Isms and Experience: The Origins of Trump's Policy Part Two
Will enough people recognise the old pattern, reclaim the ideas of a free society and build the movement needed to dismantle the ideas of the total state before it consumes us all? I hope so.
In part one of this article, I wrote about how the militarism, protectionism, and nativism that are at the core of President Trump’s policy are bankrupt old ideas. Combined with his brutal approach to business, these have led to Trump’s actions and leave us all at risk of total war. President Trump’s approach is not new - his ideas and actions are the visible expression of a system of political thinking that has been seen before: economic intervention at home spills into aggressive nationalism abroad, and the machinery of domestic control becomes indistinguishable from the apparatus of war.
Isms and Experience: The Origins of Trump's Policy Part One
“Practical men who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence are usually the slaves of some defunct economist. Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back”
As I stated in my last article, two books are especially relevant to understanding the development of Trump’s policies and actions: Mises’ Omnipotent Government and his Theory and History. In their analyses of the practical and ideological factors leading to the disaster of World War II, they teach us that history is not inevitable; history is the product of the ideas we hold and act upon.
Mises’s “Omnipotent Government” and the logic of war
Mises’s central thesis in Omnipotent Government, published in 1944, is that modern war arises not from atavistic militarism or irrational nationalism but from the internal logic of government intervention in the economy – what he called “etatism”. His argument unfolds in several interlocking steps, each of which illuminates our predicament.
Free trade removes the incentive for conquest
In a world of free trade, secure private property and unhampered markets, territorial boundaries are economically irrelevant. Individuals and firms can access resources, labor and capital across borders through voluntary exchange; no one gains materially from annexing a province, because annexation confers no commercial advantage that trade does not already provide.
Under such conditions, questions of sovereignty can be resolved through negotiation, votes and legal arbitration because no party’s prosperity depends on which government holds which territory. This was the logic of 19th-century liberalism, which saw free-trading Britain grant dominion status to overseas colonies and Sweden peacefully accept Norwegian independence, because citizens understood that their king’s loss of a foreign crown did not impoverish them.
