New Quaker Notebook

Way back in 2003, Lew Rockwell, founder and president of the Ludwig von Mises Institute, represented himself well as a sane opponent of the disaster that has now become the US occupation of Iraq (also known as the "quagmire") and what he said then was both accurate and prescient, especially the following:

... Prosperity is an essential partner in civilization itself. It is the basis of leisure, charity, and a hopeful outlook on life. It is the means for conquering poverty at the lowest rung of society, the basis on which children and the elderly are cared for, the foundation for the cultivation of arts and learning. Crush an economy and you crush civilization.

It is natural that liberty and peace go together. Liberty makes it possible for people from different religious traditions and cultural backgrounds to find common ground. Commerce is the great mechanism that permits cooperation amidst radical diversity. It is also the basis for the working out of the brotherhood of man. Trade is the key to peace. It allows us to think and act both locally and globally.

Imagine a world in which everybody were free to live and work as entrepreneur or as employee where he wanted and how he chose, and ask which of these conflicts could still exist. Imagine a world in which the principle of private ownership of the means of production is fully realized, in which there are no institutions hindering the mobility of capital, labor, and commodities, in which the laws, the courts, and the administrative officers do not discriminate against any individual or groups of individuals, whether native or alien. Imagine a state of affairs in which governments are devoted exclusively to the task of protecting the individual's life, health, and property against violent and fraudulent aggression. In such a world the frontiers are drawn on the maps, but they do not hinder anybody from the pursuit of what he thinks will make him more prosperous. No individual is interested in the expansion of the size of his nation's territory, as he cannot derive any gain from such an aggrandizement. Conquest does not pay and war becomes obsolete.¹

From one perspective the Libertarian viewpoint, whether political or economic, looks Utopian and naive; from another perspective, perhaps the historical, it embodies the the very basis of what has enabled civilization to claim credit for prosperity, leisure, and peace: trade is the key to peace, as Rockwell eloquently stated it.

But this fact is worthless if we let fascists have the key, for then the corporation becomes interested in expanding the size of its nation's territories, because it does "derive gain from such an aggrandizement." When small-government conservatives obscure the Libertarian vision by blinding the electorate with talk of small government in the regulatory sense, all the while aiming to dismantle the protective government so that its pieces may be owned by the multinational corporation, the inversion then becomes complete—government can no longer devote itself to "the task of protecting the individual's life, health, and property against violent and fraudulent aggression." In this, Katrina and the Iraq War are clarifying examples.

Picking the Lock on the Door to Peace