Prof. Friedman replies in a lengthy email. I’ve edited it for length, not out of disrespect, but because he’s got his own blog and because much of his email seems beside the point to me.
You write:
"In that post, I was trying to describe the views held by those who are closer to Rothbard than to the other well known libertarian intellectuals-views which those intellectuals themselves might not have held. This is understandable, given for example the widely known fact that Ludwig von Mises would have been deeply ashamed of the views of those calling themselves the Mises Institute. The Rothbardians are generally morally and culturally relativistic, even if Rothbard himself was not."
If you were distinguishing the position of the "Rothbardians" from the position of Rothbard, I think you had an obligation to say so: "The core of the Rothbardian position, although not of Rothbard's position, is S" which isn't what you wrote.
Okay. I thought it was clear enough, but it wasn’t my intention to mislead. I’m not sure why you would assume that it was my intention to mislead, given that I wrote “All of the following will be ‘roughly speaking’ since precision on these matters is never very easy,” and “we might call them Rothbardians after the economist Murray Rothbard who can figure, more or less, as the spiritual head of this group,” and “The Rothbardians are largely grouped around the Mises Institute and the blog Lew Rockwell.com. One of their most distinctive features is…”—quite a lot of qualifiers in there, intended to signify that what I was writing was not to be taken as a critique of Rothbard who, as you say, was not himself a relativist—and who, I’d like to think, would be embarrassed at much of what these “Rothbardians” say. I could just as easily have called these folks Misesians, but would have had to include the same sorts of qualifiers. I think you’re after a straw man here.
I can't speak to the people you are calling Rothbardians, since I don't know their views. But in the paragraph [quoted from The Ethics of Liberty] you are making the same error as before. You are jumping from "one might reach these conclusions because one was a relativist" to "Rothbard was a relativist, or at least equivocal on relativism." Rothbard isn't saying that oppressive states are legitimate, he is saying that libertarians should oppose attempts by the state they live in to make war on other states, a position that can be defended on non-relativist grounds.
As I understand that passage, he is arguing that no state is legitimate, but that since we live in a world that has states, we must as a practical matter accept the fact that they claim legitimacy as if those claims were equally valid, so long as they are confined within “their” territory. This sounds like relativism to me, or at least to contain the same sins as relativism—i.e., to fail to distinguish between the operative principles of those states. He is also saying that we should oppose our own government’s attempts to make war—a proposition I also consider incorrect—but to put the “choice of the people of Vietnam” to establish communism (which is incidentally a false descriptive statement) on a par with a free society does seem relativistic to me.
But in any case, I’m really not concerned with Rothbard one way or the other, but with the prevalence of relativism in the libertarian community—a belief that I think is antithetical to libertarianism, and one which I think is especially prevalent among those I’ve called Rothbardians. If another term would better describe this crowd, I’d be happy to use it, but it would not change the content of my observation.
You have not yet offered a single sentence inconsistent with a non-relativist position. It follows that you have no basis to claim that "Rothbard was at best equivocal on this point," since he wasn't in the least equivocal. The man published well over a thousand pages on his ideas.
There seems to be something fallacious here. Rothbard makes statement X. Statement X appears to be motivated by a belief in Y, and I call him on it. Prof. Friedman points out that statement X could have been motivated by a belief in Z also, and therefore it’s wrong for me to criticize Rothbard for holding view Y. Very well—if Rothbard held non-Y, then great! But I wasn’t trying to get into a debate about Rothbard himself—I was pointing out the prevalence of Y, which I consider to be heretical. I do think that Rothbard’s statement sounds like Y, but neither Friedman nor I are experts on Rothbard, and I could very well be wrong. If so, and if Rothbard did not believe that states are equally legitimate because “the people want communism [facism, slavery, sharia] therefore it’s okay,” then all the more reason for those I am criticizing to sin no more.
With regard to my saying that I’m not a collectivist by saying that the United States has the right, though not the duty, to liberate oppressed people, Friedman writes,
You initial use of "we" was with regard to military action against foreign dictators. Military action is usually taken by groups of people and, in the world as it now exists, military action by the U.S. military is paid for with tax money.
True, but if one flies to a higher strain and objects to any state action funded by tax money, then I think we’d have no grounds to distinguish anything that any state does as being legitimate versus being illegitimate. I don’t think we can say that Auschwitz and Eisenhower’s liberation of the death camps are both illegitimate because both were funded by tax money, though. Given the fact that government is funded by taxes, which it oughtn’t be, but is, that doesn’t change the fact that oppressive regimes have no “right” to be free from interference by other nations, and it does not put oppressive regimes on a par with free (or freer) ones.
Do you have any reason to think that either Rothbard or the "Rothbardians" would object to a voluntary group voluntarily funded attempting to overthrow a dictator? That wasn't the subject Rothbard was discussing in the bits you quoted.
I do think that those I’m criticizing do not base their objections to the Civil War or the Vietnam War or the Iraq War on the fact that they are funded with tax dollars or even on the fact that the first two involved draft armies. If that were the case, they would say “Lincoln was right, but shouldn’t have used a draft army”—which is the position I take.
I don't know the views of DiLorenzo, but I don't see that the view that states are entitled to secede is any less libertarian than the view that they aren't entitled to secede. The first position permits an oppressive state to secede from a less oppressive nation in order to oppress its citizens, the second position forbids a less oppressive state from seceding from a more oppressive nation in order that its citizens not be oppressed… And if one holds that the Union has the right to prevent secession, then one is conceding power to the federal government that no libertarian rightly so called can concede.
I’ve responded to this at length in my several published articles on the subject, and must refer readers there.
How do you find out what "the privileges and immunities of citizens of the United States" are? We know that the authors of that amendment didn't think that the right to have an abortion or to engage in homosexual intercourse were among them. It looks as though you are taking the fourteenth amendment as endorsing not the rights of citizens but the rights of all humans, defined not by the beliefs of anyone associated with the amendment or the Constitution but by your beliefs. At that point "The decision is constitutionally correct" becomes pretty nearly identical to "I agree with the result."
I’ve responded to this elsewhere also, and must refer readers there.
Texas was depriving people of liberty with due process of law--they passed the law in the legislature and they gave the defendant a trial. You just think (as I do) that they weren't entitled to.
I’ve explained in several places (most notably here) that the mere formal enactment of legislation does not satisfy the due process clause’s requirements, since there are substantive elements that are also necessary for a piece of legislation to qualify as “law.”
If you take your interpretation, then the slave states had a right to secede if doing so was necessary to preserve slavery—because "the people" had agreed by contract not to interfere with slavery and were bound by that contract. Once the federal government breaks its side of the contract, the states are no longer bound by theirs—even if you assume that the original contract didn't permit secession, which I don't think is clear.
As is often the case, I think the misunderstanding here proceeds from equivocation over the word “secede.” There is an essential difference between “secession” and “revolution” which is ignored (or perverted) in the pro-secession literature. Secession means a state unilaterally leaving the union, and it is under no circumstances constitutional. Revolution, by contrast, is a supra-legal term—revolutionary acts are probably always violations of the law which are justified by some consideration or other. The people always retain the right of revolution, and as I’ve argued in the articles I’ve referred to, if the federal government engaged in a long train of abuses pursing invariably the same object, and evincing a design to reduce the people under absolute despotism, then yes, the people would have the right to throw off such government. In one of my articles (I don’t remember which) I’ve said that the people would have a far better argument for doing so today than the CSA had in the 1860s. But, again, I can only ask that people read what I’ve already written on the subject (and which I promised myself would be my last word on it).
Comments policy