Warmongering is the health of statism

No one puts the warmongering "libertarians" in their place better than Anthony Gregory. The speech that he gave recently at the Burton S. Blumert Conference on Gold, Freedom, and Peace can now be read at LRC.

Some of the truisms that such closet collectivists can't hide from are stated clearly by Gregory in the following:

We can summarize the diagnosis for economic freedom simply by saying that war and the free market are totally incompatible. Even the most defensible war one can imagine – to repel foreign invasion – presumably involves taxation when the government plays a role. This alone makes every warfare program as much an attack on the taxpaying class as welfare. Last time I checked, we were still paying McKinley's telephone excise tax for the Spanish-American War, though I hear there are plans to repeal it.

Particularly devastating to the economic well-being of Americans, especially the poor and middle class, is the central bank inflation that typically accompanies any serious-sized war. Every major war in American history has depended upon the power of the state to monopolize the money supply and counterfeit dollars in mass to finance its slaughter. It is fair to say, then, that to support war, to advocate war, is to support this grand larceny.

No one who favors the warfare state can disown the methods by which it’s financed. It is no less economically collectivist to root for war than to root for any other government program. If a socialist told you he wants universal healthcare, but he does not favor the taxation and coercion to fund and implement it, you would quickly point out his naked contradiction. Every warmonger is an inflationist and a taxmonger, whether he knows it or not.

To accept war is to accept the warfare state, and to accept the warfare state is to accept all the fundamental premises of statism – the collectivism, the aggression, the ability of central planning to succeed.

He also addresses their puzzling and naive faith in democracy and the ability of the US government to promote it, not to mention their practice of equating democracy with freedom. As Gregory puts it, those hawks who actually believe in such nonsense see freedom as "just one more big government program."

Click here to read the whole thing.