The Many Roads to Liberty

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Llewellyn H. Rockwell Jr.
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Most readers of my weekly column already favor a libertarian society, with either a strictly limited government or no government at all. They realize what a disaster the state has been. What are the philosophical foundations of this outlook? There are many possible answers, but in this column, I’m going to discuss three of the most important of these, the way Ludwig von Mises, Murray Rothbard, and Hans-Hermann Hoppe address this issue. I’m not going to take a stand on which is best but just set forward the different views and leave the choice to you.

I’ll begin with Mises, as most readers will find this the easiest to understand. Suppose you want to do something, e.g., go for a drive in the country. Why do you want to do it? There are any number of possible answers to this. We can continue to ask why you want this goal, but we can’t go on forever. Eventually, you will reach a goal which doesn’t aim at achieving anything else. You just want it. Mises calls this “an ultimate value judgment.” According to Mises, there is no way of arguing about such judgments. I can say that what you want won’t get you that value, but then your judgment isn’t ultimate.

This seems to leave us in a quandary. Do we just have people reiterating their ultimate value judgments? Mises has an ingenious answer. Regardless of their ultimate value judgments, almost everybody needs peace and prosperity to achieve them. We can all work for peace and prosperity, and Mises goes on to argue that this is through establishing and sustaining a free market economy in which the government is strictly limited in its functions to the legal system and defense.

The need for a free-market economy to secure peace and prosperity is easy to make. There are only two possible ways of organized a complex economy—capitalism and socialism. No third system is possible. And socialism, Mises’s calculation argument shows leads to complete chaos. Introducing a government intervention into the economy won’t work. It will fail to accomplish its purpose. A minimum wage law, e.g., will cause unemployment. New interventions will try to cure the problems of the first intervention, but these won’t work either. If this process continues, full-scale socialism will soon result.

Rothbard agrees with Mises’s argument, except that he thinks there are some people who don’t value peace and prosperity. They live for the moment and don’t care about whether the long-term consequences of attaining their momentary goals can be sustained. But most people aren’t like this.

The difference between Rothbard and Mises is about ultimate value judgments. Rothbard thinks that there are some ultimate value judgments that are objectively true or false. Man has an essence or nature, and this determines what he should ultimately value. He should value his flourishing as a rational animal. Here is an example that may make the distinction between Mises and Rothbard clearer. Suppose you are diagnosed with cancer. Obviously, cancer is not a way to promote your own flourishing. Do you have a reason to want to be cured of cancer, or do you need an additional reason, i.e., that you want to be cured of cancer. Rothbard would say that you don’t need an additional reason.

This distinction might not seem like very much, but it makes a great deal of difference in practice. According to Rothbard, you have a natural right to secure what you need to promote your own flourishing. You have the right own your own body and to acquire land or other resources not already owned by a process of Lockean acquisition.

Mises has no use for natural rights, in Rothbard’s sense. Of course, Mises believes that you have the right to control what goes into your body, and you have the right to acquire and develop property. But he is satisfied if people have stable and secure property rights.

As I’ve indicated, Rothbard holds that Mises has made an excellent case against socialism and interventionism, but he thinks that you need natural rights as well. He says about Mises’s view of ethics, “To Mises, there is no such a thing as absolute ethics; man, by the use of his mind, cannot discover a true, ‘scientific’ ethics by insight into what is best for man’s nature. Ultimate ends, values, ethics, are simply subjective, personal, and purely arbitrary. If they are arbitrary, Mises never explains where they come from: how any individual arrives at them. I can’t see how he could arrive at any answer except the subjective, relative emotions of each individual.”

Hans-Hermann Hoppe is a German philosopher, sociologist, and economist who came to study with Rothbard after getting his doctorate in Germany and he became one of Rothbard’s most important followers. He developed a new way of arguing for rights that is different from what we have looked at so far. Mises and Rothbard don’t agree on whether value judgments are subjective or objective, but at least they agree that ethics is about values. Hoppe doesn’t. He argues in a way that makes no appeal at all to people’s preferences. His view is called “argumentation ethics.” He says that a prerequisite of having rights is that you can defend your claim to rights by argument. If you can’t, you are just making an arbitrary assertion. In order to argue you need to own your own body. If you deny this, you are contradicting yourself. Hoppe goes on to argue that you also need to have the right to own property. Denying this also involves a contradiction. As Hoppe says in rather daunting prose: “Second, it must be noted that argumentation does not consist of free-floating propositions but is a form of action requiring the employment of scarce means; and that the means which a person demonstrates as preferring by engaging in propositional exchanges are those of private property. For one thing, no one could possibly propose anything, and no one could become convinced of any proposition by argumentative means, if a person’s right to make exclusive use of his physical body were not already presupposed. It is this recognition of each other’s mutually exclusive control over one’s own body which explains the distinctive character of propositional exchanges that, while one may disagree about what has been said, it is still possible to agree at least on the fact that there is disagreement. It is also obvious that such a property right to one’s own body must be said to be justified a priori, for anyone who tried to justify any norm whatsoever would already have to presuppose the exclusive right of control over his body as a valid norm simply in order to say, ‘I propose such and such’ Anyone disputing such a right would become caught up in a practical contradiction since arguing so would already imply acceptance of the very norm which he was disputing.” Rothbard found this argument intriguing and was sympathetic to it, but he retained his own belief in natural law.

Here are the three approaches. The choice is yours! We can all agree, though, that we need to study the foundation of ethics. That is one way we can support a libertarian society.

Originally published at LewRockwell.com.