Rothbard Was Right: Libertarians Must Never Warm to the Warfare State

In 1977, Murray Rothbard wrote an article in response to an issue of Reason Magazine where the main feature of the month was a debate between interventionism and non-interventionism. 

The bulk of the 3,000-word article is spent tearing apart the two pieces by alleged libertarians who are advocating an interventionist foreign policy. But, before he dives in, Rothbard devotes some time to attacking the idea that this should even be up for debate within libertarian circles at all:

At first sight, this aim seems a legitimate, even a noble one, suitably democratic and free-inquiry-ish. But, on second thought, what gives here? Why are there no debates in Reason presenting both sides of the issue on abolishing OSHA, price controls, the draft, and whatnot? Why is there no article praising Communism? After all, Reason is not supposed to be a debate magazine, but a journal devoted to liberty, that is, a journal committed to a certain world outlook. Would it publish a debate on the merits and demerits of mass murder? But then, of course, it has now done just that, with more space and passion devoted to the pro–mass murder side.

To Rothbard, the very notion of a libertarian case for the fanatical interventionism that was driving American foreign policy at the height of the Cold War was utterly absurd.

And yet, forty-nine years later, there remains a concerning amount of self-identified libertarians—both in the US and abroad—who buy in entirely to the current excuse for Washington’s continual warmongering.

The most prominent figure advancing this position at the moment is Argentina’s president, Javier Milei. But he is not alone. Several commentators repeatedly signal support for libertarianism when discussing domestic policies or directly advocate for the economic policies of notable libertarians like Rothbard or Ron Paul, while also pushing for an interventionist foreign policy.

This combination of views is just as incoherent as it was back when Rothbard wrote the above article. A foreign policy that seeks to maintain a global empire through an endless series of wars, foreign “aid,” and covert interventions is entirely incompatible with the laissez-faire, free market, libertarian system at home that these folks claim to support.

In fact, not only is it incompatible, it’s downright impossible if we focus on the economic requirements of the current warfare state in Washington.

Wars are extremely expensive. Even more expensive is fighting multiple wars at once, arming proxies in another, constantly staging hundreds of thousands of troops at hundreds of foreign bases, supplying and maintaining all of those bases, securing the world’s oceans with a massive navy, collecting intelligence on nearly every country on Earth, and everything else our military and “national security state” does. It’s a major resource drain on the United States.

The only way it’s possible for the federal government to carry all that out, year after year, is due to the considerable amount of income taxes Americans pay and, even more importantly, the ability of the Federal Reserve to fund government programs with inflation—hiding the true cost and making it more politically palatable. And those are two components of the current domestic system that libertarians are pretty much universally opposed to.

But imagine trying to fund the current warfare state without the income tax or the Fed.

The only way it would be possible is if other funding mechanisms are tapped. The government would have to raise tariffs, corporate taxes, and excise taxes to levels never seen before. And they’d have to convince honest borrowers to buy war bonds—worsening the national debt and making it far harder to launch unpopular wars like Trump’s latest one with Iran.

Beyond that, some emergency tax would probably be necessary, or the direct confiscation of resources and soldiers. But all of that is so clearly not what libertarians have in mind when they picture their ideal tax system. It would be brutal, fiscally disastrous, cartoonishly authoritarian, and so highly visible that it would almost certainly be politically impossible.

But even if we move past that and assume that there’s some way a laissez-faire low or no tax libertarian system could fund a massive warfare state, it’s still a stretch to assume a libertarian system could be preserved here at home while a global empire is pursued abroad.

Randolph Bourne wrote an essay back in 1918 in which he included the line, now famous in libertarian circles, that “war is the health of the state.” By this Bourne means that the domestic conditions that wars bring about are ideal for states attempting to grab universal, unchecked power over all aspects of society.

Everything from silencing or imprisoning dissidents, printing excessive amounts of money, ignoring legal or constitutional limits on state power, and demanding total obedience from the general population is all far more achievable in the middle of a war. It’s no coincidence that some of the greatest rights violations committed by the US government against American citizens happened during wars.

Also, as Christopher Coyne and Abigail Hall detailed in their book Tyranny Comes Home, many of the coercive tactics and technologies developed by the US government for use abroad have later been brought back home and used against Americans.

That makes sense. In order to maintain a global empire and keep foreign rivals contained, the American government has invested a tremendous amount of time, money, and brainpower into developing the most effective tools and techniques for raw coercion, aggressive violence, intrusive surveillance, media manipulation, and social control. The idea that the government would continuously work on developing and utilizing this knowledge abroad and then not use it when it served their interests domestically because of some constraint written down in the Constitution is incredibly naïve.

Finally, Washington’s imperial project is fundamentally at odds with libertarian ethics. The American government has carried out countless crimes at home and abroad in its many decades of foreign interventionism—something some self-described libertarians have been dismissing as an unfortunate but necessary short-term evil to defeat the foreign policy villain of the moment for at least 74 years, and likely will for years to come.

And beyond the unethical actions of the US government, it is also deeply unlibertarian for self-described libertarians outside the United States to demand that the US government provide their country with security, overthrow some domestic or neighboring political leader they don’t like, or conduct wars they’re generally a fan of with wealth forcibly extracted from American taxpayers.

Overall, Rothbard was right 49 years ago when he said libertarians must never warm to the warfare state. Because the economic, social, and moral burdens imposed on all of us by Washington’s obsession with maintaining a global empire are destroying the very norms and institutions libertarians believe in.

We cannot have a free society at home and a hyperactive warfare state abroad, just as the warfare state cannot exist in a truly free market with a genuine private property norm. Those who try to isolate Rothbard or Ron Paul’s economic or domestic policies from their non-interventionist foreign policy are wrong. The two must go together.