Can a Libertarian Become a Civil Servant?

From immediately after World War II, in 1945, until 1945, the International Military Tribunal was held in Nuremberg, Germany, to punish the war crimes of Nazi German war criminals. There is a libertarian scholar who argues that once the current statist, anti-liberal system is transformed into a truly liberal order, a similar kind of “war crimes trial” will be necessary. That scholar is Walter Block, a colleague of Murray Rothbard and today one of the leading theorists of the Misesian Austrian School tradition.

Walter Block’s two papers, “Toward a Libertarian Theory of Guilt and Punishment for the Crime of Statism” (2011) and “Libertarian Punishment Theory: Working for, and Donating to, the State” (2009), theoretically examine how, as one possible means of implementing libertarianism in practice, punishment of criminals deeply inclined toward statism might be possible. His argument may be summarized as follows.

The most decisive characteristic of the state is that it is an impersonal entity. There is not a single individual who can be distinctly described as the state itself. The status of the state may perhaps be said to resemble that of a “legal person” as defined in law. Of course, the state is very different from an ordinary legal person, since it possesses a territorial monopoly on the right to initiate violence. In addition, because a legal person consists of voluntary members, there is relatively more room to identify responsibility, whereas the state is different in that it encompasses everyone residing within a given territory.

The key point is that the state, understood in this way, can never be justified in liberalism, that is, in libertarianism. That is because libertarianism is a political philosophy that absolutely prohibits initiatory aggression against legitimately owned property. Block argues that Lysander Spooner’s “No Treason,” Murray Rothbard’s “The Anatomy of the State,” “The Ethics of Liberty,” “For a New Liberty,” and “Power and Market,” as well as Hans-Hermann Hoppe’s “A Theory of Socialism and Capitalism” and “The Economics and Ethics of Private Property,” have fully demonstrated this point.

If libertarianism is a doctrine that prohibits violations of private property, that in turn means libertarianism enforces legal coercion against violators of private property—that is, punishment. Murderers, rapists, thieves, and all other criminals who harm others must receive appropriate punishment and compensate their victims. But from a libertarian point of view, the state is no different from such criminals, or rather an even graver criminal. In principle, this means that the state is itself a proper object of punishment and restitution to its victims. According to Walter Block: “given that governments are illicit invasive criminal institutions, and that people who aggress are justifiably punished, we must contemplate retribution, on a massive scale, against all those responsible.”

But as noted above, the state is an impersonal entity. If so, how should legal justice against the former state be carried out in a free society? Even by the most elementary calculation, the state’s share of today’s economy easily exceeds 50 percent. If professionally trained scholars were to study the matter, that share would be more likely to grow than to shrink. Many of our neighbors make a living as employees of the state. Moreover, even if they work for private companies or private institutions, a substantial portion of those entities’ finances often originates from the state. If a free society were to arrive, should the local community office worker and firefighter living next door to me be prosecuted as criminals? Is a private company that secured state contracts and reaped enormous profits thereby criminal?

Walter Block points out that the idea that everyone connected with the state is guilty is not libertarian but rather statist, and he seeks to present criteria for determining who qualifies as a statist criminal.

When one hears the claim that those who worked for the state should be punished, the first proposal that comes to mind is the logic that “if a person is employed by the state, then that person is unquestionably part of the government, and therefore guilty.” Block criticizes this claim as absurd.

To begin with, if one follows this proposal, then all citizens of fully socialist states such as the Soviet Union or North Korea become criminals. At the same time, it overlooks figures who are not officially part of the government yet still qualify as statist criminals. It also ignores cases in which, because the state monopolizes a profession, one must necessarily become a civil servant to enter it—for example, national defense, policing, firefighting, and education. It cannot be said that toll collectors or sanitation workers are criminals. Finally, this proposal fails to solve the problem of libertarians working in government. Should Congressman Ron Paul, a defender of liberty, be prosecuted as a criminal simply because he received a government salary? Of course not. If a libertarian receives money from the government and uses it to contribute to libertarian causes, that is not theft in the sense of appropriating taxpayers’ money, but rather an act of righteous outlawry that “liberates” those taxes. By analogy, it is like Oskar Schindler, a Nazi collaborator who freed many Jews.

Therefore, even if a free society were to emerge, the civil servant neighbors around us would not necessarily be branded criminals, sent to prison, or forced to surrender their entire assets as restitution. Having made this point clear, Block presents “Libertarian Class Analysis” as the criterion for punishing statist criminals. Libertarian Class Analysis is a concept put forward by the Austrian School representative Hans-Hermann Hoppe, and it is a libertarian reinterpretation of the Marxist theory of class struggle and revolution. In Marxism, the bourgeoisie and the proletariat stand in opposition within a one-sided exploitative relationship of exploiter and exploited. The bourgeoisie are pure criminals of exploitation, while the proletariat are pure victims of exploitation. Hans-Hermann Hoppe transforms this framework into one of the state (aggressor) versus the general public (victims).

Here, the state is understood not to include ordinary civil servants but rather “the ruling class.” The ruling vested interests of the state are pure criminals no different from thieves, robbers, murderers, and assailants. The true “state” as properly understood in libertarianism consists of the bureaucrats and members of the National Assembly occupying the highest posts in the institutions chiefly responsible for running the state—namely the executive, legislative, and judicial branches—along with the entrenched elites in business, the arts, and the media who assist their social domination, and the wealthy who have accumulated riches through collusion with the government or abuse of state functions. The formal distinction between public and private is merely a smokescreen concealing what the true ruling class of the state really is. A superficially private university filled with Marxists and other leftists may be more criminal than a public university that employs libertarian professors. Block adds that employees of the National Tax Service and the like, though not members of the upper ruling class, nonetheless exceptionally qualify as criminals.

A libertarian is someone who accepts a properly understood concept of rights and rejects initiatory aggression against them. The state is nothing other than institutionalized initiatory aggression, and modern society is saturated with the influence of the state, so it is truly difficult for a libertarian to live while upholding principle and conviction. Nevertheless, as Block points out, simply being connected with the state does not necessarily mean committing anti-libertarian crimes. A libertarian, in any situation, must preserve his convictions while striving and contributing to the construction of a free society.

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Original title: 자유주의자(libertarian)가 공무원이 될 수 있는가?

Author: Kyeong-hun Kim

Date: 2020-09-28

Source: https://www.cfe.org/bbs/bbsDetail.php?cid=free_opinion&pn=13&idx=23131