| Living in a State-Run World
By Murray N. Rothbard
Ludwig von Mises Institue
January 10, 2005
[Republican administrations often pose moral and practical
questions for libertarians, insofar as many jobs become
available in government, whether directly employed by the
White House, or regulatory agencies, as a writers and
intellectuals. Is it right or wrong to accept such jobs? And
regardless of who is in power, many free market economists
face the ongoing dilemma of working in state-fund
institutions. Freedom-minded citizens, too, face the problem
of whether it is proper to work for the public sector and in
what capacity. In this article from Liberty, Volume 1,
number 3; December 1987, pp. 23-25, Murray N. Rothbard
offers his perspective. This reprint, with some editing, is
posted January 2005]
The articles by Messrs., Waters and Wollstein [i] (Liberty,
Sept./Oct. 1987) highlight a vitally important question for
libertarians: How can we act, and act morally, in a
State-controlled and dominated world?
It seems to me that the most important concern is to avoid the
twin, and equally destructive, traps: of ultra-purist
sectarianism, where indeed we would not permit ourselves to
walk on government-owned streets; and sellout opportunism, in
which we could become supervisors of concentration camp while
still claiming we were "libertarians" in some far off, ideal world.
Opportunists are people who severely split theory from
practice; whose ideals are tucked away in some closet or
trophy room and have no bearing on their daily lives.
Sectarians, on the other hand, suffer from what .the Catholics
would call the error of "scrupulosity," and are always in
danger of boxing themselves in to become hermits and virtual
martyrs. All well and, good; but to avoid both pitfalls, we
need some criteria to guide us.
Morality as Religion
For Mr. Waters the problem is simple; instead of trying to
avoid the trap, he rushes to embrace it. For him the answer is
to throw away moral principle, which means throwing away
passion, commitment, and hostility to renegades from
liberty: Instead, we are to be cool and detached "scientists,"
proposing liberty on utilitarian and unemotional grounds.
Then, presumably, we wouldn't worry about betrayal, or about
any other actions, regardless how odious, libertarians might
perform. So, bring on the concentration camp supervisor, and
let us talk to him sweetly about the pragmatic benefits of the
price system and the division of labor!
In the first place, the fact that religious people are
hostile to traitors and apostates does not make their views
incorrect. Mr. Waters adopts an old canard by lumping in
moral principles as "religious," thereby indicting hostility
to immoral actions with the dread stamp of "religion." You
don't have to be religious to detest immorality or hypocrisy,
or to be angry and indignant at backstabbing by friends or lovers.
Mr. Waters's ideal of the passionless scientist is, as far as
I am concerned, totally off the wall. I have known many
scientists, and I have never known any who were~ not
passionately indignant against what they considered the
promotion of quackery or the betrayal of the ideals [e.g.,
truth-seeking] of science. I confess also to be annoyed at Mr.
Waters invoking of my dear mentor, Ludwig von Mises, in his
argument. It is true that Mises was a utilitarian, but it is
also true that he was passionately devoted to liberty, and
equally passionately opposed to all forms of statism, and to
those who purvey it. Scientist he was; bloodless he was not….
The Nozick Question
[The New Republic reported that libertarian philosopher Robert
Nozick had successfully appealed against his landlord to the
Cambridge Rent Control Board for a reduced rent on his
apartment--editor].
Mr. Waters says that for us moralist ("religious")
libertarians, the word for Robert Nozick is "apostasy."
Rubbish. The word for Nozick is "hypocrisy," since he has
never recanted his libertarian views. He apparently just
doesn't live by them. Waters also says that every libertarian
he knows "was upset, angry, and outraged" at Nozick's actions.
I was not, although I agree that was their proper reaction.
As a long time Nozickologist, his actions didn't surprise me
at all. It did not surprise me that he held the time-honored
Northeastern urban tradition of "screwing your landlord"
higher on his value-scale than the abstract principle of
liberty and non-aggression. Even more amusing was Water's
complaint that libertarians have gone so far as to "ostracize
[Nozick] from libertarian society." Come, come, how often
has anyone seen Nozick in "libertarian society?" Essentially,
he abandoned libertarian society himself after his one flashy
role at the LP national convention in 1975, where he was
lionized soon after Anarchy, State, and Utopia had hit the
streets. After that, the polymathic Nozick went on to other
concerns and other books, and lost interest in libertarian questions.
For those of us who are passionately committed to libertarian
principle, and consider it of supreme importance (especially
if we are moralist/"religious"), such loss of interest is very
difficult to understand. But that's the way it is. My own view
of Nozick, based both on his personality and on the way he
writes his books, is that he is considerably less interested
in the content of his books than he is in the coruscating
brilliance of his own thought-processes as he works his way
through them. That sort of person is surely the sort of person
who loses interest in the content of his previous books, and
who would, happily screw a landlord he dislikes without giving
much thought to libertarian principle.
To get to the screwing itself, and to the main substantive
question raised by the Waters article: is being indignant at
Nozick's screwing his landlord equivalent to upbraiding him
(or anyone else) for walking on government-owned streets or
flying from government-owned airports?
I think not. Waters's fundamental error is to confuse
accepting a situation none of your making, with actively
making that situation worse. In short, there is nothing wrong
with a libertarian living in a rent-controlled apartment,
and therefore paying a rent below the market. Nozick (or
myself) is not responsible for the rent-control law; he or we
have to live within the matrix of such laws. So there is
nothing wrong with him living in a rent-controlled apartment,
just as there is nothing wrong with him walking on government
streets, flying from government airports, eating
price-supported bread, etc. None of this is of Nozick's (or
our) making. It would be therefore foolish and martyrish for
us to renounce such apartments if available, to refuse to eat
any food grown under government regulation, to refuse to use
the Post Office, etc. Our responsibility is to agitate and
work to remove this statist situation; apart from that, that
is all we can rationally do. I live in a rent-controlled
apartment, but I have also written and agitated for many years
against the rent-control system, and urged its repeal. That is
not hypocrisy or betrayal, but simply rationality and good sense.
Nozick's moral error [let's call it "sin" to provoke the
Waters of this world] was to go much further than simply
living under rent control. His immoral action was to pursue
the landlord actively, to go to the State to agitate, time
and again, to get the State to force his rent even lower. It
seems to me that there is a world of difference between these
actions. One is living your life within a State-created
matrix, while trying to work against the system; the other is
actively using the State to benefit yourself and screw your
fellow man, which means initiating and abetting aggression and theft.
Working for Government
The criterion we should use in the Nozick case is, I believe,
an easy one. There are far more difficult questions. What
about working as a government employee? It is true that, other
things being equal, it is far better, on libertarian as well
as pragmatic grounds, to work for a private employer rather
than government. But suppose that the government has
monopolized, or virtually monopolized, your occupation, so
that there is no practical alternative to working for the government?
Take, for example, the Soviet Union, where the government
has, in effect, nationalized all occupations, and where there
are no, or virtually no, private employers. Are we to condemn
all Russians whatsoever as "criminals" because they are
government employees? Is it the only moral act of every
Russian to commit suicide? But that would be idiotic. Surely
there are no moral systems that require people to be martyrs.
But the United States, while scarcely as far gone as Russia,
has had many occupations virtually monopolized by the
government. It is impossible to practice medicine without
becoming part of a highly regulated and cartelized
profession. If one's vocation is university teaching, it is
almost impossible to find a university that is not owned,
economically if not legally, by the government. If one's
criterion of government ownership is the receipt of over 50%
of one's income from the government, then there are virtually
no universities, and only one or two small colleges, that can
be called "private." During the riots of the late 1960's,
students at Columbia discovered that far more than 50% of the
income of that allegedly "private" university came from the
government. In such a situation, it is foolish and sectarian
to condemn teachers for being located in a government university.
There is nothing wrong, and everything rational, then, about
accepting the matrix in one's daily life. What's wrong is
working to aggravate, to add to, the statist matrix. To give
an example from my own career. For many years I taught at a
"private" university (although I would not be surprised to
find that more than half its income came from the government).
The university has long teetered on the edge of bankruptcy,
and years ago it tried to correct that condition by getting
itself "statized" through merging with the State University of
New York system, in those halcyon days rolling in dough. For a
while, it looked as if this merger would occur, and there was
a great deal of pressure on every member of the faculty to
show up in Albany and lobby for merger into the State system.
This I refused to do, since I believed it to be immoral to
agitate to add to the statism around me.
Does that mean that all libertarians can cheerfully work for
the government, apart from not lobbying for statism, and
forget about conscience in this area? Certainly not. For here
it is vital to distinguish between two kinds of State
activities: (a) those actions that would be perfectly
legitimate if performed by private firms on the market; and
(b) those actions that are per se immoral and criminal, and
that would be illicit in a libertarian society. The latter
must not be performed by libertarians in any circumstances.
Thus, a libertarian must not be: a concentration camp director
or guard; an official of the IRS; an official of the Selective
Service System; or a controller or regulator of society or the economy.
Let us take a concrete case, and see how our proffered
criterion works. An old friend of mine, an anarcholibertarian
and Austrian economist, accepted an important post as an
economist in the Federal Reserve System. Licit or illicit?
Moral or immoral? Well, what are the functions of the Fed? It
is the monopoly counterfeiter, the creator of State money; it
cartelizes, privileges and bails out banks; it regulates—or
attempts to regulate— money and credit, price levels, and the
economy itself. It should be abolished not simply because it
is governmental, but also because its functions are per se
immoral. It is not surprising, of course, that this fellow did
not see the moral problem the same way.
It seems to me, then, that the criterion, the ground on which
we must stand, to be moral and rational in a state-run world,
is to: (1) work and agitate as best we can, in behalf of
liberty; (2) while working in the matrix of our given world,
to refuse to add to its statism; and (3) to refuse absolutely
to participate in State activities that are immoral and criminal per se.
Murray N. Rothbard (1926-1995) was professor of economics at
the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.
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