Libertarians Must Never Warm to the Warfare State

by Murray N. Rothbard

Libertarian Review, August 1977, pp. 10–12

Murray N. Rothbard

The July issue of Reason has a new format, which improves the layout of the publication. But what about the content? Unfortunately, on that ground, the new Reason seems to be worse than the old.


Let us examine some of the articles in Reason's July issue to see what they are all about. First, one John Kizer attacks Thomas Szasz's libertarian denunciation of involuntary mental hospitalization. Kizer analogizes that just as the unconscious victim of an auto wreck can be justifiably "involuntarily" treated by a doctor, a treatment that will be really voluntary after the patient wakes up, so too can the schizophrenic or paranoiac be involuntarily – "really" voluntarily – treated.

Except that the schizophrenic and paranoiac are awake and conscious, thank you, and are clearly not assenting! And, should an opponent of medical therapy wake up from his accident and demand out, his demand, however odd, must be granted. But what of the similar demand of the mental patient? At any rate, whether sound or unsound, the point is that Mr. Kizer's article is explicitly antilibertarian.

Then there is the crazed article from Canada, by one A. Michael Keerma, which Red-baits to an extent that would not even be tolerated by National Review or Human Events. First, there is the ludicrous charge that the Parti Québécois and Québec Premier René Lévesque are Communists run by the Soviet KGB. There is not even a coming to grips in the Keerman article with the libertarian view that secession is a per se libertarian act, being the dismantling of a State into constituent parts. But just when I thought that Keerma would be calling for an all-out defense of the Canadian nation-state against the Québec separatists, I find that the author's Red-baiting has boxed him into a peculiar corner. For, according to Keerma, Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau is himself a Communist and KGB tool.

It is incredible that this sort of drivel can appear in a responsible magazine. The truth is that neither Trudeau nor Lévesque is a Communist or a Soviet agent; they are simply, like nearly every other politician in the "free world," moderate socialists, which is bad enough, but hardly a call for the United States to become embattled, in Keerma's words, in "a war to determine the fate of the free world." Or are we to nuke Britain, run by moderate-socialist Callaghan?