I Chose Liberty - Ludwig von Mises Institute

Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr. 301
middle-class community life. He saw the relentless attacks on these as paving the way for
government managers to claim more territory as their own.
Moreover, it was Murray’s conviction that government power was the greatest enemy
that a rich cultural heritage has. It is not capitalism that wrecks the foundations of civilized
life but the state. In this, he was in full agreement with Mises, Hayek, and Schumpeter.
And incidentally, this line of argument, which Murray had long used, has been picked up
by other libertarians in the meantime.
But the real bond between Tom and Murray was their shared hatred of the statism,
centralism, and global warfarism of the conservative movement. They were both fed up
with a Buckleyized conservatism, and now, at last, here was a chance to do something
about it.
Together Murray and I watched as the Berlin Wall came down and the Soviet Union
dissolved, and we were intensely curious as to how the conservatives would respond.
Would they return to their pre-war, anti-war roots? Or would they continue to push for
the American empire? Well, we got our answer in 1990 with the beginnings of the Gulf
War. It seemed obvious that this was Bush’s attempt to keep the warfare state fat and
thriving.
The U.S. gave permission to Iraq to annex Kuwait, and then suddenly reversed positions.
The U.S. paid off countries around the world to be part of its “coalition” and waged
a bloody war on Iraq, burying innocents in the sand and proclaiming victory over the
aggressor.
We waited for the conservatives to denounce the war, but of course it didn’t happen,
although I’ll always treasure Kirk’s last letter to me, in which he called for hanging the
“war criminal Bush” on the White House lawn. Too bad he never wrote like that in public.
But the neocons were entirely in control of the right and cheered Bush to the heavens.
These were disgusting days. Bush dragged out all his taxfunded missiles and other
weapons of mass destruction and put them on the Washington, D.C., mall for the boobsoisie
to admire. Yellow ribbons were everywhere.
But the paleos were a different matter. Paul Gottfried, Allan Carlson, Clyde Wilson,
Fleming, and others associated with the Rockford Institute blasted the war without qualification.
They openly called the U.S. an imperial power and made the argument that we
had always made: that the greatest threat to our liberties was not overseas but in the District
of Columbia.
Meanwhile, we were alarmed that not even the libertarians seemed prepared to go this
far. Reason magazine and the Republican Liberty Caucus were for the Gulf War, and Liberty
magazine, for whom Murray had written, was ambivalent on the question. In general, there
was silence from the people who should have been our natural allies. To us, that merely
underscored a more deeply rooted problem in libertarian circles: the strange combination
of cultural alienation and political conventionality.
We began to write about the errors of the “modal” libertarians. They were soft on war,
sanguine about centralization of power, and friendly toward the rise of the social-therapeutic
aspects of the state inherent in civil-rights egalitarianism. They were uninterested in scholarship
and unschooled in history. They were culturally fringy and politically mainstream,