I Chose Liberty - Ludwig von Mises Institute

302 I Chose Liberty: Autobiographies of Contemporary Libertarians
which is precisely the opposite of what Murray and Mises were. I couldn’t imagine the old
libertarian school of Nock, Chodorov, Garrett, Flynn, and Mencken at home with this.
The best of the paleoconservatives, in contrast, were old-fashioned constitutionalists
who took libertarian positions on a range of issues. They wanted the troops home and the
government out of people’s lives. They wanted to abolish the welfare state, and had a very
telling critique of it. Their critique was not based on rights, but it was serious and
sophisticated.
The Center for Libertarian Studies co-founded the John Randolph Club, which I
named for the aristocratic, anti-egalitarian battler of centralized power of the early nineteenth
century. The word “paleolibertarian” was mine too, and the purpose was to recapture
the political edge and intellectual rigor and radicalism of the prewar libertarian right. There
was no change in core ideology but a reapplication of fundamental principles in ways that
corrected the obvious failures of the Reason and National Review crowd.
I remember people at the time saying: “Oh no! You’re falling in bed with a bunch of
religious rightists!” I would just rub my eyes in dismay. In the first place, if a person believes
in liberty and also happens to be religious, what is wrong with that? Since when did atheism
become a mandatory view within libertarian circles? Also, the point was not to fall in bed
with anybody but to organize a new intellectual movement precisely to do battle with the
statists on all sides.
Much good came out of this. We took out ads in the New York Times attacking war
and we gave the neocons a run for their money. We had some very good and fun meetings,
and Murray had the chance for a productive exchange of ideas with some of the smartest
thinkers in the country.
But there were limits to what could be accomplished. As old-fashioned Burkeans,
somewhat influenced by Kirk, they resisted ideology in principle. That meant an impatience
with the rationalism of economic theory and libertarian political theory. That eventually
caused us problems on issues like trade. All sides opposed NAFTA, which was mercantilist,
but we couldn’t agree on the urgency of eliminating trade barriers. Still, the debates were
fun. We agreed to cooperate where we could, and disagree where we must.
Another problem was that usual evil force in the world: politics. Nearly alone among
Republicans, Pat Buchanan was a strong opponent of the war on Iraq, denouncing it up
until the troops actually landed. He then began to offer a radical critique of the interventionist
state in a host of areas. In 1991, he challenged Bush for the nomination,
speaking out against Bush’s tax increases and welfarism. In some ways, it appeared that
he could become a dream candidate, uniting a passionate concern for both free enterprise
and peace.
Conventional libertarians didn’t like Pat, in part because he was against open immigration.
But it seemed obvious that the patterns of immigration since 1965 have increased
rather than decreased the government’s control over the economy. And there is no obvious
libertarian position on this subject: whether immigration is peaceful or invasive depends
entirely on who owns the property onto which they immigrate, and whether they make
their own way once here. The welfare state and public schools complicate the picture
enormously.