Selections from Our Enemy, the State: Supports Summit 2024

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All States Are Empires of Economic Lies

—Tom DiLorenzo

I’m going to start out by expressing my agreement with Doug Casey, who wrote about the economics profession of today. Most economists are political apologists masquerading as economists. They tailor theories to help politicians demonstrate the virtue and necessity of their quest for more power.

This has been going on for a long time. Here’s the founding document of the American Economic Association from the 1880s. It said this: “The state is an educational and ethical agency whose positive aid is an indispensable condition of human progress.”

It also said this: “The doctrine of laissez-faire is unsafe in politics and unsound in morals.” Then it also mentions a Marxian class conflict being a big issue of the day, and that economists need to weigh in on that.

To quote Murray Rothbard about the role of the intellectuals, including the economic intellectuals: “The majority must be persuaded by ideology that their government is good, wise and, at least, inevitable, and certainly better than other conceivable alternatives. Promoting this ideology among the people is the vital social task of the ‘intellectuals.’”

And unfortunately, that is the vital social task of most of the economics profession.

That’s why the only true economics these days is being pursued by the Austrian School, which is why the Mises Institute is more important than ever for the future.

Murray Rothbard himself thought that he was basically in the business of debamboozling, because so many aspects of the academic world are in the opposite business—of bamboozling the public. As Ludwig von Mises said in Human Action, the three disciplines that are the most susceptible to becoming propaganda are history, law, and economics.

Mises on Democracy: A Critique

—Guido Hülsmann

My topic is Mises on democracy and a critique of his views. Ludwig von Mises is known as a proponent of democracy. He thought that it was the best political system. This needs to be looked at with circumspection because he was not endorsing democracy as we know it today. So it should be studied more closely and to see what are the pros and the cons of this view.

What are the limits within which we can accept his views on this topic, on government and the role of democracy? What does he mean by this? That’s what I mean by a critique. It does not necessarily mean a rejection, just an attempt to grapple with the weight of the argument and the limitations of the argument.

Mises’s case for democracy does not rely on principles such as the ones that we find in the national motto of the French Republic, liberté, égalité, fraternité. This was not a matter of liberty, right? Free men could very well do without any democracy. That’s not the point, and it’s not a matter of equality.

Mises reasoned completely differently. He says . . . democracy is a way to facilitate the division of labor. The division of labor is the reason why people get together. The division of labor allows different people to obtain a larger global product by cooperating. The division of labor is there to promote the material interests of everybody. That’s the minimum program on which everybody agrees.

Mises also thought that coercive government was necessary. He posits it’s self-evident we need government. Now, what form of government do we need? Well, he makes the case for a government of self-determination, self-government, and self-rule. And that’s, for him, democracy.

So there’s a vote. We ensure that it’s not necessary to have a violent confrontation over the exercise of power. As soon as it gets violent, people can no longer cooperate. If they’re fighting over who is ruling the country, well, they won’t cooperate. And they will all suffer as a consequence.

Therefore Mises’s argument, strictly speaking, holds only in the very short run, in which we have a nascent democracy that comes out of a previous political regime, but isn’t characteristic of developed democracy as we know it in our Western world today, right?

All democracies are characterized by very long political roundabouts, in which it’s virtually impossible for the ruled to have any say, to a significant extent, in the selection of the rulers. And this leads us to the root of the problem, which is commercial democracy, not democracy as such. So, Mises’s argument that democracy preserves a peaceful transition of power holds only in the short run, not in the long run.

Of course, the political production process is worthwhile, especially if the state grows large. And in a coercive democracy, nothing prevents the government from becoming large.

A Case Study in State Conquest: The Federalists’ Constitution

—Patrick Newman

I’m really glad to be at this year’s Supporters Summit, which focuses on Albert Jay Nock’s Our Enemy, the State. Albert J. Nock was a real hard-core libertarian. The title alone speaks volumes, right, because the enemy of mankind and civilization, according to Nock, is precisely the institution that people think is the savior of mankind.

The state, the government, according to Nock, is not a Mr. Fix It who can wave his magic wand and solve all of the social problems of the day, right? The government causes the problems. Government is the enemy. And it’s important that we read Nock because he tells us what we’re up against. This is why the ideas still matter today.

One of Nock’s main arguments in his book, and this is something that really influenced Murray Rothbard, is that governments do not originate through a social contract. Governments originate through what Nock perceptively calls “conquest and confiscation.” You’re not going to find that in a traditional political science course, to say the least. So governments, according to Nock, arise through coercive means, through force. And historically, that is what happened.

This is why Nock says that “the sole invariable characteristic of the state is the economic exploitation of one class by another.” That’s the main characteristic. It’s one class exploiting another. Or as Austrian economists would say, a little bit more accurately, it’s one caste that exploits another caste. And a caste is a group of people that is privileged by the government.

You have the ruling caste, the overlords. Then you have everybody else, the ruled, who are paying the taxes, suffering under the regulations, and so on and so forth. In other words, the origins of government are examples of cronyism.

What about the United States? What about Western civilization, so to speak? Didn’t they arise through voluntary means and majority consent? I mean, we were taught that the United States started with the US Constitution.

Didn’t we ratify the US Constitution? Nock takes this question head on.

The US Constitution was enacted through conquest. Not conquest by the sword, but conquest by the rigged constitutional coup d’état and a rigged ballot-box process. This is something not a lot of people know about. And it was engineered by special interest groups looking to exploit the public, an aspiring ruling caste, if you will.

I think this matters today, to go through this little bit of a history lesson, because I think it’s important that we understand that the system we’re working under—the federal government, its US Constitution—is, unfortunately, a rigged system in a way. It was broken from the very beginning, from ground zero, so to speak.

Albert J. Nock saw his task as communicating to what he called “the remnant.” So who was Nock referring to? Nock was referring to independent people who search for knowledge on their own. They care about the world. They don’t need to be taught directly, but they want to search out knowledge for their own sake. And I think that’s exactly what the Mises Institute is about.

Our Enemy, Public Health

— Tom Woods

Public health in general is an intellectual train wreck. It’s a wholly politicized branch of so-called medicine that involves a seemingly endless series of false claims and ideological gobbledygook. Remember “Racism is a public health issue” as a justification for why you could go out to protest what happened with George Floyd but otherwise had to be locked in your house?

No self-respecting discipline speaks or thinks that way.

Now, we should have denounced public health sooner and written books about it sooner, and I think before covid we just didn’t pay enough attention to it, as much attention as it deserved. That’s partially because its overreach wasn’t quite so great in those days but also because we have a lot to criticize.

You know, we have the Fed, we have the IRS, we have all the cabinet departments, we have civil liberties violations. It’s exhausting being us. You can’t do everything. So let’s not reproach ourselves too much.

But beyond all this, they also want to impose their plans on you without having to deal with such mundane things as judges, courts, and laws. You’ll recall how unhappy Anthony Fauci was when a federal judge overturned the mask mandate on planes.

Now by the way, the reason they were unhappy that the mask mandate on planes was overturned was not that they thought we’d all get sick. The reason was that they knew we wouldn’t get sick. And then we’d start wondering, Well, gee, I wonder what else has been pointless that they’ve been pushing on us?

That’s a very important question to start asking. But Fauci said this was a matter for public health to decide and not properly a matter for the judiciary.

Well, you know what, Tony? Nobody actually consented to a dictatorship run by, I shudder even to think about it, public health officials whose 24-7 barrage of false claims survives only because no mainstream media outlets bother to question them.

So these people, the world health authorities, did nothing but lie to us about what was happening for several years running, and none of what they foisted on us accomplished a single thing. Well, I take that back. It accomplished one very important thing. It alerted every noncomatose person on this planet that the world public health establishment, far from a collection of experts looking out for our best interests, is at best grossly incompetent and, at worst, a downright sinister cabal that any thinking person must resist and denounce.

The Expropriator-in-Chief

— Jonathan Newman

This is Stephanie Kelton’s book, The Deficit Myth. She has a chapter in this book called “The Deficits That Matter.” In 2015, she became the chief economist for Senate Democrats on the Budget Committee, and she recounts her time and her frustration with both Democrats and Republicans on that committee because they were stuck in this mindset that government deficits mattered.

Here is what she described as the deficits that matter: “The deficits that we identified are the ones that affect ordinary people the most, and they have been ignored for far too long. They are what lie at the core of any decent society. Our national infrastructure is crumbling. The cost of a college education is increasingly out of reach, and forty-five million Americans are saddled with more than $1.6 trillion in student loan debt. Income and wealth inequality are near record highs. Average workers have seen their real wages increase by just 3 percent since the 1970s.”

I wonder if there was something important that happened in the early 1970s that would affect the rate of price inflation. Who knows?

She continues, “Nearly one in four Americans say that they will never be able to afford to retire. Our health-care system is inadequate, to say the least, with eighty-seven million people uninsured or underinsured.”

So she’s outlined all these deficits that matter and she’s trying to deflect, ignore the budget deficit and look at these deficits that matter. So why would she want to ignore government deficits? She’s a superstar in the modern monetary theory (MMT) world, and according to MMT, government deficits are an accounting fiction that distracts us from the government’s true ability to accomplish big things.

According to Kelton, their red ink is our black ink, meaning that government deficits actually represent positive net financial assets for the private sector. So when the government spends $100 and then taxes $90, it leaves $10 in private hands. So free money, yay for us.

But if you take just one more step, this claim falls apart. MMTers never reconcile this claim with the fact that government debt service is paid for with taxes and money printing. The only way to extinguish government debt is by taking money and purchasing power away from the same group they claim is the recipient of the government’s generosity.

Therefore the government is what I call the expropriator-inchief. And what’s interesting is that MMTers don’t deny this. So they might not like the way that I’ve characterized it, but in Kelton’s book and in her documentary, Finding the Money, and elsewhere in the MMT literature, they’re always talking about the government’s grand ability to command resources that already exist in the market. So they recognize that the government is actually doing this expropriating and commanding of resources.

Kelton does not see that the very policy she proposes causes and exacerbates the problems she thinks MMT can fix. When you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail. When you have a blank check for government spending, everything looks like a problem more government spending can fix. When all the government can do is expropriate, and when any side effects can be managed by a technocratic elite, it’s no surprise that MMT in the end advocates for statism, totalitarianism, and central planning.

The Hunt for the Neutral Rate of Interest

—Jeffrey Herbener

What I want to concentrate on this morning is something that we all learned from Murray Rothbard in his work on the origin of the Federal Reserve, where he showed that Federal Reserve policy is actually driven by politics. It’s driven by the interests of the federal government and the interests of the banking elite.

Because of this, it would have been and was historically opposed by the general public, which required this apparatus of professional economists to provide something like a scientific veneer to mask, right, to cover what was actually being done in order to accept the monster that we call the Federal Reserve.

So I would like to discuss in my talk the most recent attempt by professional economists to provide this sort of veneer, this scientific veneer that covers over Fed policy that is still, as we know and have experienced since the financial crisis of 2007, driven by politics, driven by the interests of the federal government and the banking elite. And this is embodied in this hunt for the neutral rate of interest.

The problem is that we obviously cannot actually measure the neutral rate of interest, because it’s in real terms. So we don’t have direct data on this at all. And so what we’re left with, of course, is this veneer of science that frees the Federal Reserve officials to pursue their real interest, which is to benefit the federal government politicians in their fiscal excesses and to advance the material interest of the banking elite. So I say, end the Fed.

The Assault on Our Liberties

—Wanjiru Njoya 

Before I encountered Rothbard, I used to refer to civil rights as plastic civil rights, meaning they’re just fake, they’re fabricated, and they’re malleable, and they can be used in any way. But I think Rothbard’s terminology is better, phony civil rights, because sometimes plastic things can be useful, like plastic straws.

But Rothbard is saying these are phony rights. They’re phony, they’re fake, and this applies to all the civil rights, because as he says, the only rights, the only genuine rights, are private property rights. So now we have a lot of legislation that’s supposed to eradicate hate, and one feature that all this legislation has in common is that double standards apply.

So a lot of people don’t know this. They say, Oh, it’s against hate. Well, I’m against hate. So that’s good. Let’s have a law that’s against hate. But what they don’t realize is double standards apply. So you don’t just check what’s been said, because typically they’re trying to illegalize words.

It’s about the state getting involved when people say, I don’t want to see this. The state needs to come in and protect me from having to see things that I prefer not to see. So how can we resolve this? So many people say the way to resolve this is by having more laws. So you can have more laws that protect people from these antihate laws.

And I just want to suggest that that is not the correct approach. The correct approach is not to have more laws, but to get rid of the existing bad laws. We should have less law and not more law.

We try to solve more and more problems with legal rules and fewer through voluntary accommodation. We need to go back to freedom and the principles of freedom in deciding how to solve these problems. And this is the point that Lew Rockwell makes in Against the State. And Lew Rockwell says, “What freedom has illustrated is that differences among people do not need to lead to intractable conflicts.”

Otherwise, we’re just endlessly fighting. We win the election, we fight you, and then you win the election, you fight back. He says more and more social cooperation is possible and fruitful to the extent that people are granted the freedom to associate, trade, make contracts, and work together toward their mutual advantage. We need to be moving toward liberty and not vengeance through the state. We shouldn’t be weaponizing the state against each other. We should be moving toward liberty.

Prohibition: The Sword of the State

—Mark Thornton

It’s important to realize that prohibition is the one thing in the United States where the government or the state can bring the fist of violence into our daily lives.

Fortunately, in the United States, the military is mostly prevented from intervening in our lives domestically. And so the prohibitionists, and the progressives in particular, have had to concoct something in order to have the physical power of violence to invade our lives, in order to intimidate us and to make us feel like we are good, protected sheep.

Progressives use prohibition to punish their enemies. They use prohibition to penalize their opponents. Progressives use prohibition to gain power for themselves, for the state. And like in all cases with power, the potential to use power is more important than actually using power.

So they use prohibition to demonstrate their ability to use violence through the state, or conversely, they use the existence of the violence of prohibition as a way of protecting the weak sheep in the population. Symbolically, the sword is the symbol of the absolute royal authority of the state.

The policy of prohibition in the United States is a real-world manifestation of progressive socialist power in which the state brandishes its power and authority over the people. Conveniently for the cause of the state, prohibition divides us as a population into outcasts and protected sheep.

As demonstrated by Mises’s theory of progressive interventionism, prohibition never solves any problem, but it creates a host of new problems while exacerbating the existing ones. Prohibition is a magnificent example of Mises’s theory and understanding. Progressive socialists came to power in the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Their influence quickly materialized at the state and local levels of government, where they went to work doing a lot of busybody things, but in particular, implementing a horde of government interventions directed at alcohol and drugs.

Their mission can be seen as purifying the earth for the second coming of their parents’ god and for the coming of their own godlike supremacy.