The Dissenters; 6; Joe Michael Cobb

It's just that for people who are very concerned about communism and don't have the time or the energy or the international educational television presents the dissenters, conversations with editors and publishers of political opinion magazines. This week Joe Michael Cobb, the young editor of the new individualist review published in Chicago. It is libertarian and speaks for a splinter group on the right that is anti-government and often called anarchist. How does a libertarian see communism in the world today? Indeed, what does the libertarian see as the role of the United States in this world? Well, I would be very hesitant to speak for the libertarian. I can only really speak for myself on this issue because I think the pressures that are placed on the right wing by national review on the one hand and the philosophical desire for limited government on the other hand. A very large number of libertarians, I think, are really undecided. I think you'll find an enormous number of libertarians who are, you know, in their standing right side beside with Buckley.

They might not call themselves radical conservatives. They may call themselves libertarians instead, but they're, you know, they're committed. They want to win in Vietnam too. But there are other libertarians who are, I think, more concerned with what is the warfare state doing to the United States. An old trick of dictators to stir up strength at home is to find a foreign enemy. We see that sort of thing in Orwell's 1984, for example. Do you feel that's the reason for escalating in Vietnam? Well, I don't really. I'm not that conspiratorially oriented, but I do think that having a war effort going on, and the Cold War since 1947 or something, has led to an increased centralization in American society, an increased concentration of hands of power and key industries, that sort of thing, which I don't think would have occurred if we hadn't had the Cold War. And I think it's to libertarians that are not already committed to winning against communism wherever the battle lines are drawn. I think the reasons they're not committed is because they're concerned about the empirical question, almost impossible to answer, as a matter of fact, of will communism attempt to conquer the world, all other myths about Hitler in the 30s?

Or will it be satisfied with certain territorial gains? Now, the statement that I've just made is very easy to poke holes in. It's very easy to set it up in a caricature of a strong man and knock it down. You can say, look at Munich, it failed. Look at, if we give them Southeast Asia, they'll want Australia next. And I'm not trying to defend these other people's indecision on the basis of some strong and fast argument. They're just undecided. They don't know. They don't want to spend $50 billion a year in Vietnam. On the other hand, it would probably disturb them if 50 million more people were enslaved. And it would certainly disturb them if Communist China, in fact, intended to conquer first Vietnam, then Australia, then South America, then California. You know, if that sort of domino link up were actually demonstrated, there would be no indecision.

Well, I don't think there'd be any decision on the part of anyone, if that's where we're proven. Let's take it back to domestic policy, because I think that perhaps is more fruitful. What are the manifestations of a libertarian point of view in the United States? Let me just take some of the articles that have appeared in the new individualist review. And one was an issue in which there were a few articles on the draft, various aspects of the draft, one by Milton Friedman, on why not a volunteer army? One by yourself, on immigration is an alternative to the draft, and one by James Powell, on anti-militarism and laissez-faire. Let's take Milton Friedman's, since he's one of your major mentors. Let's take Milton Friedman's argument on why not a volunteer army? And tell us what that argument is. Well, Friedman is an economist. So he's in the first place aware of the economic arguments involved in hiring men, acquiring any sort of good on the market. By supply and demand, if you will.

Most people in the American society are not, well, they might know it in theory, but they're not sort of emotionally convinced that in fact it's true. Most libertarians do know economics do the sense that they're emotionally convinced that supply and demand works. So what Friedman says is that the United States needs an army of a certain size. Three million men, perhaps a Vietnam, maybe one and a half million men, in pre-Vietnam levels and post-Vietnam levels. How do you go about acquiring that many men? General Hershey says, well, you make a little list, and you take the top 50 each month, and that's how you get your men. Milton Friedman says, what you do is you put a want-add in his paper, if you will, and say we're now paying $200 a month for privates. Will you join? And in point of fact, if you look at the American economy, that is a fairly attractive wage level for disenchanted unemployed teenagers, and they will join. All of the economic studies that have been made indicate that an army can be hired, if you will, with the expenditure of about $5 billion more.

The only objections to doing it this way of hiring people to serve in the army, rather than sending them a greetings letter, has been first that they think it's uncertain. People that oppose the plan feel that somehow we wouldn't get them in, especially if they were an emergency. Now, on the one hand, this is because they don't believe that economics works. They don't believe that men will join and risk their lives. In point of fact, young men in America are very adventurous, so I think they would. There is a moral motivation most people feel for going in the army. What you're trying to do here is to disassociate what you feel is a strictly economic proposition, with what some people feel as a matter of sort of an honor to the country. Well, I've always been a bit annoyed at people who feel that every man owes a military obligation to his country, and they're perfectly willing to manifest this moral commitment by ordering him and him and him and him and him to go in. It's very easy to have a moral commitment when you yourself are not being subjected to that sort of thing.

Now, I'm not ignoring the moral commitment. A very large number of people feel this moral commitment. You know, easily 90% of Americans, how many people don't get some little burst of pride when they see an old war movie or something like that. I think this would be one factor that would encourage a lot of young men to enlist. If the president made an appeal to the nation, we need men to win and be at norm. I think the people would enlist like crazy. They certainly did during the Spanish-American War. They also did during the First World War. Well, one of the articles that you wrote on immigration as an alternative to the draft is very interesting, because what you're spelling out there are a lot of the reasons how one can evade the draft indeed by leaving the country. This has always been associated with a new left, with the arguments about leaving the country, getting out. And they have been excoriated for doing this. Well, one of the main reasons I wrote the article was, in one sense, I wanted to try to grapple with this excoration.

A libertarian and a member of the new left has a very close emotional similarity in their outlook. The new left is very concerned with the plight of people and the ghettos, the plight of the poor Vietnamese, the plight of the people that are being drafted and so forth. A libertarian also has a commitment toward social justice, if you will. It's just that he doesn't think it can be achieved by having the government step in and redistribute things. Now, what I was trying to do in that article was to try to deal with that 5% or 1% or whatever percentage it is of the American society, which don't share the majority's moral and emotional commitment. And any libertarianism should be free to act according to that context. Yes, of course. A libertarian is not a nationalist. Under a different era, you know, I might be shot for saying this. A libertarian, if he doesn't like his government, he packs up and leaves. He has no commitment at all to the government, especially the government's oppressive.

And what is oppression except something that you yourself think? If somehow or other social security and labor union regulations and the income tax really were on your back, you would be oppressed, even though it's not nearly as objective and measurable as perhaps oppression in the Soviet Union is supposed to be. So, assume that the person is in this position. He's just received a greetings from Uncle Sam. He doesn't feel the patriotic urge that most young men feel. Now, the point of my article, which I thought was extremely interesting, was that Americans make a great deal of hullabaloo about people in communist countries being prevented from leaving. The Berlin Wall, the bamboo curtain, that sort of thing. Now, I thought, wouldn't it be interesting if, in point of fact, although most people in the United States don't feel impressed, there's 1% who do. What if they were prevented from leaving? And, in point of fact, that's exactly what I found out was the case. That 1% of the American people, well, it's actually much smaller. It's a very, very small fraction of people who are willing to leave the country, maybe only two or three hundred people a year.

But the current selective service law is, don't allow a person to leave. Don't allow a person to cancel his military obligation in that way. You can go abroad for a vacation. You can get permission for your draft board to do so. When you come back, you may or may not be a delinquent. But that, you know, two or three hundred or five thousand people a year that do want to go to Canada, do want to renounce your citizenship, do want to cancel their military obligation in that way. They can't do it. The law won't let them do it. They're indicted by the grand jury as soon as they're located. If they ever turned to the United States, they're threatened within five years imprisonment. It's a continuing duty, supposedly, that lasts with you from age 18 to death. There's nothing you can do about it. This is strangely enough very, very contrary to the Supreme Court's own justification for having conscription. In 1917, the Supreme Court said that the conscription was justified because when a person lives in society, he gets certain benefits from that society.

And he has a reciprocal duty to defend the society. Well, it's fine and good. If you accept that statement, you also have to accept the controversy, which is also logically true, namely that if you're willing to forego those benefits, then the duties are also canceled, you see. And the people that want to immigrate are willing to forego those benefits. But the duties are not canceled. It seems to me that this may be on the road to what Bill Buckley said about you, people on that is that you're close to anarchy. Well, if you do not have these rules for obligations in a society, indeed how if you can let 1% or half of 1% not hue to these obligations, how can you make the whole of society? Well, this 1.5% that's not hue to these obligations, you must realize, are also giving up all the benefits. They're leaving. They're becoming Canadians, they're becoming Britons, they're becoming Russians, if they're a Supreme. And they are really, in fact, well, but what if Canada imposes on the obligations? They keep moving.

They might keep moving. I suspect that if they're really sort of thorough-type libertarians, they might very well keep on moving. After all, the Amish men and knights move from Germany to Russia and then to the United States and into Canada. Very large Amish communities in Canada because the United States imposed restrictions on them during the First World War. What about some other aspects of libertarian philosophy? You have proposed and some of the issues of the new individuals review that maybe there are other ways to run schools besides having the state run schools. Maybe having states run schools is not the best way of running schools, indeed. Yeah, one of the things that libertarians put a lot of time on is thinking up ways to have the private market, do things that the government is currently doing. You know, you might call it our chief commitment. The reason our political philosophy is deserves to exist is because we think it can be done. Why, for example, should the government operate the schools? Well, the answer is that everyone has a right for an education and someone has to step in and run the schools. Well, that's very fine.

But everyone has a right to a house, or at least needs a house, but the government doesn't build houses. Everyone has the need for automobiles. The government doesn't build automobiles. The argument is that you can take the needs, which society recognizes as important, like the need for education. And there are other ways to provide it. For example, why should the children of very wealthy people living in very expensive suburbs? Why should their children be entitled to go to a school, pay absolutely no tuition, and have general tax revenues from the state, finance it? They can afford to pay for their children's education, why shouldn't they? Now, the argument is that, well, there are those people that can't afford to pay for their education. That's fine. Help those people. But just because you have a marginal case of necessity, doesn't mean that you somehow have to have a blanket policy for the whole society, rich and poor alike. The proposal is most frequently discussed in libertarian circles is to have the government give poor people, or everybody, if you will, if it's politically impossible to avoid subsidizing the rich.

Give everybody a voucher equal to the per capita expended cure on education. And let these people take these vouchers to private schools. Maybe there's not enough schools today, but if you sell the physical plants of the public school system, there would be more schools. Also, if there's a very large demand for private schools, it will spring up. From economic observations, whenever there's demand, you can't expect to supply. So, there would be businesses grow. Exactly. People would find schools. There's an enormous amount of talent, both in the United States and Britain, these are the two countries I read the studies on. An enormous amount of talent, teaching talent, is sort of locked in because the women who were teaching the lower grades got married and are now housewives. This talent could be released if these people were allowed to set up Dame schools. Like, for example, we saw several hundred years ago before the model of government operator schools became popular. It's very interesting. The so-called American neighborhood school system was originally based on the model of pressure. Pressure was the first country I understand in the world to have universal state compulsory education.

And somehow rather than the American intellectuals in the 19th century, the 1840s, 1850s, thought that somehow this was really magnificent. And they really wanted everybody to copy it. They lobbied in their legislatures and got tuition abolished in all government-run schools. And then they got schooling made compulsory. And by not charging any tuition and by taxing everybody to pay for them, they finally drove most private schools out of existence in those days. And it was mostly because they admired the pressure and way of doing things. It's very strange. It's somehow the origins of this have completely passed away. People don't admire pressure anymore. People don't admire militarism anymore. Why do they admire state schools? And the reason is that they grew up with it. They're fathers grew up with it. They're children are going through it. Some sort of emotional commitment. But Libertarian would like to look at a new way of doing something. Some way that doesn't involve coercive government taxation. That doesn't involve a compulsory assignment of your child to your neighborhood school. The Negroes and the ghettos for example would be much better off. They wouldn't even have this neighborhood school problem. If they were allowed to go to any school in the city, any school, any private school.

What you've been saying in responding to all of these questions is that underlying the philosophy of being a libertarian, there is a belief that primary motivation of man for collective action is economic rather than political. At least that seems to me to be true. Well, I wouldn't, I don't, I won't consider that particular phraseology of it. All I'm really trying to say here is that the economic motivation is not absent. People will try to maximize their own gains. Even in the political sphere, the so-called economic motive behavior is not absent. After all, the lobbyists in Washington who are dealing directly with the political apparatus are in there for something very specific. Some very specific gain. The new tariff bill, which Dirkson and Long have proposed in the Senate, is certainly economic in its benefits to steel makers and textile makers and so forth like that.

This is the political process. All a libertarian tries to say is that whenever the political machinery becomes active in the economy, it helps some people and hurts others. It redistributes the resources of the society in a certain way as to help some people and hurt others. And a libertarian would go further and say that in contradiction to the social democrat, the modern liberal, he would say that the redistribution of resources will help the people who are already rich, not the people who need it, not the people that the social democrats want to help. Look at the case of urban renewal. Here is something that people would call political. The government decided that certain areas were unfit for human habitation and proceeded to try to destroy them, wipe them out, clean them up, renew them. Interestingly enough, what was wiped out was lower income housing and what was built was upper income housing. The people that got rich by it are the construction firms and so forth like that, the slim land lords that were paid very handsome prices for their property.

The economic aspect is not absent in the political process. As an extension of what you said so far, you would argue that the private industry could operate the post offices would seem to me as well as that maybe if hospitals should be run by a private corporation making a profit on hospitals. I think the hospital is a different industry. Certainly the interstate highway system could be privately owned and run. There is limited access. You could set up a toll booth or some other more advanced system of building people who used it. There is no reason why the interstate highway system should be subsidized the way the city streets are. The city streets are owned by the government because there are costs of doing business. If you set up a toll booth on everybody's driveway and charge them a dime before they could use the street, the costs of charging would be too much. It would cost you a dollar an hour to have a man stand there to click that dime which is paid twice a day. There are some things that can't be handled in a market. Some things are cheaper, more economically efficient to give them away than it is to sell them.

But something like the interstate highway system could certainly be private. The depends on when your turnpike is making money hand over a fist now. There is no reason why the rest of the roads in the United States couldn't be operated similarly. Don't get me wrong. I'm not saying that I've studied it and this is my opinion. I'm saying that things like this ought to be examined. There's no ordinary reason why anything should be given away. And if you are determined to give it away, you should look and see who you're giving it to. Are you giving it to the rich people that could buy it if you sold it? Or are you giving it to the poor people who might not be able to buy it? Who we might want to give it to? Then what are the legitimate functions of the state? Well, I tried to back out of that few minutes ago. Perhaps the government should maintain a court system. Some libertarians argue that it could be handled privately, but I'm not quite that far out. There's some reason to believe the government ought to maintain a police force for enforcing crimes of violence in the streets, making sure they don't happen.

But a lot of things the police are doing could be done by private agencies also. There's no hallowed reason why the government ought to be exclusively in the business of apprehending criminals and preventing the destruction of property. Private police forces used to be much more common back in the 19th century when the government was less aggressive. The government would appoint a deputy marshal for a certain area. And if a company really wanted to protect its property, it would hire a few Burns guards, that sort of thing. But a lot of that seems to be passing over to the government. I think to maintain order doesn't require the government to take all that active role. Order will maintain itself for the most part. But certain things which can't be handled by the market because it's too expensive to handle them by the market. Can sometimes be handled by direct organization instead. And the government is just another example of a direct organization. The reason business firms exist is because it's cheaper for them to bring certain activities inside the organization rather than dealing on the market for all of the bits and parts.

And there are a few things in the general economy which the government can do best because it is one large corporation which doesn't depend upon selling its product to get its revenues. And you don't feel that the government should have any regulatory influence over business and over the private economy. Well, it should have as much regulatory influence over the economy as say I have over you. I can expect or insist that you not physically assault me. Under certain circumstances I could expect that you wouldn't verbally assault me. I can expect you wouldn't take my, you know, steal the stuff out of my pockets. And the government serves a legitimate function to make sure that private businesses don't do that to each other, to make sure that consumers don't do that to businesses and to make sure that businesses don't do that to people they deal with. But I don't think the government has any really useful function to perform in terms of really regulating the economy.

Things like the Interstate Commerce Commission, things like the Civil Aeronautics Board, things like the Federal Communications Commission. These are all things that were set up in great moments of enthusiasm for government regulation which in point of fact have done nothing in their 50 or 20 or 10 years of existence. Except sort of protect and help enrich the people they're supposed to regulate. You really think that there's a hope in this large and this mammoth organizational structure in the United States and the government of the United States that it can in fact become more libertarian the way you would like to have it happen. This is where Buckley makes his compromise. He doesn't go as far as you do. That's right, a libertarian is much more able to be an ivory tower crusader because the philosophy is more pure, I guess, is because he doesn't have power, he doesn't have to compromise. I noticed an article in the New Republic several months ago about Reagan when he was campaigning in California, especially in the early days.

He was very strongly libertarian. He was talking about the free economy, free men, human rights, limiting the size of government, all sorts of things like that. After he was elected, the power interest in California slowly began to drift into the state house and talk with him and have him over to T and so forth. After all, they're concerned with who runs the government. If the government stops handing out large construction contracts, they lose. It looks like someone who does campaign on a fire-breathing libertarian platform and inspires the imagination of a large number of voters, even people like that can be sucked into the power structure, you might say. So disrupted, corrupted. To that extent, there's some element of pessimism in my view of the world. You've talked in the new individual's review about the government regulating sin, one of the things that you were against. What is your feeling about that? Do you feel that that's another invasion of privacy?

Oh, quite a lot of smoke marijuana. Well, that's a very touchy political area in the marijuana thing, but it does fall under this category. Part of the American heritage seems to be a sort of a puritan approach to life. People have psychological complexes, they ought to be upright, they ought to be decent, that sort of thing. And it invaded the legislative halls, as you might expect. Almost every state has laws against homosexuality, almost every state has laws against fornication, almost every state has laws against the federal government that deals with stuff like heroin, drugs and so forth like that. The government is very concerned with people's moral makeup. This is, of course, something government has always been concerned with, unfortunately, since the Pharaohs of Egypt. The government tries to step in, tries to regulate people. There was some sort of movement away from this during the 19th century, but not that strong, and certainly not in the United States.

The United States has always been very vigorous in regulating the sins of its populace. In the 1920s, the sin of booze was forbidden. In the 1960s, the sin of marijuana is forbidden. Throughout this whole period, the sin of a fornication has been forbidden. And I don't think the government should concern itself with that sort of thing. Let the person regulate his own life. What public harm is caused by, you know, fornication or something like that? It's an act between two adults, presumably in private, if it were out in the public streets, there might be some reason for government action. But these laws in the States regulate private acts between adult individuals in their own homes. And I see no reason for such an invasion of privacy. What will life be like in 1990? If we have a very free and easy culture, people smoke marijuana at night to relax because it has now supplanted the five o'clock martini, that sort of thing. And the government is, you know, just all over the place with bugging devices, spy cameras, that sort of thing.

And it can sort of, since everybody does this, everybody relaxes in these ways. And they're still laws in the books. The government can be very arbitrary in who it addresses, whom it arrests, and whom it lets go free. And these laws just absolutely have to be repealed if there's going to be any freedom from arbitrary government action. You see, one of the problems with having such an incredibly minute network of laws is the fact that the government has discretion about whom it enforces these against and whom it lets go free. I understand that the children of poor ghetto people are very often picked up and harassed for being out after curfew or for being caught drinking and so forth. And the children of the upper classes are just sort of reprimanded, released to their parents, that sort of thing. This is this privilege in society. And it exists because the government has this discretionary power for the enforcement of these laws. I think that all laws which are trying to regulate the individual in that way, that sort of personal way, ought to be repealed. And that those laws which the public still believes ought to be in the books, like prohibition of murder.

Those things ought to be enforced very vigorously, you see. It's just that there are some things which I don't think are in the public sphere and other things I think may well be. So tell me how you stand. Visa V. William Buckley, he considers himself a radical conservative. Now, how does libertarianism differ from radical conservativeism? Libertarianism believes in almost the most part it's very close, except there's some. This is NET, the National Educational Television Network. The National Educational Television Network

The National Educational Television Network The National Educational Television Network The National Educational Television Network