The view of law in question is based on a conception of human nature that denies our natural belonging to family and fatherland. These institutions would then be oppressive because they are not voluntary.
Austrian Jew Ludwig von Mises, mentor of Rothbard, would explain it as follows: “Men are generally born already into the most fundamental hegemonic bonds, namely, the family and the state. The same was true in the hegemonic institutions of antiquity, such as slavery and serfdom.”
Again, he states: “The state, as an apparatus of compulsion and coercion, is by definition a hegemonic order. The same applies to the family.”
Thus, we see that this false view of law is not only illogical but also incompatible with natural and Catholic ethics. According to libertarianism, how could one practice the fourth commandment—even in private life—if doing so would require perpetuating and collaborating with institutions that are contrary to justice? To what kind of cognitive dissonance do these Catholic libertarians subject us?
If this entire problem were not already messy enough, recall that fully accepting these individual rights would entail decriminalizing practices that any sane person would consider legally punishable—even if we try to act as if morality were separable from public life.
Rothbard explains: “The genuine concept of ‘rights’ is negative. It delimits the areas within which no one may interfere with a person’s actions. No one has the right to force another to perform a positive act, because any coercion violates a person’s right over themselves.”
This implies that no one has the right to force another, for example, to refrain from spreading lies about someone. Thus, Rothbard considers blackmail a legitimate form of business.
Likewise, no one would have the right to force another to feed them. According to this view, parents would have the legal right not to feed their child—that is, to let the child die. In fact, no one has the right to force them to act as parents in any way. They could even sell the trust rights over their children to anyone willing to buy them for an agreed price.
The sale of children was precisely proposed by the libertarian party La Libertad Avanza. Its leader, Javier Milei, stated in an interview, “If I had a child, I would not sell him.” This was said as if it should ease our concerns.
Similarly, Rothbard states: “Having a right to life does not guarantee […] the right to keep using another person’s body, even if such use were indispensable for one’s own existence.”
He then asks: “Which human beings have the right to be coercive parasites within the body of a host who does not wish to accept them? If no already-born human being has such a right, a fortiori, fetuses have even less.”
The libertarian view of abortion would be termed evictionism by its systematizer, the Jewish Walter Block. This does not mean directly killing the fetus—which would violate its rights. It means evacuating the fetus from the mother’s uterus. After that, no one would be forced to prevent it from suffocating to death.
According to Rothbard, “the fetus becomes an ‘invader’ of the person, and the mother would have the full right to expel it from her domain.”
Let us hope that if Milei had a child, he would not evict him either.
The third logical flaw of these Catholic libertarians is that they act as if their defense of supposedly God-given individual liberties were a virtuous alternative to legal systems based on the democratic will of the masses.
In reality, the idea of subordinating the individual to the democratic majority simply derives from following the only possible path permitted by their own ideology. It would be impossible to build a political community “with an absolutely voluntary genesis.” Therefore, the only option left for the revolutionaries—if they did not want to abandon any possibility of liberal politics—was to pretend that every state they formed was indeed the result of a voluntary pact.
Thus, majority laws would be nothing more than associative statutes that all supposed affiliates must obey. The enlightened would restrict these to different historical nations.
Therefore, the contrast postulated by Friedrich von Hayek (another disciple of Mises) between French liberalism and Anglo-Saxon liberalism is merely a veneer concealing the common kinship among these ideas. They forget that Thomas Jefferson, who authored the famous phrase in the American Declaration of Independence, also wrote the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen with his Masonic friend, the Marquis de Lafayette.
In any case, libertarians can sleep peacefully knowing that national democracies have progressively ceded their unfounded power to a global system of homogeneous human rights. These rights, however, do not conform to those proposed by the Austrian school.
The fourth logical flaw of libertarians is that their claimed separation between morality and politics is inherently illogical and therefore deceptive.
They intend to build a system in which every individual can act according to their own ethical ideas. However, it is evident from the discussion above that they are not free from the desire to impose their particular moral guidelines on everyone—namely, to respect individual rights as they define them.
On what basis does this demand rest, if not on their own idea of moral duty?
Rothbard seeks to base rights merely on our capacity to demand them. But is this not as arbitrary as basing rights on the condition of being alive, as animal rights advocates argue?
Therefore, libertarians do insist that politics be conducted according to a particular idea of morality: their own.
Thus, what the Catholic libertarians are defending is not a separation between politics and Catholic ethics, but rather the replacement of Catholic ethics with another.
In fact, in keeping with their ideology, we should all support that people be killed and die in war in the name of individual rights—even if that means killing Christians. Yet, we should not support war in the name of the Church—even against it.
According to J. Ramón Rallo, “the military interventions of one political community aimed at protecting the population of another political community […] constitute potentially legitimate uses of force to prevent the violation of individual rights.”
This reveals once again that, for them, the commandments of Christ hold no more weight than personal preferences, such as a favorite ice cream flavor.
In conclusion, libertarianism is nothing more than a further radicalized version of the prevailing liberal ideology. It can be summarized in the following premise: the individual is not required to take any action unless they have voluntarily consented to it.
Thus, libertarianism is not anti-system. Although our states are far from adhering to the ethical paradigm of the Austrian school, that is because the current system is an amalgam of different interpretations of that very premise. These interpretations, as explained at the beginning, are no less liberal than libertarianism.
However, as if under a demonic spell, these Catholics have embraced the inconceivable. They believe that to go against this anti-Christian world, we must ignore the Catholic political tradition and follow a group of Jewish writers as faithful talmidim who turn to their rabbi.
Fortunately, the majority of these Catholics are not consistent with the ideas they defend. They do not recognize the right to sell children, to abort, or to blackmail.
Nevertheless, it must be remembered that this is so not in accordance with their ideas about law, but despite them.
Like a rebellious teenager with his parents, many Catholics will chase after any political cause rather than clearly commit to the one that has always awaited them: the restoration of the Social Reign of Christ.
Marco Benítez, Círculo Cultural Alberto Ruiz de Galarreta (Valencia)
[1] La acción humana, Madrid, Unión Editorial, 2011, pp. 235-236.
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l4l1b84fFtQ
[3] https://www.infobae.com/politica/2022/06/28/que-respondio-javier-milei-cuando-le-preguntaron-si-esta-a-favor-de-la-venta-de-ninos/
[4] All Rothbard quotes are taken from La ética de la libertad, Madrid, Unión Editorial, 1995, pp. 147-150,156 y 183.
[5] Ibid., p. 222.
[6] Liberalismo: los 10 principios básicos del orden político liberal, Vizcaya, Eds. Deusto, 2019, p. 162.
Translated by Daniel Alejandro Rodríguez Guerra
Deje el primer comentario