History professor Ralph Raico is a dedicated opponent of the court historians’ cant and deception. Great Wars and Great Leaders is a collection of his essays challenging the conventional wisdom, ranging from the beginning of World War I to just after World War II.

As Robert Higgs notes in his introduction, “Raico’s historical essays are not for the faint of heart or for those whose loyalty to the U.S. or British state outweighs their devotion to truth and humanity.” Raico is usually called a “revisionist” historian, but a more fitting term would be “correctionist” because his work corrects false ideas that glorify wars and political leaders who deserve the sharpest condemnation.

The book’s opening essay is about World War I. What most Americans think they know about that war is roughly this: Militaristic Germany was itching for a reason to launch an expansionist war, and the outbreak of fighting in the Balkans gave it an excuse to attack the peaceful democracies France and Britain. Eventually the United States was compelled by German belligerence to enter the war and “make the world safe for democracy.”

The victors get to write the history, and Raico shows that it’s mostly wrong. The Germans and their Austrian allies were not as devilish as they’ve been portrayed, and the Allies were far from angelic. Most important, President Woodrow Wilson was an authoritarian eager to engage in military interventions to advance his fevered notions of “good government.” Raico points out that Wilson had sent U.S. troops into Mexico in 1914. Some of them died—utterly in vain.

Throughout 1915, 1916, and early 1917 Wilson pursued a provocative policy meant to serve British interests. He was glad to trample on international law with respect to the rights of neutrals and declined to pursue diplomatic efforts at restoring peace. Nevertheless, most historians grade Wilson a “near-great” president. Raico shows how undeserved that accolade is.

Winston Churchill’s lustrous reputation also takes a beating in the book. Most people think of Churchill as a rock-ribbed defender of Western traditions. After all, he was a Conservative prime minister who abhorred communism and fascism. Raico makes it plain, however, that he had no real principles when it came to the economic order. At one point in his career Churchill advocated free trade, but he later abandoned that position when it became a political liability. Nor was Churchill an opponent of the advancing British welfare state. He supported the Trades Union Act that gave legal privileges to unions and advocated “a sort of Germanized network of state intervention and regulation” over the labor market. That made him popular with the socialists. Beatrice Webb applauded him for his support of “constructive state action.”

There are hordes of politicians who will get on popular crusades even though they carry the seeds of long-run social ruin. What puts Churchill in a different class is his willingness to sacrifice innocent lives. Raico gives several particulars. Against the advice of his officers Churchill ordered the British fleet to fire on the French Navy, harbored at Mers-el-Kebir in Algeria after the Germans had defeated France in 1940. The French commander had said that he would neither surrender his ships to Britain nor permit them to fall into German hands. Nevertheless, the British shelled the ships, killing more than 1,500 sailors. Raico comments that this was a war crime and Germans at Nuremberg were sentenced to death for less. Worse still was the continuing bombing campaign against German cities long after it was evident that Hitler was on the verge of defeat. The bombing of Dresden, a city with no military importance, killed some 30,000 civilians in February 1945.

Another “great leader” Raico demolishes is Harry Truman. Truman is often praised these days for his supposed common sense, but the truth is that he was a statist demagogue whose instincts were to escalate the New Deal’s attacks on liberty and property. Americans are fortunate that most of his efforts were parried by Congress or the courts. The same cannot be said, unfortunately, about his decision to use atomic bombs to destroy Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Raico eviscerates the excuse that Truman “had to” use the bomb because the Japanese would otherwise have fought on and killed half a million Americans.

This book defines “iconoclastic.” I strongly recommend it.

Europe had not experienced a prolonged and massively destructive war since the defeat of Napoleon one hundred years earlier. To be sure, there had been some wars and civil wars, especially in central and eastern Europe during the nineteenth century. But they were relatively short and, compared to what were experienced in the twentieth century, rather limited in their destruction of life and property. “Rules of warfare” recognized the rights of neutrals and noncombatants in Europe, though not in the colonial areas of Asia and Africa.

But in the last decades of the nineteenth century, beneath the appearance of a classical-liberal utopia of freedom, peace, and prosperity, new ideological forces had been winning the hearts and minds of a growing number of people. These forces were socialism, nationalism, and imperialism—in a word, philosophical, political, and economic collectivism.

The air was filled with calls to arms in the name of national greatness and glory, talk of a higher social good more important than the “mere” interests of individuals, and the notion that peoples discovered their “destinies” not in peaceful industry, but on battlefields amid the thrust of bayonets.

Four years after the war began, by the autumn of 1918, more than 20 million Frenchmen, Englishmen, Germans, Austrians, Hungarians Italians, Russians, Greeks, Turks, Armenians, Serbs, Poles, Romanians, Bulgarians, and many others were dead. European industry and agriculture were ruined, and a good part of the accumulated wealth of a century had been consumed.

Jim Powell, in his book Wilson’s War, tells the story of how this came about, what the consequences were, and the role Woodrow Wilson played in making this entire catastrophe worse than it might have been.

While not ignoring Imperial German militarism, aggressiveness, and bellicosity in the decades before World War I, Powell emphasizes the various nationalist ambitions and secret alliances among all the major belligerents that kept the war from being simply “Germany’s fault.” Battlefield incompetence by generals and political arrogance and stubbornness by national leaders on both sides dragged the war on and on in the face of mounting casualties and growing economic hardship unknown in living memory.

At first, Powell explains, Wilson—a vain and often vengeful man—claimed the role of impartial arbiter to bring the war to a negotiated conclusion. But soon both he and his circle of cabinet members and advisers decided that victory should belong to Great Britain and France. Finally, after winning reelection in 1916 on the slogan “He kept us out of war,” Wilson had Congress declare war on Germany in April 1917, although neither Germany nor any of its allies had attacked or threatened the United States. At the peace conference that followed the November 1918 armistice, Wilson’s idealistic rhetoric was drowned out by the imperial and territorial ambitions of the British and French that left Germany and the former Austro-Hungarian and Russian Empires in a shambles.

Powell persuasively suggests that if America had stayed out of the war the belligerents, exhausted and with no hope of a clear battlefield victory, might have accepted the need to end the conflict without any winner. Had that happened, there might well have been no Bolshevik revolution in Russia and therefore no deadly 75-year “experiment” in Soviet communism under Lenin, Stalin, and those who followed them. If Germany had not been humiliated, stripped of 13 percent of its territory, burdened with “war guilt” and heavy reparations, and left in political and economic chaos, a demagogue like Hitler, with his Nazi ideology of racism and blood lust for revenge and conquest through a new war, might not have come to power.

Had America not taken the path of foreign intervention in 1917, it might not have set the precedent of assuming the mantle of global policeman throughout the remainder of the twentieth century and now into the 21st century. In the world Woodrow Wilson did so much to create, the United States suffered not only hundreds of thousands of casualties in two global wars, but also over a hundred thousand additional deaths in the Korean and Vietnam wars.

Nor should it be forgotten that this U.S. role has cost Americans dearly in other ways: hundreds of billions of dollars in tax money; the growth and increased intrusiveness of the federal government; and their placement in harm’s way throughout the world. This has been a heavy price to pay for Woodrow Wilson’s war ambitions.

In this landmark book, Beard, a professor of history at Columbia University, argued that the Constitution was “an economic document drawn with superb skill by men whose property interests were immediately at stake.” The Founders, then, rather than being patriots, wise lawmakers, or thoughtful students of government, were primarily in the Constitution-writing business to protect their “property interests.”

Conflicts of Interest

The Founders’ economic motives, according to Beard, were straightforward—they were owed money from their support of the Revolution, and those “public securities” (receipts for loans made to support American independence) were not being repaid under the weak Articles of Confederation. A stronger governing document was needed to ease the transfer of tax dollars from ordinary citizens into the pockets of the more affluent Founders.

Thus, according to Beard, the constitutional convention in Philadelphia in 1787 was promoted by “a small and active group of men immediately interested through their personal possessions in the outcome of their labors. . . . The propertyless masses were . . . excluded at the outset from participation. . . .”

Beard, who was among the first generation of professionally trained historians, gathered evidence on the Founders: “Many leaders in the movement for ratification were large [public] security holders,” he argued. Those who opposed the Constitution owned fewer public securities.

Each state had to vote on ratifying the Constitution, and Beard offered evidence that “the leaders who supported the Constitution in the ratifying conventions represented the same economic groups as the members of the Philadelphia convention.” The Founders, Beard conceded, did not write the Constitution merely to make money, but nonetheless, “The Constitution was essentially an economic document.”

Beard’s thesis, seemingly well researched, was presented in a tentative way, but it soon swept the historical profession and became gospel in college classrooms by the 1920s. The Constitution, professors suggested to their students, was not a document worthy of special respect. It was a product of self-interest that should be interpreted loosely and changed as the Progressives saw fit.

The constitutional separation of powers, for example, according to Woodrow Wilson—a friend of Beard’s and a fellow Ph.D. in history—was a “grievous mistake” by the Founders. More centralization of power was needed—especially in the executive branch—to change society through needed reforms, such as the progressive income tax.

Beard made his reputation with his book and went on to an illustrious career: He authored or coauthored 49 books that had sold more than 11 million copies by 1952.

Questionable Scholarship

During the 1950s, historian Forrest McDonald did a more thorough study of the Founders and discovered what can most generously be described as errors in research and, less generously, as fraudulent research. McDonald traveled to archives throughout the original 13 states and meticulously compiled data on thousands of men involved in the debate over the Constitution. After systematically studying the lives of the Founders and the state convention delegates, McDonald wrote We the People, which debunked Beard completely. “No correlation” exists, McDonald discovered, “between their economic interests and their votes on issues in general or on key economic issues.” In fact, McDonald emphasized that in Pennsylvania, South Carolina, and New York “most [public] security holders opposed ratification.”

How could Beard have erred so badly? In part Beard missed the mark because he was trying to hit something else—a Progressive agenda for reform, the excuse to transfer wealth from the haves to the have-nots. If the Founders were merely protecting their economic interests, Beard and his progressive friends were justified in supporting the redistribution of wealth.

How can we be sure that Beard was blinded by his ideology? One indication is that he seems to have willfully distorted his evidence to suggest that certain signers of the Constitution owned more public securities (and other forms of wealth) than they actually did. For example, Daniel Jenifer of Maryland, who signed the Constitution in Philadelphia, held no public securities—a point against Beard’s view that the signers were self-interested. But Beard classified Jenifer among the large security holders because his son Daniel Jenifer, Jr., held several thousand dollars’ worth of them.

But alas, as McDonald shows, “Jenifer had no children—at least no legitimate ones—for in both of the sources Beard used to gather data on Jenifer, it is expressly stated that Jenifer was a bachelor.” Beard also classified Gunning Bedford, Jr., a delegate from Delaware, as a security holder, but, as Beard admits, there were two Gunning Bedfords in Delaware, and the one who didn’t sign the Constitution was the one who owned the public securities. Furthermore, Beard places delegates Nicholas Gilman, William Samuel Johnson, Charles Pinckney, and others as holders of public securities, but they did not acquire these securities until long after they signed the Constitution.

Some of Beard’s mistakes are more subtle. He classifies delegate William Few as a security holder because Few funded a “certificate of 1779” with a “nominal” value of $2,170. True, but what Beard neglects to say is that Few’s “nominal” value was scaled down to a mere $114.80, a sum hardly worth motivating Few to sign the Constitution to redeem.

No doubt all the Founders were concerned about their own finances as well as those of the nation. But in writing the Constitution, they were above all trying to apply principles of natural rights and limited government to create a durable nation that would be a bastion of freedom in an unfree world. James Madison and other Founders diligently studied ancient and modern republics to learn from their mistakes what safeguards to employ to protect liberty while allowing elected politicians enough authority to effectively lead the nation.

The Sacrifices Made

What Beard omits from his history is the wisdom and dedication of the Founders in overcoming narrow self-interest to produce a masterful guiding document for the country. The actions of Robert Morris of Pennsylvania and Nathaniel Gorham of Massachusetts, for example, are remarkable. Both men signed the Constitution and supported it vigorously even though they ultimately lost money doing so.

Both men had committed to buy land with public securities—which were trading at only about 15 percent of par value before the Constitution was ratified. When the Constitution was ratified and the public securities were redeemed, both Morris and Gorham had to buy the securities at par value, so they both lost fortunes. Morris, in fact, went from being the wealthiest merchant in the United States in 1787 to being tossed into debtors’ prison in the 1790s. Contrary to Beard, Morris had voted against his own economic self-interest, and for his country’s financial integrity.

The Declaration of Independence reflected a generation of thinking on the subject of natural rights—“that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” The Constitution later separated the powers of government to protect life, liberty, and property from future encroachments by potential tyrants.

Woodrow Wilson had only limited use for the Founders and the Declaration. “If you want to understand the real Declaration of Independence,” Wilson urged, “do not read the preface.” Government did not exist merely to protect rights. Instead, Wilson argued that the Declaration “expressly leaves to each generation of men the determination of what they will do with their lives. . . . In brief, political liberty is the right of those who are governed to adjust the government to their own needs and interests.” “We are not,” Wilson insisted, “bound to adhere to the doctrines held by the signers of the Declaration of Independence.”

The limited government enshrined in both the Declaration and the Constitution may have been an advance for the Founders, Wilson conceded, but society had evolved since then. The modern state of the early 1900s was “beneficent” and “indispensable.” Separation of powers hindered modern governments from promoting progress. “[T]he only fruit of dividing power,” Wilson asserted, “was to make it irresponsible.”

A better “constitutional government,” Wilson urged, was one “whose powers have been adapted to the interests of its people.” A strong executive was needed, he believed, to translate the interests of the people into public policy. The president was the opinion leader, the “spokesman for the real sentiment and purpose of the country.” And what the country needed was “a man who will be and who will seem to the country in some sort of an embodiment of the character and purpose it wishes its government to have—a man who understood his own day and the needs of his country.”

In the White House, Wilson intended to be a strong president working with a “living Constitution.” He promoted the expanding of “beneficent” government into new areas. In his second year as president he concluded that shipping rates were too high, and he blessed his secretary of treasury’s plan to regulate overseas shipping rates and the companies doing the shipping. Later he promoted a plan to make loans to farmers at federally subsidized rates. Then he pushed through Congress a bill fixing an eight-hour day for railroad workers.

Article 1, Section 8, of the Constitution gives no power to the federal government to regulate the prices of trade, the hours of work, or to make special loans to farmers or any other group. But Wilson said he was operating with a “living Constitution” and that increased government in these cases reflected appropriately the greater will of the people. Likewise, when Wilson helped centralize banking with the Federal Reserve system and when he further restricted trade by promoting the Clayton Antitrust Act, he believed that this work for the general good outweighed any loyalties to the rigid construction set up by the Founders in the original Constitution.

Not all Americans agreed with Wilson ‘s evolving Constitution. The Adamson Act, which required the eight-hour day for railroad workers, was challenged and went to the Supreme Court. It was sustained by a 5–4 majority, but Justice William Day was appalled at the constitutional violations in the bill. “Such legislation, it seems to me,” Day said, “amounts to the taking of the property of one and giving it to another in violation of the spirit of fair play and equal right which the Constitution intended to secure in the due process clause to all coming within its protection.”

Such growth of government came with a cost, but Wilson was ready with the progressive income tax to pay for his new programs. World War I clearly influenced Wilson’s use of the tax and his centralization of power—he promoted an increase in the top tax rate from 7 to 15 percent in 1916; then, during the war, Wilson secured an increase to a 77 percent marginal rate on the country’s largest incomes.

Where Wilson supported an evolving Constitution that gave him authority to increase the power of government and centralize power, President Calvin Coolidge, who was on the ticket that succeeded Wilson, believed that the Declaration and the Constitution should be accepted as the Founders wrote them.

In July 1926, on the sesquicentennial of the signing of the Declaration, Coolidge gave a speech reaffirming the need for limited government. “It is not so much then for the purpose of undertaking to proclaim new theories and principles that this annual celebration is maintained, but rather to reaffirm and reestablish those old theories and principles which time and the unerring logic of events have demonstrated to be sound.”

Coolidge added that “there is a finality” about the Declaration. “If all men are created equal, that is final. If they are endowed with inalienable rights, that is final. If governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed, that is final. No advance, no progress can be made beyond these propositions. If anyone wishes to deny their truth or their soundness, the only direction in which he can proceed historically is not forward, but backward toward the time when there was no equality, no rights of the individual, no rule of the people. Those who wish to proceed in that direction can not lay claim to progress. They are reactionary.”

Coolidge’s attitude as president reflected his belief in the ideas of the Declaration. He was not always consistent—for example, he signed the Fordney-McCumber Tariff in 1922, which slapped high and uneven taxes on some needed imports. But his efforts were largely in the direction of reducing the size of government to increase liberty. For example, Coolidge cut the size of government and was the last president to have budget surpluses every year of his presidency. Also, when the Harding-Coolidge administration came into office in 1921, the tax rate on top incomes was 73 percent; when Coolidge left the presidency eight years later it was 25 percent. The rates on the lowest incomes were also slashed.

Attacked Special Interests

Furthermore, Coolidge often attacked special interests. He vetoed a bill to give a special cash bonus to veterans; and, through President Harding, he was part of the administration that shut down a government-operated steel plant set up by Wilson, which had lost money each year of its operation.

Not once but twice Coolidge courageously vetoed the McNary-Haugen farm bill, which was popular with farmers because it promised federal price supports for them. “I do not believe,” Coolidge wrote, “that upon serious consideration the farmers of America would tolerate the precedent of a body of men chosen solely by one industry who, acting in the name of the government, shall arrange for contracts which determine prices, secure the buying and selling of commodities, the levying of taxes on that industry, and pay losses on foreign dumping of any surplus.”

When presidents are faithful to America ‘s founding documents, limited government has a chance to flourish. But when presidents emote over a “living” Declaration and Constitution, then the growth of government is upon us.

There are few more dangerous errors in political thinking than to equate democracy with liberty. Unfortunately, this is one of the most widespread errors in America —and a key reason why there are few leashes left on government power. As Nobel laureate F. A. Hayek observed in a 1976 speech, “The magic word democracy has become so all-powerful that all the inherited limitations on government power are breaking down before it. . . . It is unlimited democracy, not just democracy, which is the problem today.”¹

People have long been encouraged to confuse self-government of their own lives with “self-government” via majority rule over everyone. Because abusive rule by foreigners or a king personified oppression, many presumed that rule by people of one’s own nationality meant freedom. Boston pastor Benjamin Church proclaimed in 1773 that liberty was “the happiness of living under laws of our own making. Therefore, the liberty of the people is exactly proportioned to the share the body of the people have in the legislature.”² However, the rampages of state and local majorities during and after the American Revolution debunked this naïve faith in majorities.

Americans quickly recognized that liberty meant lack of coercion—especially lack of government coercion. “The Restraint of Government is the True Liberty and Freedom of the People” was a popular motto of the late 1700s.³ John Phillip Reid, in his seminal work, The Concept of Liberty in the Age of the American Revolution, observed that liberty in the eighteenth century was “largely thought of as freedom from arbitrary government. . . . The less a law restrained the citizen, and the more it restrained government, the better the law.”⁴ This concept of freedom continued into the early part of the twentieth century. 

But as time passed, enthusiasm for government power returned and different concepts of freedom arose to again vindicate awarding unlimited power to the majority. Progressive Herbert Croly, one of President Theodore Roosevelt’s favorite writers, declared in 1909, “Individual freedom is important, but more important still is the freedom of a whole people to dispose of its own destiny.”⁵ However, in practice, this means the “freedom of the whole people” to dispose of individuals’ rights, property, and lives. 

This confusion has prospered in part because, throughout Western history, tyrants and tyrant apologists have sought to browbeat citizens into obedience by telling them that they are only obeying themselves. The eighteenth-century French political philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau used this bait and switch to sanctify democracy. Rousseau wrote: “Each man, in giving himself to all, gives himself to nobody. . . . Each of us puts his person and all his power in common under the supreme direction of the general will, and, in our corporate capacity, we receive each member as an indivisible part of the whole.”⁶ The general will is “infallible,” and “to express the general will is to express each man’s real will.” Rousseau taught that people need not fear a government animated by the general will because each citizen would be “obeying only myself.”⁷ And because the people’s will would actuate government, the classical warnings on the danger of government power became null and void. The horrors of the French Revolution cast Rousseau’s doctrines into temporary disrepute, but his intellectual contortions permeated subsequent thinking on democracy and government.

Some U.S. presidents who have been most enthusiastic on seizing power have exonerated themselves by claiming that “the people did it.” FDR declared in 1938, “Let us never forget that government is ourselves and not an alien power over us,”⁸ and Bill Clinton declared in 1996 that “The Government is just the people, acting together. . . .”⁹ In his 1989 farewell address, Ronald Reagan asserted, “ ‘We the People’ tell the government what to do, it doesn’t tell us. ‘We the people’ are the driver—the government is the car. And we decide where it should go, and by what route, and how fast.”¹⁰ But the American people did not choose to drive into Beirut and get hundreds of Marines blown up, or choose to run up the largest budget deficits in American history, or provide thousands of antitank weapons to Ayatollah Khomeni, or have a slew of top political appointees either lie or get caught in conflicts of interest or other abuses of power or ethical quandaries between 1981 and 1988.

Invoking “the government is the people” is one of the easiest ways for a politician to shirk responsibility for his actions. This doctrine makes sense only if one assumes that government’s victims are subconscious masochists and government is only fulfilling their secret wishes when it messes up their lives.

The notion that democracy automatically produces liberty hinges on the delusion that “people are obeying themselves.” But, as Freeman editor Sheldon Richman commented, “When you rushed to finish your income tax return at the last minute on April 15, were you in fear of yourself and your fellow Americans or the IRS?”¹¹ People who exceed the speed limit are not “self-ticketed.” People who fail to recycle their beer bottles are not self-fined, as if the recycling police were a mere apparition of a guilty conscience.

Is a citizen governing herself when she is arrested for possessing a handgun in her own home for self-defense in a crime-ridden District of Columbia neighborhood where police long since ceased providing minimum protection? Is a 20-year-old citizen governing himself when he is arrested in his own home by police for drinking a beer? The fact that a majority—or, more likely, a majority of the minority who bothered to vote—may have sanctioned such laws and government powers has nothing to do with the self-government by each citizen of his own life. 

Yet by assuring people that they are the government, this makes all the coercion, all the expropriation, all the intrusive searches, all the prison sentences for victimless crimes irrelevant. At least for the theoreticians and apologists of democracy.

Praising Democracy to Unleash Government

The more vehemently a president equates democracy with freedom, the greater the danger he likely poses to Americans’ rights. Abraham Lincoln was by far the most avid champion of democracy among nineteenth-century presidents—and the president with the greatest visible contempt for the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.¹² He swayed people to view national unity as the ultimate test of the essence of freedom. That Lincoln suspended habeas corpus, jailed 20,000 people without charges, forcibly closed hundreds of newspapers that criticized him, and sent in federal troops to shut down state legislatures was irrelevant because he proclaimed “that this nation shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the earth.”

President Woodrow Wilson pioneered the democracy-as-salvation bosh. Yet his administration had the worst civil rights record since the Civil War—imposing Jim Crow restrictions on federal employees that resulted in the mass firing of black civil servants. After taking the nation into World War I, Wilson rammed a Sedition Act through Congress that empowered the feds to imprison anyone who muttered a kind word for the Kaiser.¹³ Wilson pushed conscription through Congress—as if his goal of having “a seat at the table” at the postwar peace conferences entitled him to dispose of a hundred thousand American lives. Wilson ‘s constant invocation of democracy shielded him against a popular backlash, at least until the fraud of the peace settlement became widely recognized.

Franklin Roosevelt’s presidency was the clearest turning point in the American understanding of freedom. In a 1937 speech on the 150th anniversary of the signing of the Constitution, FDR declared that “even some of our own people may wonder whether democracy can match dictatorship in giving this generation the things it wants from government.” FDR’s comment was part of his attack on those who opposed his seizure of power over property, wages, and contracts. Earlier that year, in his second inaugural address, he bragged, “In these last four years, we have made the exercise of all power more democratic; for we have begun to bring private autocratic powers into their proper subordination to the public’s government.” When the Supreme Court found many of Roosevelt ‘s power grabs unconstitutional, he announced plans to wreck the power of the Court by stacking it with new appointees—showing his contempt for any limits on his power. “FDR freedom” meant presidential supremacy—and nothing else. 

In his 1941 State of the Union address, FDR announced the “four freedoms”—“freedom of speech and expression—everywhere in the world”; “freedom of every person to worship God in his own way—everywhere in the world”; “freedom from want—which, translated into world terms, means economic understandings which will secure to every nation a healthy peacetime life for its inhabitants—everywhere in the world;” and “freedom from fear—which, translated into world terms, means a world-wide reduction of armaments to such a point and in such a thorough fashion that no nation will be in a position to commit an act of physical aggression against any neighbor—anywhere in the world.” FDR’s revised freedoms ignored most of all the specific limitations on government power contained in the Bill of Rights. Now, instead of a liberty for each to live his own life and go his own way, Roosevelt offered freedom from fear and freedom from want—“freedoms” that require omnipresent government surveillance and perpetual government intervention. Roosevelt perennially invoked freedom as a pretext to increase government power. His promises of freedom for the entire world distracted attention from how his administration was subjugating Americans. Partly because Americans in the 1930s and early 1940s were less politically astute than those of the Founding era, FDR’s bait and switch worked like a charm—and was canonized into American folklore by Norman Rockwell and others.

Complacent about Liberty

Freedom became increasingly bastardized in the decades after FDR. President Nixon, like most of his predecessors, encouraged Americans to be complacent about their liberty. In 1973, in his second inaugural address, he declared: “Let us be proud that our system has produced and provided more freedom and more abundance, more widely shared, than any other system in the history of the world.” Americans later learned that, at the time of Nixon’s statement, the FBI was involved in a massive campaign to suppress opposition to the government and to the Vietnam War, and Nixon himself was involved in obstructing the investigation of the Watergate break-in and related crimes. But Nixon may not have seen such actions as a violation of liberty because, as he explained to interviewer David Frost in 1977, “When the president does it that means that it is not illegal.” Frost, somewhat dumbfounded, replied, “By definition?” Nixon answered, “Exactly. Exactly.”¹⁴ 

President Clinton openly scapegoated freedom for many problems caused by government (such as welfare programs). In a 1994 interview with MTV he declared, “When we got organized as a country and we wrote a fairly radical Constitution with a radical Bill of Rights, giving a radical amount of individual freedom to Americans, it was assumed that the Americans who had that freedom would use it responsibly. . . . What’s happened in America today is, too many people live in areas where there’s no family structure, no community structure, and no work structure. And so there’s a lot of irresponsibility. And so a lot of people say there’s too much personal freedom. When personal freedom’s being abused, you have to move to limit it.”¹⁵ 

But the Bill of Rights did not give freedom to Americans; instead, it was a solemn pledge by the government that it recognized and would not violate the pre-existing rights of individuals. The Bill of Rights was not “radical” according to the beliefs of Americans of that era; it codified rights both long recognized in English common law and purchased in blood during the Revolution. The Founding Fathers had difficulty getting the Constitution approved in many states not because it was “radical” in giving people rights—but because it was perceived as concentrating too much power to violate rights within the federal government. Yet by painting freedom as a gift of the government, Clinton distracted people from recognizing the threat that any government—democratic or otherwise—poses to their rights.

President George W. Bush uses freedom and democracy interchangeably, as if they were two sides of the same wooden nickel. Bush explained to a Dutch journalist in May 2005: “ Holland is a free country. It’s a country where the people get to decide the policy. The Government just reflects the will of the people. That’s what democracies are all about.”¹⁶ Later that day he was questioned by another Dutch journalist:

Q. How do you define freedom?

The President. Freedom, democracy? 

Q. Freedom as such.

The President. Well, I view freedom as where government doesn’t dictate. Government is responsive to the needs of people. . . . That’s what freedom—government is of the people. We say ‘‘of the people, by the people, and for the people.” And a free society is one if the people don’t like what is going on, they can get new leaders. . . . That’s free society, society responsive to people.¹⁷

And as long as government claims to respond to the people, the people are free, no matter how much the government abuses them.

Bush Freedom hinges on government as the savior of freedom. Debates over the Patriot Act provided further opportunity for degrading the American vocabulary. Former Attorney General John Ashcroft titled the August 2003 launch speech of his national Patriot Act promotion tour “Securing Our Liberty: How America Is Winning the War on Terror.” Earlier in 2003 Ashcroft characterized Justice Department antiterrorist deliberations this way: “Every day we are asking each other, what can we do to be more successful in securing the freedoms of America and sustaining the liberty, the tolerance, the human dignity that America represents.”¹⁸

Ashcroft’s successor, Alberto Gonzales, used the same rhetoric to sanctify the Patriot Act: “Congress did a good job in striking the appropriate balance between protecting our country and securing our liberties.”¹⁹ The Patriot Act authorized confiscations of travelers’ money (in violation of a Supreme Court ruling), the use of new surveillance software that could vacuum up millions of people’s e-mails without a search warrant, nationwide “roving wiretaps,” and seizing library, bookstore, and other business and financial records based solely on subpoenas issued by FBI field offices on the flimsiest of pretexts.²⁰ After the Patriot Act was signed, there was a hundredfold increase in the number of emergency spying warrants issued solely on the Attorney General’s command—and later rubber-stamped by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.²¹ But all the violations of Americans’ rights and liberties by federal agents are irrelevant because the proclaimed intent of the Patriot Act is to “secure liberty.” There is no freedom without security, and no security without absolute power.

Intellectuals Join In

It is not only politicians who seek to confuse people about the reality of liberty. Intellectuals who should know better join in the circus shell game. Former federal judge and Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork in 1996 called for “a constitutional amendment making any federal or state court decision subject to being overruled by a majority vote of each House of Congress.” Bork appealed to “our most precious freedom, the freedom to govern ourselves democratically.”²² According to this view, the greatest danger to freedom is having frustrated legislators.

What are the mechanics by which majority-mandated shackles liberate the individual? How does a shackle supported by 51 percent of the populace affect an individual differently from one endorsed by a mere 49 percent? Is the secret to democracy some law of inverse political gravity—so that the more people who support imposing a shackle, the less it weighs? Are citizens obliged to pretend that any restriction favored by the majority is not a restraint but instead a badge of freedom? Shackles are shackles are shackles, regardless of what rhetorical holy water they are blessed with.

People are taught that, thanks to democracy, coercion is no longer dangerous because people get to vote on who coerces them. Because people are permitted a role in choosing who will be in charge of the penal code, they are free. Being permitted to vote for politicians who enact unjust, oppressive new laws magically converts the stripes on prison shirts into emblems of freedom. But it takes more than voting to make coercion benign.

The fiction of majority rule has become a license to impose nearly unlimited controls on the majority and everybody else. The doctrine of “majority rule equals freedom” is custom-made to turn mobs of voters into spoiled children with a divine right to plunder the candy store. The only way to equate submission to majority-sanctioned decrees with individual freedom is to assume that individuals have no right to live in any way that displeases the majority. 

The more confused people’s thinking becomes, the easier it is for rulers to invoke democracy to destroy freedom. The issue is not simply Lincoln ‘s, Roosevelt’s, Clinton’s or Bush’s absurd statements on freedom but a cultural–intellectual smog in which politicians have unlimited leeway to redefine freedom. If politicians can redefine freedom at their whim, then they can raze limits on their own power.

It is better that government be representative than nonrepresentative. But it is more important that governments respect people’s rights than fulfill some people’s wishes to oppress other people. The rules that a person must obey are more important than the identity of the nominal rulers. Herbert Spencer wrote in 1857, “The liberty which a citizen enjoys is to be measured, not by the nature of the governmental machinery he lives under, whether representative or not, but by the relative paucity of the restraints it imposes on him.”²³ The existence of democracy does not change the meaning of individual liberty. A person is free or not free, regardless of how many people approve his fetters.

The Founding Fathers fought for a government that would respect their rights, not for a government that would allow them to forcibly micromanage the lives of their fellow citizens. The only way to claim that democracy automatically protects liberty is to say that the only freedom that matters is “freedom for the government to rule in the name of the people.”

Reconciling Democracy with Liberty

The scope of majority rule should be limited to those issues and areas in which common standards must prevail to preserve public peace. Democracy is a relatively good method for reaching agreement on a system of roads, but is a lousy method for dictating where each citizen must go. Democracy can be a good method for reaching agreement on standards of weights and measurements used in commerce, but is a poor method for dictating wages and prices. Democracy should be a system of government based on common agreement on issues that must be agreed upon, and tolerance—however grudging—on all other differences. 

“Whenever majority rule is unnecessarily substituted for individual choice, democracy is in conflict with individual freedom,” wrote Italian professor Bruno Leoni in his 1961 classic, Freedom and the Law.²⁴ Majority rule is a means not an end. There is nothing superior in majorities running (or thinking they run) a government compared to an individual running his own life. Collective rule will always be inferior to the self-rule of a citizen in his own life. 

The fact that democratic governments violate liberty does not prove that democracy is uniquely or inherently evil. This is simply what governments do. In the same way that a political candidate’s lies don’t create a presumption that his opponent is honest, the fact that democracies routinely violate rights and liberties creates no presumption that other forms of government would not be worse.

1. Friedrich A. Hayek, The Essence of Hayek (Palo Alto, Calif.: Hoover Institution Press, 1984), p. 352. 
2. Gordon S. Wood, The Creation of the American Republic , 1776–1787 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1969), p. 24.
3. John Phillip Reid, The Concept of Liberty in the Age of the American Revolution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), p. 65. 
4. Ibid., pp. 65, 114.
5. Herbert Croly, The Promise of American Life (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction, 1993 [1909]), p. 442.
6. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract and Discourses (New York: Dutton, 1950), p. 14. 
7. Ibid., p. 87. 
8. The Public Papers and Addresses of Franklin D. Roosevelt, 1938 (New York: Macmillan, 1942), p. 489 (emphasis added). 
9. “Remarks to Business Leaders in Stamford , Connecticut ,” Public Papers of the Presidents, October 7, 1996, p. 1999.
10. “Farewell Address to the Nation,” Public Papers of the Presidents, January 11, 1989, p. 53.
11. Sheldon Richman, “Government Is Not ‘Us’,” Future of Freedom Foundation, June 2, 2004.
12. See Jeffrey Rogers Hummel, Emancipating Slaves, Enslaving Free Men (Chicago: Open Court, 1996), and Thomas DiLorenzo, The Real Lincoln (New York: Random House, 2003).
13. Thomas Fleming, The Illusion of Victory ( New York : Basic Books, 2003), p. 382.
14. “Nixon’s Views on Presidential Power: Excerpts from an Interview with David Frost,” www.landmarkcases.org/nixon/_nixonview.html.
15. “Remarks by the President in MTV’s ‘Enough is Enough’ Forum on Crime,” Office of the Press Secretary, White House, April 19, 1994.
16. “Interview with Dutch TV NOS,” Public Papers of the Presidents, May 5, 2005.
17. “Interview with Foreign Print Journalists,” in ibid.
18. Gene R. Nichol, “Ashcroft Wants Even More,” Raleigh News and Observer, February 20, 2003.
19. “Conversation with U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales; Preview of President Bush’s Speech—Part 1,” Charlie Rose Show Transcripts, June 27, 2005.
20. Ibid., pp. 145–46, 137–40.
21. Ibid., p. 144.
22. Robert H. Bork, Slouching Towards Gomorrah (New York: HarperCollins, 1997), pp. 115, 117.
23. Gary Doherty and Tim Gray, “Herbert Spencer and the Relations Between Economic and Political Liberty ,” History of Political Thought, Autumn 1993, p. 475.
24. Bruno Leoni, Freedom and the Law (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund Press, 1991 [1961]), p. 131.

by Thomas Fleming

Basic Books • 2003 • 543 pages • $30.00

Reviewed by Richard M. Ebeling

Imagine how different the twentieth century might have been if Lenin and the Bolsheviks had never come to power in Russia in 1917 and had not set in motion all the cruel crimes that were committed in the name of making a new socialist man for a bright and beautiful communist future. Imagine if Mussolini and Hitler had never come to power and we had been spared the fascist and Nazi variations on the totalitarian theme.

No one can say how the twentieth century would have taken shape if these collectivist demons had not been set loose. But it can be said with a fairly high degree of certainty that the triumphs of communism, fascism, and Nazism would not have occurred except for one event: the First World War.

How different was the epoch before 1914 from everything that came after it! It is true that nationalist, neo-mercantilist, and socialist ideas and policies were gaining influence in the years before the beginning of World War I. But for the most part—even in militarist-minded Germany— there was a dominant sense that governments should respect a certain conception of what it meant to live in a civilized society.

That conception included the ideas of individual liberty, private property, rule of law, relatively free commerce and trade, and limits on the method of fighting wars. As one historian pointed out, an Englishman, before 1914, could go through practically his entire life and never be confronted by the state, other than in the form of the policeman walking his beat and the occasional irritation of serving on a jury.

That world, however imperfect from a principled classical-liberal perspective, was nonetheless a paradise of human liberty compared to what followed through the rest of the twentieth century. It came to an end with the opening shots of the First World War in 1914.

Thomas Fleming’s book, The Illusion of Victory: America in World War I, focuses on Woodrow Wilson’s crusade to bring the United States into that European conflict, and the domestic and international consequences resulting from American participation.

The personality characteristics that Fleming finds in Wilson include arrogant self-righteousness, a lust for power, petty vindictiveness, cruelty toward enemies and opponents, lack of political common sense, and a streak of near-irrational stubbornness that resulted in personal and political tragedy for himself.

Wilson was manipulated by British propaganda once World War I had begun. He was taken in by fabricated atrocity stories about German brutality in Belgium and France, and was swayed by British and American interests wanting to assure an Allied victory for various political and economic reasons.

After running for re-election in 1916 on the slogan “He kept us out of war,” Wilson asked Congress for a declaration of war on April 12, 1917. Once the United States had entered the war, he introduced a Committee on Public Information that censored the press and suppressed dissent and disagreement.

Conscription was introduced, adding compulsory military service to many other wartime restrictions on domestic life. More than a million young men were sent to France. Many thousands of them never returned home or only with permanent injury, after being sent into the meat-grinder of trench warfare.

At the war’s end Wilson went to Europe to remake the world in his own image of a just society of nations. After spending seven months in the company of the other Allied leaders, he discovered that all his earlier rhetoric and pronouncements about a peace without vengeance, without territorial annexations, and rights of self-determination for small countries were a fool’s dream in the real world of nationalism and imperialism. The peace treaty imposed on the Germans was one of revenge, political and economic emasculation, and deep humiliation. Wilson had been willing to accept virtually anything the British and the French wanted, as long as he could get their acceptance for a League of Nations.

When he returned to the United States, Wilson discovered that many Republicans and a sizeable number of Democrats considered the peace terms to be either too harsh or too soft. Unwilling to compromise, he insisted on fighting an all-or-nothing campaign in favor of the peace treaty and the terms for a League of Nations. The treaty twice went down to defeat in the Senate and the campaign brought on a stroke from which Wilson never recovered.

Fleming suggests that if the United States had stayed out of the war, a compromise peace would have been forced upon the exhausted European combatants. And even if the terms had been more in favor of Germany than the Allies, it still might very well have been a far better outcome, from the perspective of hindsight, than a war that went on so long that its unintended by-product became those twentieth-century forms of collectivism and totalitarianism.

Richard Ebeling is president of the Foundation for Economic Education.

Another Century of War?

by Gabriel Kolko

New Press • 2002 • 160 pages • $15.95 paperback

Reviewed by John V. Denson

Most libertarians, or believers in the free market, probably met Professor Gabriel Kolko through reading his 1963 revisionist interpretation of American economic history from 1900 to 1916, The Triumph of Conservatism. Since then, Kolko has been primarily a historian of war and American foreign policy, his 1994 magnum opus being Century of War: Politics, Conflicts, and Society since 1914. The publisher of that work suggested he continue the theme by commenting on the events of September 11, 2001.

Kolko states the purpose of his book: “In the following pages I outline some of the causes for the events of September 11 and why America’s foreign policies not only have failed to exploit communism’s demise but have become both more destabilizing and counterproductive. I also try to answer the crucial question posed in my title: Will there be another century of war?”

His theme is that the United States has become the single most important arms exporter, thereby contributing to much of the disorder in the world. Further, contrary to America’s claims of bringing stability by its interventions, especially since 1947 in the Middle East, it has caused death, destruction, and turmoil. For Kolko, America has become the sole rogue superpower, no longer restrained by the possibility of the Soviet Union’s counterpunch.

Kolko notes that much changed since September 11. With terrorism becoming the worldwide target of the U.S. government, the result may be perpetual war: “Bush had campaigned in 2000 as a critic of ‘big government,’ but after September 11 he became an ‘imperial’ president with new, draconian powers over civil liberties.”

In regard to U.S. policies in the Middle East, Kolko argues that the CIA set up a Vietnam-type trap for the Soviet Union in Afghanistan, and with financial assistance from Saudi Arabia, the U.S. government armed and supplied Osama bin Laden to fight the Soviets. When Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait, bin Laden offered to repel Iraq, but this offer was refused. Instead, the American coalition, with financial support from Saudi Arabia, pushed Hussein back within his borders, while leaving American troops in Saudi Arabia. This alienated bin Laden, who vowed vengeance on America. He mobilized his forces into al Qaeda in 1989 by training up to 70,000 potential fighters and terrorists, and creating cells in at least 50 countries, all initially financed with U.S. and Saudi money. Kolko states: “But both of America’s prime enemies in the Islamic world today—Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein in Iraq—were for much of the 1980s its close allies and friends, whom it sustained and encouraged with arms and much else.” (Some analysts, such as Peter Bergen, author of Holy War, Inc., dispute this.)

Kolko contends that our massive support for Israel, which began in 1968, was one of the turning points in American foreign policy and has led to enmity against America: “This aid reached $600 million in 1971 (seven times the amount under the entire Johnson administration) and over $2 billion in 1973. Thenceforth, Israel became the leading recipient of U.S. arms aid. Today it still receives about $3 billion in free American aid. Most of the Arab world, quite understandably, has since identified Israel and the United States as one.”

The author maintains that America faces a dire future if it continues its frequent interventions and warfare throughout the world. He writes, “Should it confront the forty or more nations that now have terrorist networks, then it will in one manner or another intervene everywhere. . . . America has power without wisdom, and cannot recognize the limits of arms despite its repeated experiences. The result has been folly, and hatred, which is a recipe for disasters. September 11 confirmed that. The war has come home.”

Kolko concludes that we cannot afford further interventions and wars since weapons of mass destruction are prevalent throughout the world and available to terrorists everywhere.

This little book, so full of wisdom and good common sense, should lead the way toward reaffirming America’s original foreign policy of noninterventionism.

John Denson is a lawyer in Opelika, Alabama, and the editor of Reassessing the Presidency and The Costs of War.

The Future of U.S. Capitalism

by Frederic L. Pryor

Cambridge University Press • 2002 • 367 pages • $35.00

Reviewed by Gary M. Galles

In The Future of U.S. Capitalism, Frederic Pryor attempts “to analyze the most probable future of the economic system on the basis of the best information currently available.” He arrives at pessimistic conclusions, described variously as a tendency toward “a merciless economy,” “capitalism with a very hard edge,” and “capitalism with an inhuman face.”

Unfortunately, while Pryor includes some useful insights in his discussion, the core strands in his analysis are confused, at best. Therefore, even if some of his premises are correct, there is no reason for confidence in the conclusions drawn. Perhaps most important, though, his conclusions are pessimistic only because of his strong statist leanings. To anyone familiar with the case for limited government, his gray cloud is actually the silver lining.

The useful sections of Pryor’s book deal with demographic problems and financial-sector fragility. The pending retirement of the baby boom may well reduce savings and investment, cutting economic growth as well as confronting the U.S. taxpayers with tens of trillions of dollars in unfunded commitments to Social Security and Medicare recipients. Combined with the electoral clout of the elderly, that is likely to lead to substantial increases in taxes. Reduced saving could also lower asset prices, causing difficulties or even bankruptcy for pension plans, which might lead to further government bailouts. Dovetailed with increases in financial-sector fragility due to greater debt, the result may be increased vulnerability to financial shocks and serious bankruptcy and/or illiquidity problems.

The rest of Pryor’s book, however, is built on false premises. The most serious involve income and wealth inequality, his reliance on market concentration as a useful measure of competition, and the presumption that government intervention successfully improves and stabilizes the economy.

Pryor, who teaches economics at Swarthmore College, argues that income inequality has risen and that it will continue to do so (even though that is inconsistent with the most recent trends). This will supposedly cause social unrest and increasing “need” for government intervention.

He cites reams of data, but misunderstands them. He relies on reported income statistics, ignoring that consumption is the more relevant measure and that the lowest income quintile (20 percent) spends substantially more than twice its measured income each year. He also ignores that the worsening situation he sees for “the poor” is largely caused by the increasing fraction of retired people, many with near-zero measured income, which skews the average sharply downward at the low end of the income distribution. He claims that upward income mobility in the United States is limited, ignoring many studies to the contrary. He even concludes that having more high-income people somehow causes harm to low-income people, rather than seeing that in a world of voluntary market relationships, higher incomes mean greater benefits have been provided to others.

Given that increasing inequality drives much of his analysis, Pryor’s failures to understand the income measures and trends he relies on completely undermines his forecast’s credibility. But that is far from his only confusion.

Pryor’s understanding of competition amounts to little more than long-discredited measures of market structure, which displays no understanding of the process of competition. He needs to do some serious remedial reading of analysts such as Dominick Armentano and Harold Demsetz.

Pryor further argues that big business will increasingly control an accommodating government. This mistakes increasing political action to rein in the growing government extortion of business for an increase in business control over government. Aside from corporate welfare and protectionist policies, the business-government relationship is more of a war by government against businessmen (or more precisely, private property) than increasing control of government by business.

Perhaps Pryor’s greatest analytical error, however, grows from his vision of government. He expresses a naive Keynesian view of fiscal policy as a successful stabilization tool, and simplistically credits activist monetary policy with similar success. Therefore he mourns rather than celebrates the increased limits, thanks to globalization, on government power to “stabilize” the economy, as well as to engage in protectionism.

He wants a government even more massively involved in income redistribution (that is, theft) than it is today, favoring a society in which “public choice, rather than individual demand, becomes the arbiter of services.” He thinks poor educational achievement “can be solved in part by the infusion of federal and state funds,” and endorses such counterproductive policies as the minimum wage.

Thus Pryor’s gloomy conclusions stem from faulty understanding and analysis, combined with his desire for the government to do more of what in fact it should not do at all.

Gary Galles is professor of economics at Pepperdine University.

Creative Destruction: How Globalization Is Changing the World’s Cultures

by Tyler Cowen

Princeton University Press • 2002 • 171 pages • $27.95

Reviewed by George C. Leef

A main gripe against globalization is “American cultural hegemony.” When “we” build McDonald’s restaurants or sell designer jeans in culturally different nations, we’re guilty of undermining, if not destroying, the indigenous culture. “Culturecide” is nearly as bad as genocide.

The anti-globalization protesters have never thought deeply about the relationship between culture and trade (for that is all globalization comes down to—ever widening trade), but Tyler Cowen certainly has. In his latest book, the George Mason University economics professor carefully analyzes the impact of globalization on culture and finds that, as Joseph Schumpeter said of the process of competition generally, it’s a case of creative destruction. When the people of Culture A encounter the arts, products, technologies, and so forth of Culture B, they may end up abandoning some aspects of their own culture for things they prefer from the other. But those choices should not be lamented, Cowen argues.

He begins with a crucial insight: “Individuals who engage in cross-cultural exchange expect those transactions to make them better off, to enrich their cultural lives, and to increase their menu of choice. Just as trade typically makes countries richer in material terms, it tends to make them culturally richer as well.” Contrary to the anti-globalist rant about domination, the spread of cultural influence is not a case of “ours” somehow taking over “theirs.” It is a matter of individual actions. If Chinese teenagers like listening to Western pop music rather than traditional Chinese music, that isn’t domination. It’s peaceful change.

Cross-cultural exchanges, Cowen points out, increase diversity within cultures, while at the same time decreasing diversity among cultures. Using the example above, when Chinese add American pop music to their cultural mix, they now enjoy a wider range of choices. However, in doing so, the difference between Chinese and American cultures decreases. That bothers some cultural “purists,” who think it akin to species extinction when “we” start to contaminate the “authentic” cultures in other parts of the world.

Cowen treats the cultural purism with disdain. First, there aren’t really any pure cultures. With many interesting illustrations, he demonstrates that what we may think of as authentic native cultures are the products of considerable cross-cultural exchange, usually having taken place long before people were paying attention to the phenomenon. Consider the steel-drum music associated with Trinidad. Where did the steel drums come from? The answer is that American military forces brought many with them during World War II. The “authentic” music of Trinidad was based on bamboo percussion, which the Trinidadians happily abandoned when American steel drums became plentiful.

Similarly, Cowen points out that Navaho weavers hardly have a culturally pure product. Their dazzling geometric designs were not indigenous to the Navaho culture, but were borrowed from the ponchos of Spanish shepherds living in northern Mexico, designs that the Spanish had adapted from the Moors. Once machine-spun yarn and chemical dyes became available, the Navaho eagerly experimented with and began using them.

Even if we arbitrarily denominate the current cultures of China, Trinidad, the Navaho, and others as “pure,” so what? Does it follow that anti-globalists are doing those populations a favor in trying to protect them against Western contamination? Cowen has no patience for that argument, writing that “poorer societies should not be required to serve as diversity slaves.” That’s what the elitist position comes down to. People in all those exotic places with their quaint, “authentic” cultures should be denied the opportunity to adopt aspects of Western culture so that some elitists can bask in the warmth of knowing that they have helped protect against the ravages of capitalism.

Besides its resounding call for a laissez-faire approach to culture, Creative Destruction has a delightful side dish for the reader: Some embarrassing truths about one of the most overrated men of the twentieth century, Gandhi. Gandhi railed against Indian purchases of British textiles, calling them “defiling” and “our greatest outward pollution.” He insisted that Indians, no matter how poor, burn their foreign garments. Evidently, Gandhi regarded Indian weaving as “authentic” and foreign textiles as somehow a desecration of Indian culture. Cowen has sport in pointing out that “Western technologies provided critical pieces of the economic network behind Indian handweaving.” Gandhi comes off like a cranky authoritarian.

Anti-globalists need “issues” to grumble about. The supposed destruction of native cultures is one of those issues. Thanks to Tyler Cowen for showing that it’s nothing but hot air.

George Leef is book review editor of Ideas on Liberty.

“And the Oscar for Greatest President goes to . . . . um . . . . Martin Van Buren?”

Almost no one ever thinks of Martin Van Buren at all, much less as the greatest American president, but in this magnificent treasure trove of historical iconoclasm, you will find Jeffrey Rogers Hummel’s essay, “Martin Van Buren: The American Gladstone,” wherein he contends that the president who least betrayed the philosophy of the Founders was indeed “The Red Fox of Kinderhook.”

John Denson’s achievement here is to bring together 23 essays dealing with various presidents individually and with presidential power generally. The perspective of all the writers is classically liberal, and that makes for a complete inversion of the usual historical view of the presidency. Most historians have a statist bias that makes them prone to regard as “great” presidents who expanded the power of the federal government. The writers Denson has assembled, to the contrary, analyze presidents by their fidelity to the Constitution. If you want to arm yourself to engage in intellectual combat with people who adhere to the conventional notions of presidential history, this book is an absolute must.

There is so much in this hefty volume that it isn’t possible to do more than mention a few personal favorites, although not one of the essays disappoints.

The book’s first essay, “Rating Presidential Performance,” by the well-known team of economists Richard Vedder and Lowell Gallaway, asks whether it might be the case that presidents are inclined toward “activism” (which is to say, aggrandizement of federal and especially executive power) because that is what is apt to build one’s historical legacy. They write, “If presidential scholars on balance have a bias toward activism, we would hypothesize that there would be a positive relationship between the growth of the relative size of government during a presidency and the reputation of that president with the presidential scholars.” The authors proceed to compare the rankings of presidents given by several scholars, who invariably accord “greatness” to those who expanded federal power enormously, with their own ranking, which gives high marks for holding down (better still, decreasing) the federal budget. Vedder and Gallaway regard as our best presidents the likes of Andrew Johnson and Warren Harding, who downsized war-bloated federal behemoths.

H. Arthur Scott Trask takes a fresh look at Thomas Jefferson. Certainly Jefferson was not one of the great aggrandizers, but neither did he adhere strictly to the principles of the Founding. He was elected with the promise of a new “revolution” that would undo the Federalist excesses. Trask concludes, however, that “Jefferson’s failure to institutionalize his ‘revolution’ was due to his misplaced faith in the good sense of the people. He simply could not believe that they would ever discard the Constitution and its restraints on power for the allure of an energetic state that could accomplish ‘great’ things. He was wrong.”

Richard Gamble’s essay, “Woodrow Wilson’s Revolution Within the Form,” provides the reader with a remarkably clear-eyed view of our mawkish president from Princeton. He quotes Wilson’s first inaugural address: “There has been a change of government,” Wilson intoned. Henceforth, the U.S. government would be “put at the service of humanity.” This disastrous shift from more or less minding our own business and letting individual Americans decide whether they wanted to do anything to help “humanity” to the busybody state we now have was Wilson’s doing. Gamble’s analysis is razor-sharp. “Wilson was a gnostic revolutionary at the most elemental level in that he wished to repeal the past by waging war against the institutions of the past.”

Harry Truman’s star has been in the ascendancy in recent decades, with some historians putting him in the “near-great” category. Ralph Raico devastates that notion with his essay, “Harry S. Truman: Advancing the Revolution.” Far from the plain spoken man of common sense that modern admirers paint, Truman was a devoted statist disciple of Franklin Roosevelt, who was held back from many outrageous attacks on American freedom only because Congress balked at them. For example, when railroad workers went on strike in 1946, Truman wanted to respond by drafting them into the army. His Attorney General told him that the existing Draft Act didn’t give him that power, so a bill was hastily drafted and passed the House overwhelmingly. Fortunately, the Senate had the sense to reject the bill. Another shining example of the Truman mind at work is his proposal for a government takeover of the meat-packing industry when, owing to the continuation of wartime price controls, the nation faced a meat shortage. Raico writes, “ever the cheap demagogue, [Truman] pilloried the meat industry as responsible for the shortage.” The idea of nationalizing the meat industry was dropped only because it was seen as “impracticable.”

Those are but a few tasty morsels. Buy this fabulous book for the entire feast.

Several commentators quickly took issue with Winik’s argument. Most important, the critics challenged the claim that “despite these previous and numerous extreme measures, there was little long-term or corrosive effect on society after the security threat had subsided.” In fact, each episode of national emergency left the liberties of Americans not “stronger than before,” but severely maimed and weakened.

During World War I, the Wilson administration took sweeping actions to suppress not only individuals’ freedom of action but even their freedom of expression. The 1918 Sedition Act must be read to be believed. Under it, one might be, as some 2,000 persons were, prosecuted for daring to “utter, print, write, or publish any disloyal, profane, scurrilous, or abusive language about the form of government of the United States, or the Constitution of the United States, or the military or naval forces of the United States, or the flag of the United States, or the uniform of the Army or Navy of the United States, or any language intended to bring the form of government of the United States, or the Constitution of the United States, or the military or naval forces of the United States, or the flag of the United States, or the uniform of the Army or Navy of the United Sates into contempt, scorn, contumely, or disrepute.” Nor was this all the statute forbade!

When convictions under the Sedition Act were challenged in the courts, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the statute. To his eternal shame, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., wrote: “When a nation is at war, many things that might be said in time of peace are such a hindrance to its effort that their utterance will not be endured so long as men fight and no Court could regard them as protected by any constitutional right.” This decision and others upholding unconstitutional measures undertaken by the Wilson administration might strike the proverbial Man from Mars as odd, because the Constitution itself makes no provision for its own evisceration during wartime or other crisis, yet time and again during national emergencies the justices have allowed the legislative branch and especially the executive branch of government to transcend their constitutionally enumerated powers and to nullify individual rights proclaimed in the Constitution.

The Wilson administration conscripted some 2.8 million men–70 percent of those who served in the army. The Supreme Court could find no constitutional infirmity in that involuntary servitude, and its ruling has been a decisive precedent for judges ever since. The government also intervened massively in economic affairs, setting prices, allocating raw materials, and even going so far as to nationalize the interstate railroad, ocean shipping, and telecommunications industries. Those measures established precedents that would return to haunt subsequent generations and undercut their liberties in later crises–economic depressions as well as wars–each time entering more deeply into the fiber of American life, with malign effects on the traditional American devotion to liberty.

World War II became the occasion for unprecedented repressive actions by the U.S. government. More than 10 million young men–about 63 percent of all those who served in the armed forces during the war–were drafted to fight, and hundreds of thousands of them died or suffered serious wounds. The government imprisoned nearly 6,000 conscientious objectors, most of them Jehovah’s Witnesses, who refused to obey the conscription laws. Totally without due process of law, the government confined some 112,000 innocent persons of Japanese ancestry, most of them U.S. citizens, in concentration camps in desolate areas of the west. Perceived enemies of FDR’s administration came under surveillance by the FBI, whose special-agent ranks mushroomed from 785 to 4,370 during the war.

The government built a massive apparatus of economic controls between 1941 and 1945 and displaced free markets for the duration. No one should pooh-pooh the wartime economic controls because they entailed a sacrifice of “mere” economic liberties, as opposed to “precious” civil liberties. Men were sent to prison for violating price controls, and people were displaced from their homes to make way for military construction projects. Wartime taxation itself was no trivial assault.

To pay for the gargantuan munitions production, the government imposed new taxes and raised the rates of existing taxes to unprecedented heights. Payroll withholding of income taxes was instituted, as portentous an action as any, because it created a virtually automatic means of snatching people’s earnings and thereby greatly facilitated the government’s subsequent financing of its ever-growing expenditures. Despite the vastly increased taxation, the government had to borrow most of its wartime revenue, and the national debt swelled by $200 billion (equivalent to roughly ten times that amount in today’s dollars), or about fivefold, creating liabilities that would hover over taxpayers ever afterward.

Can-Do Government

World War II gave a tremendous fillip to the federal government’s reputation as a “can-do” organization, which helped to sustain various wartime economic controls, most notoriously New York City’s never-abandoned rent controls. Moreover, as economist Calvin Hoover observed, the war “conditioned [American businessmen] to accept a degree of governmental intervention and control after the war which they had deeply resented prior to it.”

During the prolonged Cold War emergency, an apprehensive nation grew accustomed to extensive domestic surveillance, government infiltration of dissident political groups, and even the murder of persons perceived by the government as threats to “national security.” In the light of these and countless other facts, one wonders how Winik managed to conclude that “our democracy can, and has, outlived temporary restrictions and continued to thrive”?

Winik would have us believe that, even if the government should adopt much more repressive measures to fight its declared “war on terrorism”-and indeed it has done so since his article appeared-we shall ultimately get past them, back to our glorious democracy, with the dangers surmounted and our freedoms undiminished. Vice President Dick Cheney, however, sees the matter in a different light. The present war “may never end,” Cheney said on October 19. “It’s a new normalcy.”

In the weeks that have passed since the Vice President uttered those ominous words, the government has continued to act in ways that confirm the worst fears of those who cherish a free society. Many of the measures being taken will have little effect on terrorism but much effect on ordinary Americans, and many of those measures will surely persist even when the present crisis has passed.

Isolationism has been turned (by our politicians, our bureaucracy and its henchmen, the professorial idealists) into a bad word.

And yet, isolationism is inherent in the human makeup. It is in the nature of the human being to be interested first in himself, and second in his neighbors. His primary concern is with his bread-and-butter problems, to begin with, and then in the other things that living implies: his health, his pleasures, the education of his children, wiping out the mortgage on the old homestead, and getting along with his neighbors. If he has the time and inclination for it, he takes a hand in local charities and local politics. If something happens in his state capital that arouses his ire or his imagination, he may talk to his neighbors about the necessity of reform; that is, if the reform happens to engage his interests. Taxation always interests him. But events and movements that occur far away from his immediate circumstances or that affect him only tangentially (like inflation or debates in the U.N.) either pass him by completely or, if he reads about them in the newspapers, concern him only academically. A Minnesotan may take notice of a headline event in Florida, as a conversation piece, but he is vitally interested in what has happened in his community: a fire, a divorce case, or the new road that will pass through. How many people know the name of their congressman or take the slightest interest in how he votes on given issues?

It has become standard procedure for sociologists and politicians to take opinion polls and to deduce behavior patterns from such data. Yet, it is a fact that the subject matters of these polls do not touch on matters in which the questionees are vitally interested, but are topics in which the pollsters have a concern. Putting aside the possibility of so framing the questions as to elicit replies the pollsters want, the fact is that the pride of the questionees can well influence their answers. Thus, a housewife who has been asked for her opinion on South African apartheid, for instance, will feel flattered that she has been singled out for the honor and will feel impelled to give some answer, usually a predigested opinion taken from a newspaper editorial; she will not say honestly that she knows nothing about apartheid and cares less. On the other hand, if she were asked about the baking of an apple pie, she would come up with an intelligent answer; but the sociologists are not interested in knowing how to bake an apple pie.

The scientist immersed in the laboratory will weigh carefully any question put to him regarding the subject matter of his science and will probably not come up with a yes-or-no answer; but he is positive that the nation ought to recognize the Chinese communist regime, because he heard another scientist say so. The baseball fan who knows the batting average of every member of his team, on the other hand, will denounce the recognition of the regime because he has heard that the “Reds” are no good. The student whose grades are just about passing will speak out boldly on the U.N., reflecting the opinion of his professor on that organization. Everybody has opinions on international subjects, because the newspapers have opinions on them, and the readers like to be “in the swim.” That is to say, interventionism is a fad stimulated by the public press, and like a fad, had no real substance behind it. If a poll were to be taken on the subject of our going to war, the probability is that very few would vote for the proposition; yet, war is the ultimate of interventionism, and the opposition to it is proof enough that we are isolationist in our sympathies. A poll on the subject of isolationism—something like “Do you believe we ought to keep out of the politics of other nations and ought to let them work out their problems without our interference?”—might bring out some interesting conclusions; but the politicians and the energumens of interventionism would prefer not to conduct such a poll. Our “foreign-aid” program has never been subjected to a plebiscite.

A Natural Attitude

Isolationism is not a political policy, it is a natural attitude of a people. It is adjustment to the prevailing culture within a country, and a feeling of security within that adjustment. The traditions, the political and social institutions, and the moral values that obtain seem good, the people do not wish them to be disturbed by peoples with other backgrounds and, what is more, they do not feel any call to impose their own customs and values on strangers. This does not mean that they will not voluntarily borrow from other cultures or that they will surround themselves with parochial walls. Long before interventionism became a fixed policy of the government, American students went to Europe to complete their education and immigrants introduced their exotic foods to the American table. But these were voluntary adoptions, even as we welcomed German and Italian operas and applauded the British lecturers who came here to decry our lack of manners. We certainly enjoyed the bananas and coffee imported from Latin American countries, and, while we might deplore their habit of setting up dictatorships, we felt no obligation to inject ourselves into their political affairs; that was their business, not ours.

This was the general attitude of the American people before the experiment in interventionism known as World War I. Before that event, Woodrow Wilson had taken leave of his senses in backing one revolutionary leader against another in Mexico, and had even sent the marines to support his choice; his excuse for opposing Huerta was that that leader had not been “democratically” elected, overlooking the fact that 80 percent of the Mexicans were simply incapable of making a choice, or of caring about it. From that interventionary exploit we garnered a mistrust of American intentions vis-à-vis Mexico which haunts us to this day. But, Wilson’s urgency to introduce “democracy” in Mexico was purely a personal idiosyncrasy, shared by his political entourage but not by the American people. We cared little about which brigand, Huerta or Carranza, got to the top, and were stirred up only by the fact that a number of American boys were killed in Wilson’s invasion.

When World War II got going in Europe and it became evident that Roosevelt was intent on getting us into it, a group of Americans organized the America First Committee for the purpose of arousing the native spirit of isolationism to the point of frustrating his intent. They were for keeping the nation neutral. For various reasons (particularly Pearl Harbor) their plan failed, even though at the beginning they gained the adherence of many Americans. One flaw in their program was a tendency toward protectionism; the anti-involvement became identified with “Buy American” slogans and with high tariffs; that is, with economic, rather than political, isolationism. Economic isolationism—tariffs, quotas, embargoes, and general governmental interference with international trade—is an irritant that can well lead to war, or political interventionism. To build a trade wall around a country is to invite reprisals, which in turn make for misunderstanding and mistrust. Besides, free trade carries with it an appreciation of the cultures of the trading countries, and a feeling of goodwill among the peoples engaged. Free trade is natural, protectionism is political.

The America First Committee’s opposition to our entry into the war was based on political and economic considerations. It is a well-known fact that during a war the state acquires powers which it does not relinquish when hostilities are over. When the enemy is at the city gates, or the illusion that he is coming can be put into people’s minds, the tendency is to turn over to the captain all the powers he deems necessary to keep the enemy away. Liberty is downgraded in favor of protection. But, when the enemy is driven away, the state finds reason enough to hold onto its acquired powers. Thus, conscription, which Roosevelt reintroduced at the beginning of the war, has become the permanent policy of the government, and militarism, which is the opposite of freedom, has been incorporated into our mores. Whether or not this eventuality was in Roosevelt’s mind is not germane; it is inherent in the character of the state. Taxes imposed ostensibly “for the duration” have become permanent, the bureaucracy built up during the war has not been dismantled, and interventions in the economy necessary for the prosecution of war are now held to be necessary for the welfare of the people. . . .

Fatal Conceit

As isolationism is a natural attitude of the people, so interventionism is a conceit of the political leader. There does not seem to be area enough in the world to satiate his desire to exercise his power or, at least, his influence. Just as the mayor of a town hopes to become governor of his state, a congressman, or even president, so does the president or the king of a country deem it his duty to look beyond the immediate job of running his country. Necessity limits the interventionary inclination of the head of a small country, unless, indeed, he finds a neighboring small country incapable of resisting his advances. But, given a nation opulent enough to maintain a sizable military establishment and an adequate bureaucracy, his sights are lifted beyond the borders. To be sure, his interest is always the enlightenment or the betterment of the people over whom he seeks to extend his dominion or influence, never to exploit them. Thus, Alexander the Great offered the benefits of Hellenic civilization to the people of Asia, the Roman legions carried Pax Romana at the tip of their spears, and Napoleon imposed French “liberté, fraternité, égalité” on the peoples of Europe, whether they wanted it or not. Hitler tried to extend the influence of Aryanism and the late British Empire was built on the premise that a taste of English civilization would do the natives good.

“Foreign policy” is the euphemism which covers up this inclination toward interventionism. About the only foreign policy consistent with the natural isolationism of a people would be one designed to prevent interference of a foreign power in the internal affairs of the country; that is, protection from invasion. But that is too limited in scope to satisfy the cravings of the government of a powerful country. Theodore Roosevelt’s foreign policy was avowedly designed to spread among other peoples the benefits of American civilization—even at the end of a Big Stick. Without an income tax, he could do very little beyond the display of naval might to execute this purpose, and the job was undertaken by Woodrow Wilson. It is interesting to note that Wilson was by persuasion an antimilitarist and an isolationist; yet the exigencies of office induced him to lead the country into war and into the missionary purpose of spreading American democracy far and wide. He failed, partly because the peoples of the world were not willing to adopt the American tradition and partly because he could not break down American resistance to interventionism. It remained for Franklin D. Roosevelt, aided and abetted by the Great Depression and a great war, to do that. And now that a monstrous bureaucracy with a vested interest in interventionism is in control of our “foreign policy,” the nation is committed to a program of interference in the affairs of every country in the world.

The war that did the most to transform the world for the worse was formally settled 80 years ago. Not World War II, which employed greater destructiveness, exhibited greater cruelty, and slaughtered greater numbers of people. But World War I, which birthed World War II, along with the greatest of the totalitarian delusions—communism, fascism, and Nazism. Yet the Great War, as it was originally called, is largely forgotten in America.

Today the United States celebrates Veterans Day on November 11, which replaced the original Armistice Day. But when Americans think of veterans they think of Vietnam, Korea, and World War II. Not so in Europe. There World War I continues to loom large.

As it should. The Triple Entente, with which America was allied, had won when the guns fell silent on November 11, 1918. But as the Versailles peace conference, which opened in January 1919, proceeded throughout the spring, the Western powers managed to lose the peace. Tens of millions in the next generation would pay for their mistakes.

And the Europeans continue to fight leftover issues of the war. For instance, last November French Prime Minister Lionel Jospin suggested rehabilitating army mutineers who had been executed during a massive soldiers’ revolt in 1917. President Jacques Chirac sharply rejected Jospin’s idea, however, citing the negative reaction from surviving veterans. Yet at the same time the British government allowed relatives of soldiers executed for cowardice and desertion during World War I to hold a ceremony at the Cenotaph, Whitehall’s monument to the war dead.

To the extent that Americans know anything about the war, they probably think of supposed idealist Woodrow Wilson leading the fight to make the world “safe for democracy.” This was pure cant. Instead, Wilson was dedicated to reforming the entire world and would have a chance to do so only if he headed a belligerent power. His high-flown rhetoric disguised the fact that he had allied America with one militaristic bloc against the other.

While Germany helped bring on the war by isolating itself and adopting a hair-trigger mobilization plan, it was not bent on war. German diplomacy after Chancellor Otto von Bismarck was maladroit and stupid, not malicious.

France, in contrast, was aggressively revisionist. It wanted to recover the provinces of Alsace and Lorraine, lost in 1871 in the aftermath of the Franco-Prussian War (which had been started by France). This required not just war between France and Germany, but a European-wide conflict, since France alone could not defeat Germany.

Austria-Hungary, Germany’s ally, was also a status quo power, desperately seeking to avoid internal collapse. In contrast, Italy, which eventually joined the Entente, desired Austro-Hungarian territory; Russia hoped to gain influence in the Balkans at the expense of Vienna.

Most important, the blood-stained Serbian regime, built on the brutal murder of the king and queen of the previous dynasty in 1903, wanted to break apart Austria-Hungary in order to build a greater Serbia. In fact, it was the Serbian-supported assassination of Austria-Hungary’s heir apparent that lit the fuse of the war. The contending alliance systems acted as transmission belts of war for all of the major European powers.

After the deaths of some ten million people, all the contending nations’ goals looked downright frivolous. Washington’s formal justification for war was its desire to protect the right of Americans to travel on armed British merchantmen carrying munitions through a war zone.

The celebrated Lusitania, sunk by a German U-boat in 1915, carried just such a mixed cargo of babies and bullets. Wilson’s eloquence notwithstanding, the Germans were perfectly justified in sinking it and other such vessels. In fact, there is a continuing controversy over whether British officials, particularly then-First Lord of the Admiralty Winston Churchill, hoped the Lusitania would end up on the ocean floor, thereby inflaming American opinion against Berlin.

The war offers many ugly precedents. There was, for instance, the brilliant British propaganda, which convinced the world that the “Huns” were ravaging Europe. Alas, it was all false, but it helped drive America into the war. Joseph Goebbels modeled the Nazi effort after that of the British.

There was also the war against noncombatants. London imposed a “hunger blockade,” denying foodstuffs to all European civilians, even though it was against international law. Britain maintained the blockade even after Germany had surrendered. Hundreds of thousands died of starvation.

Finally, soldiers were treated as cannon fodder to be slaughtered. The Western front became a static “sausage machine” once trenches stabilized positions in the fall of 1914. From then through the spring of 1918 no attack moved the lines more than ten miles.

The French mutineers about whom Chirac and Jospin quarreled represented soldiers refusing to lose their lives in useless offensives pushed by fantastically overoptimistic generals who commanded far from the front. Who could blame the poilus for resisting?

Especially since the politicians knew what was going on. British Prime Minister David Lloyd George admitted that people could not be told the truth about the war or they would end it the next day. He finally limited troop replacements to the front because of what he termed the generals’ “reckless wastage of the manpower so lavishly placed at their disposal.”

No one was immune from the effects of this reckless wastage. The carnage sparked revolution in Russia, breakup in Austria-Hungary, dissatisfaction with democratic politics in Italy, and, most important, collapse in Germany.

Unfortunately, after all this mindless bloodletting, the Allies came up with a peace that French Marshal Ferdinand Foch presciently called “an armistice for 20 years.” The Allies blamed Germany for the war, dismembered Austria-Hungary and the Ottoman Empire, plundered the defeated states, awarded Third World peoples to the victors like prizes in a sporting competition, and mixed different ethnic groups in a host of unstable new nations.

A decade later Britain was embarrassed by its handiwork and refused to defend it; France lost the will to act alone. They would neither ruthlessly enforce Versailles to contain Germany nor voluntarily revise the treaty to conciliate Germany. Then came Adolf Hitler, and the Allies yielded on every point. World War II was not long in coming—followed inexorably by the Cold War.

Even today we are not free of the lingering effects of World War I. The continuing Balkan civil wars are a bloody bit of unfinished business from Versailles in 1919.

The world was full of hope 80 years ago, as Allied leaders sought to create the world anew. But they failed: not only did ten million people die in vain, but some 40 million more would perish a generation later. It is the kind of history that we cannot afford to repeat.