LIBERTARIANISM: Challenging the Reign of Political Power Why does politics seem so hopeless? One reason is the endless series of unpalatable choices it presents. Conservative and Liberal governments may interchange with each other, but it is becoming increasingly plan that only the faces have changed - not the politics. Professors and pundits self-righteously condemn student "apathy" concerning the issues of the day. But very few students don't care about political problems. It's just that very few of us think anything can be done about them. Our generation has matured during the worst economic recession since the 1930s. Yet this recession has occurred after two decades of phenomenal growth. A bewildering array of government programs and agencies have been set up to solve every conceivable type of problem. Despite this huge commitment in resources, however, the problems remain. Real political solutions most certainly do not lie in the direction of more government power. Yet government power still grows, eclipsing ever larger areas of individual authority. Libertarianism is the only political philosophy which advocates reducing power of the government over the individual, making Canada a freer and more prosperous country. Political discussion - on campus and off - is frozen in the stereotypes of conservatism and liberalism. Politically aware students are expected to pick sides, "right" or "left", and robotically recite the cliches of liberal or conservative doctrine. But neither conventional political viewpoint comes to grips with the basic issue of government power versus individual freedom. Conservatives - those on the political right - often claim to value freedom. But usually it is the freedom of huge corporations and other interests to receive government favours and subsidies the expense of everyone else's economic freedom. It is the freedom of military contractors to extract huge amounts of money from taxpayers. Or it is the freedom of puritanical zealots to forcibly impose their standards of morality on the rest of society. This is certainly a bizarre sort of "freedom". Liberals and "progressives" - the political left - are not even rhetorically committed to freedom, but rather talk about the need to help the disadvantaged. But the mammoth welfare agencies they have erected have not ended poverty. In fact, they have institutionalized it, bureaucratizing the poor while failing to address the causes of their condition. Liberals and Conservatives alike are unrealistic. Ignoring the failure which besets every form of government power, they insist that if only the "right people" - people like themselves - were in charge, government could be transformed into a benevolent, humane force. But there are inherent reasons government does not work. No central authority can successfully plan the economy since it would require comprehending billions of constantly changing facts about supply and demand for millions of possible products and services. Attempts to legislate morality divide people, splintering society into factions fighting to use government power to impose their ethical codes on everyone. And the effect of every increase in government power is to diminish individual freedom. The defining characteristic of government action is that people are forced to comply with it. obey it, and pay for it; whether they agree with it or not. Government is inherently coercive. Neither conservatives nor liberals, who disagree only about how or how much government power should be used, offer true freedom. Freedom entails respect for people's right to live their own lives in their own ways. No conventional political ideology grants that respect. To both liberals and conservatives, human beings are, in effect, mere tools for achieving a certain kind of society. By seeking to force people to obey their variety of political authority, both left and right dehumanize politics by treating people as a means to political ends rather than ends in themselves. Libertarianism is politics on a human scale. It finds its ultimate constituency in the individual human being. It is a movement optimistic about humanity's capacity for reason, compassion, and creativity if released from the grip of political authority. While most political movements view human diversity as something to be contained, human independence as a threat to the public order, the human pursuit of happiness as a source of guilt, and human beings themselves as "national resources" to be "developed" by and for the government, libertarians celebrate individuality and individual freedom as the most natural and humanistic traits. Libertarians begin with the fundamental separateness of every person. Each of us, individually, makes myriad choices about how best to pursue happiness and fulfilment. We naturally resist the imposition of another's will into our lives. Libertarians recognize every person's sovereignty over his or her own life. We wish to extend this sovereignty to the political sphere, preserving each person's right to live as he or she chooses, as long as he or she respects the same right of every other person. The state should not restrict 'immoral' personal behaviour, forbid voluntary economic activities, or confiscate people's wages by taxation. These are radical proposals, but the enormous problems we face require no less. To continue to rely on the coercive power of the state would be to close our eyes to the evidence all around us pointing to the fact that government has not worked, and cannot work, as long as it forces us to sacrifice our liberty. War is the health of the state - and the worst enemy of personal liberty. On the battlefield, war is mass murder; at home, it strengthens military-industrial control of oil wells and railroads, manufacturing and transportation. The threat of war directs two-thirds of all research and development toward solving the difficult technical problems involved in killing the enemies of the state. The spirit of war even permeates the universities, where government scholarships and grants focus research on questions of "national security." The government's consuming passion is war. Libertarians believe that to oppose war we must understand its roots and act to eliminate them. Above all, war is a tool and a product of the nation-state, and opposition to war must therefore centre on reducing state power. Just as we seek to limit and contain the power of government at home, so must we end the government's attempt to manipulate and control world events. It is out of our desire to eliminate state oppression abroad as well as at home, then, that we support a non-interventionist foreign policy and everything that goes with it: absolute opposition to conscription and favour nuclear disarmament. In sort, we want a world where peaceful exchange is possible, unimpeded by war and protectionist economic barriers. Libertarians believe that there should be no restrictions on civil liberties. The state is at its ugliest when it tries to police our personal lives. It spends millions of dollars busting pot smokers, while violent criminals go unapprehended. For centuries it has harassed, censured, and defamed gays and lesbians. The state spies on, disrupts, and sometimes even murders its political opponents. It attempts to dictate what woman can do with their own bodies, regulating everything from abortion to midwifery. While promulgating real obscenities like war and taxation, the government piously removes "dirty" pictures from the movie theatres and newsstands. Libertarians believe there should be no limitations of freedom of speech, of the press, or of broadcasting. Nor should the state invade our privacy by dictating our sexual habits and preferences, by regulating the drugs we use, or the lifestyle we pursue. Libertarians would stop the government from spying on its own citizens and would promote much stronger freedom of information legislation. The protection of individual rights requires no less. At the foundation of all liberty is economic liberty, individual control of one's own property and earnings. Economic freedom follows from every person's ownership of his or her own body and the fruits of the labour of that body. Libertarians believe that people should be free to keep the wealth they produce, or to give it or trade it way in any voluntary manner. Without economic liberty, no other liberty is possible. In the former Soviet Union, freedom of speech and press was officially guaranteed - but since the state controls the economy, it simply refuses to allow "scarce economic resources' to be devoted to printing anti-government propaganda. The notion that the government somehow expresses "the will of the people" and acts in the "public interest" has led people to surrender control over their economic lives to the state, which now taxes away half of what the average worker earns. Does the government really serve the "public interest"? Those who can afford lobbyists to coax money away from the public coffers are certainly well-served by the state. Their efforts have reshaped the economy around political favouritism rather than consumer demand. Entire industries, from automobile manufacturing to shoe production, are subsidized, regulated, and protected from competition by a tangle of licensing laws, tariffs, price controls, and other extensions of state power. The electronic media are licensed, granted monopoly privileges, and censored by the government. The banking system is controlled in order to allow government to expand money and credit and allocate it to favoured interests. And around the endless streams of money spewed out of Ottawa have gathered a class of businesses almost totally reliant on government. In this context, to call for a free market - eliminating the privileges, controls and taxes - is to call for fundamental changes in our society. It is time to end the incestuous alliance of government and economic interest groups once and for all by calling for separation of state and economy. To remove the state from the waste, distortion, and injustice invariably caused by government intervention. Those who do not receive favours, subsides, and protection of the government constitute a permanent underclass, many of whom inhibit the dreary ghettos of our cities. Conventional political discourse deals with the poor only when considering how much 'welfare' to give them. It is taken for granted that defending and extending the welfare bureaucracy is synonymous with defending the poor, but that bureaucracy shows no sign of alleviating the structural causes of poverty. This issue, in fact, is not poverty so much as it is hopelessness. At the tern of the century, hundreds of thousands of illiterate, unskilled, and impoverished Europeans emigrated to Canada to face material hardship and discrimination. Yet they escaped poverty, and many of their descendants are among the wealthiest of all Canadians. As the economy has been politicized, however, many of the traditional routes out of poverty have been closed off. In periods of relative economic freedom, impoverished areas buzzed with activity - industries were created; small businesses were formed; the poor hired themselves out for odd jobs, stated taxi services, or peddled fruits and vegetables. But these activities have become virtually impossible today. The high cost of government regulations and taxes make it very difficult to start a successful small business today. Nor can one do whatever job one chooses. Hundreds of professions, from medicine to hairdressing, require licenses which are obtained only after extensive training or at considerable expense. To operate a taxi in Toronto requires a license which costs over $25,000. To work in dozens of other industries requires a union card. The only remaining possibility, unskilled labour, has been severely limited by minimum wage laws (enacted at the behest of the unions to eliminate lower-paid competition) which make working for less than the current minimum wage illegal. The government has, in effect, decided that those skills worth less than this wage deserve no job at all. Political power has closed off the economy to the politically powerless. Who will speak out against the political economy that locks individuals into poverty and can offer them nothing more than dependence on government and a subsistence living in exchange? Who will defend our right to live our lives as we choose? Who will defend our right to do so in peace - without the omnipresent threat of global war? And who will challenge the very legitimacy of state authority? To do these things a new political movement is needed, a movement dedicated to eliminating the coercive power of the state rather than using that power for its own ends. It is just that movement that Libertarians are committed to building. The roots of libertarianism can be traced back to the eighteenth century enlightenment and the American, English and French revolutions. In each of these cases, oppressed people were rebelling against the feudal "Old Order" and the shackles of the absolute state. Supporters of libertarian ideas have been known by a variety of names (classical liberals, individualists, radicals), but their dedication to individual rights, free trade, and political liberty ties them together. Throughout history, libertarians have continually challenged state power. Washington, Jefferson, and their allies led the American revolution in order to limit the power of the central government. In England, Cobden and Bright spearheaded the free trade movement. Frederic Bastiat wrote about the follies of government intervention on the continent. During the period up to the American Civil War, many of the great abolitionists were libertarians, including William Lloyd Garrison, Frederich Douglass, and Edward Atkinson. Libertarians of the post World War I ear, such as H.L. Mencken and Albert J. Nock, levied heavy attacks on the military- industrial-government power structure. The period following World War II saw libertarians Arthur Ekirch and Harry Elmer Barnes providing lonely opposition to the blind consensus for the welfare state. Libertarians were also active participants in the anti-war movement of the sixties. The decade since the sixties, however, has seen the emergence and growth of an explicitly, self-consciously libertarian movement, a movement that has drawn from both the left and the right. Libertarian philosopher Robert Nozick won the U.S. National Book Award and Friedich Hayek the Nobel Prize in Economics for their libertarian approaches. Politically, libertarians have been active throughout North America with libertarian parties in both the Canada and the U.S. While libertarians were scattered across the political landscape in the past, they are now united in a new political movement. Advocates of economic freedom who are sick of the militarism and social authoritarianism of the right are being joined by the opponents of war and imperialism who are disillusioned with the sad record of socialism. The libertarian movement could not have developed at a more promising time. Statism, whether in the form of the welfare states of the west, the Communist regimes of the East, or the military dictatorships and totalitarian hybrids of the third world, is failing everywhere. Every variety of statism has proven disastrous, and no can hide the fact that state power means coercion and violence. The challenge stands before us, and the libertarian movement stands ready to assume its historic role as the enemy of power and the friend of liberty, justice and peace.