Do libertarians contradict themselves by opposing foreign intervention?

Or do they simply have a better way to do it?

Photo by Daniel on Unsplash

A previous version of this article was published at the Zero Aggression Project.

In this article…

• How libertarians might be contradicting themselves about foreign intervention
• The underlying reason libertarians are not contradicting themselves when they oppose a certain kind of foreign intervention
• How the libertarian approach might have prevented the Iraq invasion, fostered an end to the Rwandan genocide, and delivered a more cost-effective F-35.

Libertarians constantly stress the difference between initiated force and defensive force.

• Initiated force is when you threaten or use physical violence against someone who has not threatened or attacked you.
• Defensive force is violence used to counter a threat or retaliate against an attack.

Defensive force is legitimate. Initiated force is a crime, both for an individual and for any group, including a government. But…

What about using violence to defend others?

That’s okay too, so long as the violence is proportional to the threat or attack. But if that’s true then…

Why do nearly all libertarians oppose foreign intervention?

That’s an excellent question. Shouldn’t libertarians be the primary advocates of military intervention to defend foreign people from oppression?

At first glance, it looks like libertarians are contradicting themselves. But the seeming contradiction is superficial. Look deeper and you’ll see that…

What libertarians really oppose is foreign intervention by The State.

Statist intervention suffers from two flaws…

• It’s tax-funded
• It’s politically managed

Tax funding is…

• Immoral because it uses threats of violence to make people pay for things they don’t want or that their consciences abhor. (This flaw is already enough to make most libertarians oppose statist intervention.)
• Impractical because it removes the need to perform well — the money comes whether the service provided is good or bad.

Tax funding also implies political management, which makes statist foreign intervention doubly impractical. Randolph Bourne observed that “War is the health of The State.” The great libertarian scholar Robert Higgs showed in his book Crisis and Leviathan that Bourne’s observation is true. War causes The State to grow and politicians to gain new powers. In other words…

Politicians benefit from war even when no one else does.

These factors suggest that tax-funded and politically managed foreign interventions almost always do more harm than good. I’ve tested this claim in seven articles that review all the major U.S. wars and interventions between 1812 and WW2…

• Were early U.S. wars good or bad? (War of 1812, Mexican War, Spanish War, Philippines conquest)
• Did Teddy Roosevelt co-found the Japanese Empire?
• Did U.S. politicians choose the more evil side in WW1?
• How U.S. politicians helped create the Soviet Union
• Did blundering U.S. politicians spark the rise of Nazi Germany?
• How U.S. politicians fostered the rise of radical Islam
• Was World War 2 a “good war?”
• What if World War 2 had been voluntarily funded?
• The Cuban Missile Crisis was a fraud

I asked the following questions about each conflict…

• Did it defend freedom?
• Did if defend America?
• Did it make the world better?

The evidence deployed in these articles pointed the same way for every question for every conflict. U.S interventions have not…

• Defended freedom
• Defended America
• Made the world better

Please understand, my claim is not that U.S. interventions have never achieved anything good. My claim is that the bad has always outweighed the good. If you doubt this, please review the evidence presented in the articles above. You’ll discover that the history you were taught in state schools is inaccurate, incomplete, and self-serving — it’s propaganda by The State for The State. A more honest evaluation of history suggests two things…

One, foreign interventions will not reliably serve a defensive purpose so long as they are…

• Tax-funded
• Politically managed

Two, you might get better results from foreign intervention if our military was voluntarily funded.

This post-statist approach would give you and your fellow citizens control over the purse strings for proposed foreign interventions. You, personally, could pump more money into good interventions or deny funding for interventions that appeared ill-conceived. Seen in this way…

Many libertarians might actually be pro-intervention, as long as the intervention isn’t using some form of initiated force, such as taxation or a military draft.

I understand that this must seem like a bold new idea, but it isn’t really. It’s actually how the most important parts of your life already work. Consider…

Would your housing, food, or entertainment be improved if you were compelled to buy them from only one provider, and pay the price set by that supplier, whether you wanted the product or not? Of course not. You would expect things to be worse, not better!

So is it really so strange to suggest that the military and foreign interventions should be funded in the same way? The big concern that comes to mind is…

What if voluntary payments didn’t generate enough money to do the job?

This begs the question, how do we know the tax-funded system is providing the right amount of funding? Maybe the amount being spent is insufficient? Or perhaps it’s too high? Or maybe the amount is correct but it’s being spent in the wrong way, on ineffective things. There’s nothing to guarantee that the scheme imposed on us by the politicians is the correct one. In reality, opinions differ, even among the politicians. In addition…

People are more careful with their own money than politicians are with other people’s money.

For instance, the Pentagon has misplaced several trillion dollars and is infamous for wasting money on boondoggles. Given that, isn’t it possible, and perhaps even likely, that we would get better answers through crowdsourcing — letting 200 million taxpayers make their own individual spending decisions? For example…

• Might the Iraq invasion have been prevented because citizens withdrew funding?
• Might we have intervened to stop the Rwandan genocide because citizens clamored to fund that mission?
• Might the F-35 have been less costly if Lockheed had needed to worry more about continued citizen support?

Maybe we’ve had things upside down all this time.

Maybe the real answer to the question of how much money we need for the military is not whatever the politicians want to impose on us, but rather, what we as individuals are willing to voluntarily provide?

Voluntaryist or post-statist libertarians certainly think so. That’s why…

• Libertarians are not contradicting themselves by opposing foreign intervention
• Libertarians are being consistent because tax-funded foreign intervention is initiated force, not defensive force
• Voluntary funding could result in better security and foreign interventions that actually do more good than harm.

Copyright © Perry Willis 2024

Perry Willis is the co-founder of Downsize DC and the Zero Aggression Project. He co-created, with Jim Babka, the Read the Bills Act, the One Subject at a Time Act, and the Write the Laws Act, all of which have been introduced in Congress. He is a past Executive Director of the national Libertarian Party and was the campaign manager for Harry Browne for President in 2000.