This article was originally published by George Ford Smith at The Mises Institute.
Most people accept the moral prohibitions on lying, murdering, and stealing in their personal lives as well as in their business affairs. Why, then, does government—which is run by people—get a pass? Is ethics irrelevant in government affairs?
The answer is yes, because there is no one to hold the government accountable. By its nature as a state, it is above accountability. As Rothbard elaborately explained, the state is a criminal gang writ large, an organization not subject to its laws because of its monopoly of violence. Jefferson’s notion of binding men down by the chains of the Constitution was easily broken by government intrigue.
Blame for the absence of government morals is sometimes laid on a loss of religious faith among citizens and the ones they elect. But a Pew Research Religious Landscape Study (RLS), conducted in 2007, 2014, and 2023-24, revealed an overwhelming majority of Christians and non-Christians alike regard theft, murder, and lying as violations of honest living. They may have lost their faith in a higher power, but their professed morals were unshaken.
If no one punished a person for stealing, he might be tempted to try it. But, due perhaps to a nagging conscience, most people would still feel the need to justify the theft. Since most ethical creeds censure actions taken in self-interest while praising actions taken for others, a thief can bathe in ethical sunlight if he can show he acted for someone other than himself. Pushed consistently, the government becomes a welfare state.
The American state—founded inconsistently on laissez-faire—became wealthier than other governments because it presided over an economy that was allowed to flourish to historical highs, but then pulled off a coup in 1913 with the passage of the 16th Amendment and the Federal Reserve Act—each a major theft-enabling expansion of power. The income tax had the “virtue” of “soaking the rich,” which it did initially with the War Revenue Act of 1917, but later—in combination with the Fed’s confiscatory monetary policy—led to the decline of the middle class and to a seemingly omnipresent government.
Woodrow Wilson—the White House resident during the 1913 coup—expressed dark thoughts about what he had done in his collection of campaign speeches, The New Freedom:
We have restricted credit, we have restricted opportunity, we have controlled development, and we have come to be one of the worst ruled, one of the most completely controlled and dominated, governments in the civilized world—no longer a government by free opinion, no longer a government by conviction and the vote of the majority, but a government by the opinion and the duress of small groups of dominant men.
Certain small but controlling groups crushed the last remnants of a relatively sound money system, using the economic crisis of the 1930s as an excuse, then, through behind-the-scenes activities, became a combatant in another foreign war, after the president’s repeated lies about not getting us into it. Millions of deaths and billions in destruction later, the government amplified its interventionist ways when he signed the National Security Act of 1947. Since then, the government has found threats everywhere it looked, including Cuba, South America, Korea, China, Vietnam, the Middle East, and always, Russia. Following 9/11, its sights have intensified on the people involuntarily supporting it, right here in the home field, on the premise that terrorists could be lurking anywhere.
What other country has “750 military base sites estimated in around 80 foreign countries and colonies/territories”? Maybe the world wouldn’t seem so threatening if we left it alone. The US has thereby become a Roman warfare state, with untouchable intelligence and military budgets.
Hans-Hermann Hoppe, in his essay “The Libertarian Quest for a Grand Historical Narrative,” points out the blatant contradictions between the personal ethics of most people and the defining “ethics” of government. Regarding the Ten Commandments, he writes:
In this, the biblical commandments go above and beyond what many libertarians regard as sufficient for the establishment of a peaceful social order: the mere strict adherence to commandments six, eight, and ten. Yet this difference between a strict and rigid libertarianism and the ten biblical commandments does not imply any incompatibility between the two. Both are in complete harmony if only a distinction is made between legal prohibitions on the one hand, expressed in commandments six, eight, and ten, violations of which may be punished by the exercise of physical violence, and extralegal or moral prohibitions on the other hand, expressed in commandments five, seven, and nine, violations of which may be punished only by means below the threshold of physical violence, such as social disapproval, discrimination, exclusion, or ostracism.
He concludes: “Even with the greatest intellectual contortions, it is impossible to derive the institution of a state from these commandments.”
Yet the state’s senior denizens bear false witness every hour of the day, with impunity. As we witnessed during the COVID episode, major political donors also escaped accountability for their egregious acts. Included in the COVID-19 nightmare were prestigious medical institutions—flush with government money—promoting false information about hydroxychloroquine, which continues today as unabashed medical authorities. To paraphrase Thomas Paine, freedom was hunted throughout the country as well as the rest of the world. What’s to prevent governments from attempting a COVID-19 II?
The inalienable rights of all men that Jefferson set forth in the Declaration need a strong champion to defend them, and I suggest it takes the form of a competitive free market where security is purchased along with other goods. Governing by monopoly force is incompatible with human well-being.
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