More from Hunter Wallace on Libertarianism

“Linder and Libertarianism”
from Occidental Dissent, September 12, 2009

Libertarians tend to think in abstract terms. They have all sorts of theories about government, economics, and ethics. I’m impressed less by their abstractions and more persuaded by the empirical results that follow their implementation.

We’ve tried almost everything the libertarians recommend over the course of American history: the gold standard, multiple currencies, financial deregulation, private roads/railroads, absence of the Federal Reserve, absence of the income tax, cutting back government bureaucracy, legalization of drugs, laissez-faire capitalism, international free trade, federalism/small government, expansion of civil liberties, neutering the state, deunionization, no Social Security, no Medicare/Medicaid, no Earned Income Tax Credit, no welfare system, no minimum wage or collective bargaining, no workplace safety standards, dispensing with virtue ethics, private schools, etc. We have a vast well of experience with radical liberty to draw upon. Yet the libertarians always seem to prefer their abstract arguments and deductive reasoning to historical ones. Why is that?

We know how free market laissez-faire capitalism ends: in vast concentrations of wealth (land and capital) in the hands of a privileged few, huge multinational corporations that tower over the remaining small businesses, monopolies and cartels, private transportation systems that suck every penny out of the common man, race replacement through ‘cheap labor’ immigration, a radicalized, uneducated and degraded proletariat constantly engaged in strikes and riots and infected with Marxism, environmental degradation, financial panics and depression, shortage of credit, depressed wages, a plutocratic elite that buys elections and corrupts the political system with its largess. It was a good system for the wealthiest few who didn’t use public services, at least for a while, until the top heavy economy periodically collapsed under its own weight in the inevitable cyclical depression.

The system is inherently unstable for both labor and capital and gave rise to the very social forces which succeeded in undermining and overthrowing it. If by some chance we ever were to return to Gilded Age conditions, history would unfold again in much the same way. It is worth noting that this is the degenerate condition that millions of Jewish immigrants found Americans in when they arrived on our shores. Their arrival in the New World was part of the ‘cheap labor’ glut that flowed out of Eastern and Southern Europe into Northern industry at the time. The Jews would later climb the same ladder into the American plutocracy used by J. P. Morgan, Rockefeller, Carnegie, and Ford.

Aside from the small faction of libertarian ideologues, there is no constituency for returning to the  days of the Robber Barons. The working class justifiably balks at surrendering the handful of concessions won from Capital over the past hundred years. The middle class, still reeling from ‘free trade,’ clamors for ever more public services (which Obama promises to deliver). Even the wealthy realize that a managed economy is ultimately in their interest. It stifles labor militancy and the growth of radical class-based redistributionist movements. The government is also useful (as in the Panic of ’08) when it pulls their collective chestnuts out of the fire.

White Nationalists support ending non-White immigration and deporting the non-White labor force already in the United States. In doing so, we have earned the implacable hostility of the business community; both small businesses and multinational corporations alike depend on their non-White helots. We’re proposing a permanent and radical increase in the price of labor that will bankrupt any number of businesses. The only way forward to the White ethnostate is through a knife fight to the death with the pro-business lobby and the ethnic grievance organizations that are allied to them. That’s not a fight we can possibly win with a libertarian economic agenda that will alienate the working class and lower middle class.

Once the beast is subdued (the cheap labor lobby and its hangers on), White Nationalists will have to be permanently on guard to ensure it never rises from the dead. As you note, this could involve constitutional measures, draconian penalties for racial treason, a permanent class or religious order of “Defenders” charged with the responsibility of overseeing the culture and economy, a national academy to train the “Defenders,” government control of the media, public schools that indoctrinate our youth in the racial ideal, or some combination the above. Whatever the case, the salient point is that a transition to a White Nationalist ethnostate (a process likely to take generations) will require authoritarian measures which run against the grain of libertarianism, and probably not solely on a temporary basis.

Indeed, there is nothing “libertarian” at all about what we are proposing to do: overthrowing civic institutions and replacing them with a new Blut und Boden racial order, mass violations of sacrosanct individual rights and property rights, engaging in ‘aggression’ against sovereign individuals in the name of collectivism, engaging in racial and religious intolerance, imposing ethical and aesthetic standards on a libertine populace, etc. A true libertarian (whose mind is governed by universal abstractions) would never entertain such measures. In many ways, the White Nationalist worldview (based solely on collective self interest, not high-minded universal principles) is the polar opposite of libertarianism and the other species of liberalism.

If you really think about it, libertarianism has no future in a White Nationalist ethnostate. In selecting our form of government, our primary concern must be the nature of our elite, not the ‘rights’ of individuals. After a successful revolutionary struggle, I seriously doubt White Nationalists will want to go back to the days when America was governed by a shallow Judeo-Capitalist plutocracy whose primary qualification to rule was their ability to make money. Social mobility will have to be organized on some other basis than the Horatio Alger myth; perhaps along the lines of the “essentially religious civil servants” you described above. At a minimum, this would require a highly regulated economy, not the laissez-faire free market favored by libertarians.

Most importantly, the status system will have to be forever severed from the market economy, which is another blow against libertarianism. We’ve seen the mischief the advertising industry has caused by creating artificial needs and instilling sick materialistic values in the masses. This is closely linked to the low White birthrate, racial nihilism, and popularity of contraception and abortion in the West. You’ve already mentioned that status must be linked to values like duty, honor, and self-sacrifice in the new system. I would go beyond that and argue for a return to virtue ethics in your Home School curriculum. We need to move beyond the silly expressivist notion that each child should be allowed to nurture his own individuality. From our perspective, some values are manifestly superior to others.

In a White ethnostate, ‘liberty’ and ‘equality’ would be knocked off the pedestal they now occupy in contemporary political discourse. More important considerations like community and the preservation of our genetic integrity would rise to the fore and take precedence. I seriously doubt we would break wholly with the tradition of individual rights or basic republican equality before the law. The old values would still have their place, but they would no longer be considered absolute, center stage, or universally applicable to all races. The market economy is also another likely survivor, albeit in a form unrecognizable to the one we are familiar with today.

I will stop short of saying that pro-Whites need an entirely new political philosophy. We don’t need to establish a new set of (false) universal principles which could later be invoked to sabotage our racial interests. Instead, we should take our direction from art and literature that reflect our racial ideals, and adopt a critical posture towards all systemizers and their fetish for abstractions.