt. No tax-funded “reparations.” There is only individual Human Action. This must be the bedrock ground of any sane approach to international relations (or any human relations). The universal rights of real, individual humans must be respected in international law and individuals must have standing to act internationally.

Chief among these rights is the Right of Informed Consent in all things pertaining to our bodies,  minds and spirit. As Natural Solutions Foundation founder, the late Maj. Gen. Bert Stubblebine taught us, the individual's right to "Informed consent is the defining issue of the 21st Century."[2]

[3] And the third principle, Free Trade. 

Despite the mercantilist errors being spouted by some Republicans and Democrats, protectionism (with its regulations and tariffs) is simply taxation -- and we are Taxed Enough Already

Whether penalizing companies for following market forces or imposing new tariffs, it is just tax policy and the incidence of the tax will fall where all taxes fall: on the production of real goods and services, paid for by the consumers. Who benefits? The Bureaucracy.

In economic science the issue was settled literally centuries ago.

First, the market price is the just price. Therefore, any government imposition that restricts the market price must be unjust.

Second, as early as the Corn Law Debates in England in the 1830s it has been conceded by all thinking economists that free trade benefits those countries that adopt it, even if other countries continue irrationally to impose protectionist policies. If you read the economic literature and do the math, you will realize that protectionism is a con.

The Nation is better off with free trade and market-created currency than it can ever be with centrally planned trade and government fiat currency.  The blockchain can enable both secure, "trustless" trade and non-state currency, facilitating a new era of world economic growth.  Not globalist control, but free individuals living in free Nations freely trading without government permission or fiat.

Peace -- Individualism -- Free Trade: lead to a libertarian world. 


As a practical matter, urgent steps in that direction require a wholesale planetary divesting of authority from political systems used to micro-manage Human Action. 

Every regulation abolished, every tax reduced, is a victory for humanity. The direct political program therefore must be "abolish multiple old regulations for any new one proposed" -- and the same as to taxes and bureaus.

Just as the market price is the only just price we can know[3] humans, free to act with their own property (including their bodies) as they choose, will make, on the whole, on average, the best choices. Far better than those decisions being dictated to us by a self-appointed globalist elite that will do anything to maintain power and privilege, shrinking not even from genocidal, weaponized vaccines and declared pseudo- pandemics.

The existence of international libertarian organizations, such as Libertarian Parties, Mises Circles and the like is very encouraging.

Here is what the libertarian protesters in Brazil were saying:


L. von Mises understood it clearly. He warned us, from his vantage point of the 20th Century, the Century of Genocide, the consequences of statist interventionism:

"Man's freedom to choose and to act is restricted in a threefold way. There are first the physical laws to whose unfeeling absoluteness man must adjust his conduct if he wants to live. There are second the individual's innate constitutional characteristics and dispositions and the operation of environmental factors; we know that they influence both the choice of the ends and that of the means, although our cognizance of the mode of their operation is rather vague. There is finally the regularity of phenomena with regard to the interconnectedness of means and ends, viz., the praxeological law as distinct from the physical and from the physiological law. The elucidation and the categorial and formal examination of this third class of laws of the universe is the subject matter of praxeology and its hitherto best-developed branch, economics. The body of economic knowledge is an essential element in the structure of human civilization; it is the foundation upon which modern industrialism and all the moral, intellectual, technological, and therapeutical achievements of the last centuries have been built. It rests with men whether they will make the proper use of the rich treasure with which this knowledge provides them or whether they will leave it unused. But if they fail to take the best advantage of it and disregard its teachings and warnings, they will not annul economics; they will stamp out society and the human race." -- L. von Mises, Human Action (Part Seven, Chapter XXXI,3)


Libertarians need to apply Mises' profound understanding to our advocacy for a peaceful world. 

Only then can we achieve human freedom, peace and prosperity. If we intend to prevent the 21st Century from becoming the Century of Eugenicide, the culling of humanity, for the supposed benefit of the globalist elite, we must demand a humane future in which individuals are free to trade and live in peaceful harmony with all other individual humans.


At this time our liberties are under relentless attack, all in the name of "public health."  The public cries out for safety and the public health authorities, while not able to provide it, are quite willing to abolish liberties wholesale as their new fiat coin of control.

If we do not advocate for a free and peaceful world, who will?

This essay is an updated version of a previous posting at this blog.

[1] Quote from L. von Mises, Nation, State, and Economy posted by J. Deist, https://mises.org/wire/national-conservatism-and-cosmopolitanism

[2] More on informed consent:  https://tinyurl.com/AVDcard

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