Obama: The People's War President?

Last week, I received news that an old friend—the son of a former Libertarian congressional candidate—had become a conscientious objector in his Army unit following an action that killed noncombatants. This was Wayne's first tour of duty, but there is no doubt that he was well-practiced in the fieldcraft and personal discipline required for good soldiering.

He grew up in a close-knit Christian family that homeschooled their children on a fifty acre plot of woods in the wiregrass region of lower Alabama. Wayne grew up reading, hunting, fishing, shooting guns, and playing paintball with his brother and sister. While working with the Libertarian Party of Alabama, I visited their home on several occasions between 2002 and 2004, and I remember Wayne as a respectful young teenager with an expansive vocabulary and his father's knack for computer games.

Around five years after the last time I saw him, Wayne's infantry unit deployed to Iraq. Having been in the Army for a couple of years already, his father reports that he was "gung-ho" about the Army life, even in a combat zone. Wayne's unit assaulted a building thought to contain "insurgents," and air support was called in from an AC-130 gunship and an AH-64 Apache helicopter. After the target was bombarded from the air with 105 mm shells and strafed with 30 mm cannon-fire, the structure was cleared, and only lifeless women and children were found inside.

After returning stateside, Wayne determined that his conscience would not allow him to kill for the United States government again. Despite ridicule and worse from his "battle buddies," Wayne, now facing another Iraq deployment, has begun openly speaking his conscience and declaring that participation in the Iraq War is participation in murder.

Barack Obama was held out by many as the most radical voice for peace among the viable Democratic presidential candidates in 2008. What a disappointment to those who voted accordingly! The peace president has broadly expanded the Afghanistan campaign, begun bombing runs in Yemen, and still maintains tens of thousands of combat troops, albeit at reduced levels, in Iraq (although my friend reports that private military contractor usage has been amped up to compensate). There have been rumblings about stepping up U.S. efforts to "stabilize" Somalia, and Xe (formerly Blackwater) mercenaries are already on the ground there. The Obama administration has also worked to move more troops into the murderous anti-coca campaign in Colombia, where "false positives" (anti-narco-gestapo-speak for "murdered civilians") continue to mount.

Fear of American operations into Colombia's neighbors has made political hay for South American political oppressors, as the socialists in power in Venezuela and Ecuador have effectively used the American regime as a foil in their own democratic socialist melodramas, working to clamp down on dissenting media outlets and otherwise centralizing control of those economies into state hands.

In total, the United States has around 394,000 troops deployed on foreign soil. In comparison, the rest of the world's governments combined have fewer than 150,000 of their military personnel on international deployment.

Like his war-hawk predecessor, the current president is pursuing a policy of perpetual war for perpetual peace. And like the Bush government, Obama's administration has moved to cover-up evidence of torture and other crimes committed by U.S. personnel.

Glenn Greenwald pointed out in a recent Salon column that this should come as no surprise to those who remember that in 2008 Obama's current head of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, Cass Sunstein, advocated government operations to actively infiltrate and disrupt groups that openly questioned the truthfulness of the federal government's various organs. Sunstein pitched such actions as means for promoting public faith in the government.

Administration figures have also been up to no good in domestic policy debates, with the undisclosed bankrolling of soi disant "independent" experts like Jonathan Gruber. The MIT professor took federal money to promote the president's healthcare agenda in the media, but forgot to mention this rather substantial conflict of interests when grandstanding for his government employer. Greenwald correctly concluded that such official deception is symptomatic of yet another administration's narcissistic self-assuredness and disdain for honest debate.

If anyone doubts that government propaganda kills, look at the eighteen year-old kids who join the military because they believe they will be "protecting freedom" by serving as emissaries of the leviathan state that once used atomic weapons against civilians and which imprisons a higher percentage of its own citizens than any other modern democracy.

Rather than sending naive, trusting young people like my friend Wayne to risk life and limb committing mayhem in the name of "regional stability" and other nebulous trump cards, Obama should bring American troops home now. But he will not do so. He will simply put new window dressing on the tired old political barbarism of high-time preference foreign policy and spending for spending's sake, and will continue to show the same disregard for the individual lives irreparably harmed as a result. Where's the hope?

(Also published in the January 2010 issue of Dicta, the Suffolk Law Paper.)

Civil Disobedience and the Libertarian Division of Labor

Having witnessed first hand the fruits of brutal libertarian in-fighting, I think it is important to examine the roots of such needless, yet casualty producing conflict. Libertarians believe in a legal theory based upon non-aggression--that is, a respect for the rights of others. We oppose the idea of a monolithic, ever-present state wielding arbitrary and capricious power over subjects. Where so-called libertarians deviate by endorsing some form of aggression, we should, no doubt, ferret out the incorrect position so as to prevent anyone from confusing it with a libertarian one. The evil sell-outs and the misguided retreatists, as Rothbard called them, ought to be battled on philosophical grounds. Not all inter-libertarian conflicts arise from such principled disputes, however.

Wilt Alston has previously addressed the problem here with his posited categories of "pre-lib" and "pre-con" libertarians. I think that one's previous political disposition that may be inculcated by parents, or by some other means, may color our libertarian lens like Wilt suggests. I think, though, that the way many libertarians focus their indignation may be even more obvious and primal than mere prior team affiliation. When dealing with the government itself, we each see the face of the state in the areas where we have best tasted of its evil effect.

For those of us who are successful businesspeople, the taxing power of the state that has so many times inhibited the growth and success of vibrant enterprises is the arm of the state that must be attacked. For those of us who are parenting young children and are required to jump through legal hoops to home educate them, the specter of centralized, regimented, state regulation of education is the usurpation that ought be battled first. For those of us who have a friend or relative who has been imprisoned for self-medication outside of the bounds of state approval, on the other hand, the War On Drugs is the tentacle most in need of a chopping.

It is obvious, and to be expected, that one would hate the part of the state with which he has had the misfortune to wrangle most often. Yet, it isn't obviously right to say--speaking as a libertarian strategist--that any of these branches of the state apparatus is necessarily the right one with which to start. This is because they all are. An individual soldier must defend the front that he occupies. So too must we libertarians defy the state's grasp where it reaches for us personally--an activist division of labor.

It is some small satisfaction, no doubt, to moralize about the wrongs committed against others, and to voice opposition to their oppression. This is itself praiseworthy, and can be helpful in popularizing a movement, and in guiding its participants. Yet, when we look for the heroes of any revolution that casts off one tyrant or many, we must look first for the individuals who simply stood their ground. The most lauded heroes--and thus the most effective figures for the purposes of fomenting revolutionary ideas--are those who did not seek out a fight, but rather stood steadfastly and refused to yield when assailed by the usurper.

The search for libertarian heroes is made more difficult, though, by the fact that while we libertarians nearly universally recognize an individual's inherent freedom to do with his body as he wishes, we don't necessarily find the use of intoxicants or other acts of carnal indulgence praiseworthy. For example, take the massive act of civil disobedience staged by ten thousand students and activists in Boulder, Colorado on 4/20/08. Some libertarians may find this sort of behavior foolhardy, even without the risk of arrest. With that view of the underlying drug use, they then find it difficult to praise the act of resistance to the state, even though they advocate the abolition of all drug prohibition. Yet, these college students are heroes. Whatever a libertarian may think of the wisdom of smoking marijuana, it cannot be denied that these particular pot-smoking college students--who were presumably not picking up the habit solely for this event--were engaging in what can only be called anti-state activism. Rather than cowering away from the state, hoping to be overlooked, they risked arrest in an act of defiance that brought one of the state's more ridiculous laws into greater disrepute. And what may be helpful to libertarians who are apprehensive about fully applauding such behavior is the fact that they did it without engaging in anything more or less moral than what they already do anyway.

Likewise, regardless of what one thinks of Wesley Snipes' acting abilities, his battle against the IRS is more heroic than Susan Sarandon's speeches against the war. After all, while Ms. Sarandon's antiwar position--insofar as it is a consistent one--is laudable, it is only a matter of words. Wesley Snipes acted to defend his property from federal usurpation--he stood his ground, and paid heavy consequences for it.

Now, I do not mean to say that each and every libertarian must subject himself to a scourging by the state to show his devotion to resisting it. I agree with my friend Manuel Lora that libertarianism is not an altar call for martyrs. I do not think that most libertarians ought to pull up stakes and abandon their gainful employment only to throw their bodies into the cogs of the state. However, when the state comes roaring towards your home, it is heroism to dig in, stand firm, and resist for as long as possible. Likewise, those students in Boulder were already part of a legally vulnerable class of citizens--recreational drug users. By taking their resistance outside, where others could see some indication of the strength of those in defiance, they are to be praised as having made a contribution to the cause of liberty.

Just as atheist libertarians should applaud the sentiment of Daniel's pious disobedience to Darius, so too should socially conservative libertarians applaud the revolutionary sentiment expressed by those tie-dyed students in Boulder.

(Also published at LewRockwell.com.)

Why be an anti-drug war radical?

(From an email discussion on a libertarian mailing list, to a fellow member who was unsure about ending drug prohibition altogether. To read the definitive libertarian treatment of this issue, be sure to check out Prof. Mark Thornton's Economics of Prohibition.)

The pro-liberty position on prohibition is the one that is both just and most likely to have the best outcome.

If we are really worried about gang violence, cut off their exclusive, monopoly hold on the illegal/illicit drug market in urban centers. The drug war indirectly subsidizes gang violence by driving profit margins up while driving the responsible, law-abiding businessmen out of the market and removing any legal (and non-violent) recourse for breached contracts, stolen goods, fraudulent sales, etc.

If we want to reduce the number of overdoses, stop allowing the War on Drugs to create artificial irregularities in the supply line that result in "hot doses" of drugs like heroin after a series of "bunk" (low potency) lots of the substance. Most heroin overdoses seem to result from irregularity in the supply line that cause people to take more of the drug than they realize after learning their level of tolerance from their use of a batch of drug with different potency. The "hot dose" combined with other substances, particularly alcohol and benzodiazepines like Xanax, result in fatalities where combination with a lower-potency drug have previously produced the desired effect without the tragic consequences.

If you are concerned about the most vile and dangerous homecooked drugs, like crystal meth, stop the governmental hampering of the market--the thing that drives people to these more dangerous substitutes for other, imported drugs. Cocaine is an addictive drug that I think it is unwise to toy with, but the facts show that powder cocaine doesn't pose such an immediate threat to the abuser's health as the cheaper, more accessible, substitute stimulant, meth. When some drugs are outlawed, other less desirable but more readily available drugs are used as substitutes.

If you are worried about kids doing drugs, allow the legal market to distribute them. If a store sells a dangerous item to an infant (a non-majority-age individual who is legally incapable of giving consent for dangerous activities or any other binding contracts), that store can be held responsible. If a kid buys drugs from "Big Mike" who got them from some shadowy drug dealer, you are far less likely to be able to get any relief from irresponsible sellers.

If you want fewer people to do drugs, remove the "taboo" of illegality from behaviors that are essentially harmless to others. By outlawing victimless acts, we teach people to disrespect the law. The resultant acculturation into lawlessness is not a good thing.

I don't think most pro-drug war types are mean-spirited folks. I think they just don't understand the real ramifications of the actual policies in place. It is nice to hear a politician say "we're gonna stamp out drug abuse by doing X, Y, and Z." It seems that voting for that politician or that measure is voting against drug abuse itself. But what one must consider is whether the policy will actually have it's intended (or purported) effect. It feels good to "do something," but the stick of government force often fails to work the way those who wield it believe it will.

We should heed Frederic Bastiat's advice from the final words of his short but powerful work The Law:

"Away with the whims of governmental administrators, their socialized projects, their centralization, their tariffs, their government schools, their state religions, their free credit, their bank monopolies, their regulations, their restrictions, their equalization by taxation, and their pious moralizations! And now that the legislators and do-gooders have so futilely inflicted so many systems upon society, may they finally end where they should have begun: May they reject all systems, and try liberty; for liberty is an acknowledgment of faith in God and His works."