In 1973, Murray Rothbard wrote, “The libertarian creed, finally, offers the fulfillment of the best of the American past along with the promise of a far better future. Even more than conservatives… libertarians are squarely in the great classical liberal tradition that built the United States and bestowed on us the American heritage of individual liberty, a peaceful foreign policy, minimal government, and a free-market economy.”
He was correct, but a half-century later these principles have all but disappeared from the American landscape and, increasingly, the American psyche. Individual liberty has been replaced by the war on drugs, the war on terror, and an Orwellian surveillance state. On foreign policy, they literally renamed the Department of Defense to the Department of War. Minimal government has given way to maximized government intrusion in every facet of human existence. And our once nearly free market has become a fascist fusion of state force and corporate corruption.
Embracing libertarian principles would have indeed provided a far better future, but America went the other direction, turning its back on its classical liberal foundation, and embracing all the worst elements of a totalitarian police state. Today, heavily armed federal agents patrol American cities in armored vehicles, seizing people without evidence, holding them without justification, and denying them even the most basic elements of due process. The Fourth Amendment is in tatters as corporate cronies provide governments a digital dragnet to track every person in real time — and your tax dollars pay for it.
Save perhaps the unconscionable slaughter of civilians during WWII, America’s foreign policy has never been more belligerent and violent. Invading foreign countries without provocation, kidnapping and assassinating foreign leaders, seizing resources, and murdering suspected smugglers, all at a cost now measured in trillions. Beyond the financial cost, the blowback is inevitable. Violence begets violence, and America’s ham-fisted intrusion into the foreign affairs of other countries will only engender ongoing conflict for generations to come.
Looking at America today, it’s difficult to imagine a more inaccurate description than minimal government. Every substance you ingest is regulated. Natural medicines are prohibited unless or until they can be synthesized for corporate profit. Your vehicle is congressionally mandated to spy on you. And what little freedom once remained over life’s minutiae has been handed over to the control of city councils and HOAs. You cannot even sleep in your own vehicle in most places without facing the threat of arrest.
Though the term “free market” is still used, such freedom no longer exists. Instead, entrepreneurs face a byzantine web of protectionism, tariffs, quotas, and restrictions on the movement of capital and labor. Many of these restrictions change from day to day, based on the whims of politicians and bureaucrats.
Fifty years ago, America was poised to achieve a far better future by embracing a libertarian outlook that rejected economic central planning and the imposition of moralistic preferences. But today, such ideas have more in common with bell-bottoms than current affairs. We traded the prospect of expanding liberty, peace, and free markets for the highest incarceration rate in the developed world, the proliferation of foreign wars and entanglements, and a bloated government carrying $40 trillion in debt.
Rejecting the libertarian creed was the country’s greatest failure, and it guaranteed a far worse future for our world.
