Addicts of the State

Samuel Johnson once remarked of certain philosophers: “Truth, sir, is a cow that will yield such people no more milk, and so they are gone to milk the bull.”

I thought of Dr. Johnson’s comment as I read an essay in the Wall Street Journal by Francis Fukuyama, titled “The Fall of the Libertarians.” Fukuyama argues that September 11 discredited libertarianism. I had to laugh, because I thought September 11 discredited Francis Fukuyama.

About a decade ago, Fukuyama became famous overnight for a single idea: he announced that, with the collapse of Communism, we had reached “the end of history.” It was an amusing idea, but I never understood how anyone could take it very seriously. One of the first thoughts that occurred to me on September 11, in fact, was that we may still have a little more history ahead of us.

Fukuyama seems to have dropped the subject, and one can readily understand why he would avoid mentioning the thesis that launched his career as a public intellectual: it already seems embarrassingly quaint. How odd, to be famous for an idea he’d rather not mention.

His latest idea is what might be called the end of libertarianism. Until September 11, he says, libertarians plausibly promoted isolationism, an end to U.S. military intervention around the globe. But, he contends,

September 11 ended this line of argument. It was a reminder to Americans of why government exists, and why it has to tax citizens and spend money to promote collective interests. It was only the government, and not the market or individuals, that could be depended on to send firemen into buildings, or to fight terrorists, or to screen passengers at airports.

As an interpreter of history, Fukuyama isn’t showing very marked improvement. Nor does he show much familiarity with libertarian thinking.

It doesn’t occur to him that the simple lesson he takes from the September 11 attacks is not the only one that might be drawn; it isn’t even the obvious one. He sees government only as the cure, not as the cause. A good deal of history has been going on since Fukuyama proclaimed the end of it, and one of the things that has been going on is that our government has been making a lot of enemies around the world. And we peace-loving Americans have become the targets of those enemies.

If anything, September 11 should have provoked a massive cost-benefit analysis of whether the U.S. Government is more trouble than it’s worth. Instead, the American public, in its panic, made a spasmodic, unthinking decision that the government should have even more power to intervene abroad.

You might almost suspect Fukuyama of gallows humor when he says that only the government could be counted on to send firemen into buildings. We all know what happened to those firemen and those buildings. We mourn them, but we don’t celebrate the event as a triumph of government.

Fukuyama makes the common mistake of assuming that in the absence of the coercive state, people wouldn’t bother protecting themselves against fire, crime, or terrorism. In fact, we already take many precautions beyond those the state takes and requires; sometimes we take them in spite of the state, which often increases these dangers and strips us of the means of self-defense. (Nothing has bred more crime than the welfare state.)

Anyone who reads the libertarian press knows that it bristles with schemes for privatizing, and thereby improving, services that are now state monopolies. If we had to depend entirely on the government, we would dispense with gun ownership, security guards, gated communities, fire extinguishers, and Federal Express.

The most astounding fact about our time is its great addiction to the state. Even after all the horrors of the past century, people still believe implicitly in the state; whereas, if they learned from experience, they would all talk about states in general the way Jews talk about Hitler.

Today a state is considered a success not when it produces net benefits for its own subjects (no state does that), but when it inflicts more harm on foreigners than on its natives. We forgive whatever it does to us, so long as it stands ready to commit even worse crimes against others. This is what we now mean by defense. Of course our ancestors had different ideas; but what did they know?

Joseph Sobran