States Rights has been a dominant theme in American history. We all know about the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions, the Tariff of Abominations, the War Between the States, the battle over the civil rights movement, and so on. But I’m not going to rehash American history in this week’s column. Instead, I’m going to ask a more fundamental question. What should Rothbardians think about states rights?
For Rothbard, the key question in all political issues is how to promote freedom. As he says in The Ethics of Liberty, “Libertarianism, then, is a philosophy seeking a policy. But what else can a libertarian philosophy say about strategy, about ‘policy’? In the first place, surely-again in Acton’s words-it must say that liberty is the ‘highest political end,’ the overriding goal of libertarian philosophy. Highest political end, of course, does not mean ‘highest end’ for man in general. Indeed, every individual has a variety of personal ends and differing hierarchies of importance for these goals on his personal scale of values. Political philosophy is that subset of ethical philosophy which deals specifically with politics, that is, the proper role of violence in human life (and hence the explication of such concepts as crime and property). Indeed, a libertarian world would be one in which every individual would at last be free to seek and pursue his own ends-to ‘pursue happiness,’ in the felicitous Jeffersonian phrase.”
Keeping this basic principle in mind, we should then ask, what is the greatest enemy of liberty? The answer is clear. It is an all-powerful government, In the words of the great libertarian theorist Albert Jay Nock, Our Enemy the State.
At this point, you might raise an obvious question. If our enemy is the state, how can there be any question about Rothbard’s position on states rights? Wouldn’t he have to be against them? But thinking about the issue this way is wrong. It rests on an ambiguity. When we talk about states rights in American history, we mean limits to an all-powerful central government. We aren’t talking about increasing the power of the central government but decreasing it.
With that in mind, let’s look at what Rothbard said about a powerful central government: “But, above all, the crucial monopoly is the State’s control of the use of violence: of the police and armed services, and of the courts—the locus of ultimate decision-making power in disputes over crimes and contracts. Control of the police and the army is particularly important in enforcing and assuring all of the State’s other powers, including the all-important power to extract its revenue by coercion. For there is one crucially important power inherent in the nature of the State apparatus. All other persons and groups in society (except for acknowledged and sporadic criminals such as thieves and bank robbers) obtain their income voluntarily: either by selling goods and services to the consuming public, or by voluntary gift (e.g., membership in a club or association, bequest, or inheritance). Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion, by threatening dire penalties should the income not be forthcoming. That coercion is known as ‘taxation,’ although in less regularized epochs it was often known as ‘tribute.’ Taxation is theft, purely and simply even though it is theft on a grand and colossal scale which no acknowledged criminals could hope to match. It is a compulsory seizure of the property of the State’s inhabitants, or subjects. It would be an instructive exercise for the skeptical reader to try to frame a definition of taxation which does not also include theft. Like the robber, the State demands money at the equivalent of gunpoint; if the taxpayer refuses to pay his assets are seized by force, and if he should resist such depredation, he will be arrested or shot if he should continue to resist.”
The United States Constitution is far from ideal. But the system of government it set up was not at all a powerful central state. It was a loose confederation with a very weak central government. As Mises Institute President Thomas DiLorenzo notes, discussing an important book by the historian Paul C. Graham, “‘Declaration of Independence’ is actually slang for the actual title of the document, ‘The Unanimous Declaration of the Thirteen united States of America.’ As in all the founding documents, “united States” is in the plural, signifying that the thirteen free and independent states were united in their desire to secede from the British empire. That is why, at the end of the Revolution, King George III signed a peace treaty with each individual state, not something called ‘the United States government.’
Di Lorenzo goes on: “The first constitution, the Articles of Confederation, declared that each state ‘retained its sovereignty, freedom, and independence.’ They retained, not gained, their sovereignty as ‘free and independent states,’ as they are called in the Declaration. States rights, state sovereignty, the right of secession, and the states delegating a few powers to the central government as their agent were the ideas of the founders, not creating ‘a new nation.’ There was no pledge of allegiance to ‘one nation, indivisible’; that was an invention of late nineteenth-century socialist and Lincoln worshipper Francis Bellamy. Graham describes the second Constitution as an attempted and failed coup by the nationalists in American politics to destroy state sovereignty and consolidate all political power in the national capitol. At the constitutional convention Alexander Hamilton, for example, proposed a permanent president (aka a king) who would appoint all governors, with the central state having the right to veto any and all state legislation. His plan for a centralized dictatorship of course failed, but the nationalists, including Lincoln, would never give up.”
Because of the importance of limiting the central government by means of states rights, Rothbard thought that as much as possible should be left to state and local control. Of course, he was an anarchist, who thought there should be no government at all; but if we did have a government, it should be limited in every way possible.
Here is an example of the way he applied this view. Rothbard says something few other people would think of. Even if you are “pro-choice,” you should still favor overturning Roe v. Wade. “But even apart from the funding issue, there are other arguments for a rapprochement with pro-lifers. There is a prudential consideration: a ban on something as murder is not going to be enforceable if only a minority considers it as murder. A national prohibition is simply not going to work, in addition to being politically impossible to get through in the first place. Pro-choice paleo-libertarians can tell the pro-lifers: ‘Look, a national prohibition is hopeless. Stop trying to pass a human life amendment to the Constitution. Instead, for this and many other reasons, we should radically decentralize political and judicial decisions in this country; we must end the despotism of the Supreme Court and the federal judiciary, and return political decisions to state and local levels.’ Pro-choice paleos should therefore hope that Roe v. Wade is someday overthrown, and abortion questions go back to the state and local levels—the more decentralized the better. Let Oklahoma and Missouri restrict or outlaw abortions, while California and New York retain abortion rights. Hopefully, some day we will have localities within each state making such decisions. Conflict will then be largely defused. Those who want to have, or to practice, abortions can move or travel to California (or Marin County) or New York (or the West Side of Manhattan.)”
Let’s do everything we can to promote states rights, in order to limit the Leviathan, “that coldest of all cold monsters.” That is what Murray Rothbard would want us to do.
