I Chose Liberty - Ludwig von Mises Institute

Joseph Sobran 341
in time to crush the Japs)—and this is why the Vietnam war was so bitterly frustrating.
Not the dead, but the defeat! The end of history’s great winning streak!
As I grew up, my patriotism began to take another form, which it took me a long time
to realize was in tension with the patriotism of power. I became a philosophical conservative,
with a strong libertarian streak. I believed in government, but it had to be “limited”
government—confined to a few legitimate purposes, such as defense abroad and policing
at home. These functions, and hardly any others, I accepted, under the influence of writers
like Ayn Rand and Henry Hazlitt, whose books I read in my college years.
Though I disliked Rand’s atheism (at the time, I was irreligious, but not anti-religious),
she had an odd appeal to my residual Catholicism. I had read enough Aquinas to respond
to her Aristotelian mantras. Everything had to have its own nature and limitations,
including the state; the idea of a state continually growing, knowing no boundaries,
forever increasing its claims on the citizen, offended and frightened me. It could only
end in tyranny.
I was also powerfully drawn to Bill Buckley, an explicit Catholic, who struck the same
Aristotelian note. During his 1965 race for mayor of New York, he made a sublime promise
to the voter: he offered “the internal composure that comes of knowing there are rational
limits to politics.” This may have been the most futile campaign promise of all time, but
it would have won my vote!
It was really this Aristotelian sense of “rational limits,” rather than any particular
doctrine, that made me a conservative. I rejoiced to find it in certain English writers who
were remote from American conservatism—Chesterton, of course, Samuel Johnson, Edmund
Burke, George Orwell, C.S. Lewis, Michael Oakeshott.
In fact I much preferred a literary, contemplative conservatism to the activist sort that
was preoccupied with immediate political issues. During the Reagan years, which I expected
to find exciting, I found myself bored to death by supply-side economics, enterprise zones,
“privatizing” welfare programs, and similar principle-dodging gimmickry. I failed to see
that “movement” conservatives were less interested in principles than in Republican victories.
To the extent that I did see it, I failed to grasp what it meant.
Still, the last thing I expected to become was an anarchist. For many years I didn’t
even know that serious philosophical anarchists existed. I’d never heard of Lysander Spooner
or Murray Rothbard. How could society survive at all without a state?
Now I began to be critical of the U.S. Government, though not very. I saw that the
welfare state, chiefly the legacy of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, violated the principles
of limited government and would eventually have to go. But I agreed with other conservatives
that in the meantime the urgent global threat of Communism had to be stopped.
Since I viewed “defense” as one of the proper tasks of government, I thought of the Cold
War as a necessity, the overhead, so to speak, of freedom. If the Soviet threat ever ceased
(the prospect seemed remote), we could afford to slash the military budget and get back to
the job of dismantling the welfare state.
Somewhere, at the rainbow’s end, America would return to her founding principles.
The Federal Government would be shrunk, laws would be few, taxes minimal. That was
what I thought. Hoped, anyway.