The False Gospel(s) of the Left

St. Paul, in his farewell address to the Ephesians in Acts 20, said that he had not hesitated “to declare unto you all the counsel of God.” (v. 27) The “whole counsel of God”, as the ESV renders this phrase, can be summed up in two messages, the Law and the Gospel. The Gospel is the primary message, and its name means “the good news.” It cannot be understood apart from the message of the Law, which could also be called “the bad news,” not because it is bad in itself (Rom. 7:7) but because it reveals what is bad in us. For this reason it is called the “ministration of death” and of “condemnation” (2 Cor. 3: 7, 9) and all who are under it are said to be under a curse (Gal. 3:10). The Law reveals the aspect of the goodness of God that is called justice, and the perfect righteousness which God in His justice requires of us. To one degree or another, the Law has been communicated to all mankind, having been written in our consciences (Rom. 2:14-15), handed down as a moral code to national Israel in the Covenant of Mt. Sinai (Ex. 20:1-17), and taught in its highest and purest form by Jesus Christ Himself (Matt. 5-7). At whatever level we consider it however – conscience, Ten Commandments, or Sermon on the Mount – the Law is only ever bad news for us, because we are incapable of meeting its requirements of righteousness. The Law reveals us to be sinners, and therefore can only accuse and condemn us. It identifies our basic problem of sin, and reveals our basic need of righteousness but can do nothing towards solving that problem and filling that need.

It is the Gospel that meets our need. Whereas the Law is, albeit imperfectly, communicated to us naturally through our consciences, the Gospel is only to be found in the direct revelation of the inspired Holy Scriptures, where it is the main message. Theological liberals claim that the ethical teachings of Jesus – which are simply the highest and purest form of the Law - are the main message of the Christian Scriptures. In doing so they reveal that theological liberalism is not a version of Christianity but of the natural religion of mankind, of which all religions except true Christianity are forms, and which is clearly condemned in the Scriptures. Man’s natural religion is to seek acceptance with God through the Law by doing good works. True Christianity is the religion of the Gospel – the Good News that although, as the Law reveals, we as sinners are incapable of earning God’s acceptance by our works, He freely gives us His acceptance, pardoning all of our sins and declaring us to be fully righteous in His sight, out of His grace – favour that we have neither earned nor deserved – on the grounds of the completed Atonement for sin made by the Saviour Whom He has given. We receive that grace simply by believing in that Saviour as He is presented to us in the Gospel. The Saviour is God’s Only-Begotten Son, Who being true God, of one essence with the Father and the Holy Spirit from all eternity, took our human nature unto Himself when He was conceived by the Holy Spirit and born of the Virgin Mary, and became true man. His name is Jesus and He is also called Christ or Messiah, meaning that He is the Anointed Redeemer-King that had been promised since the Fall of mankind. He lived a life of perfect, sinless, righteousness and then, when He was arrested, accused, and convicted of crimes that He had not committed, and condemned to die a cruel death on the cross, He took the guilt of all of the sins of the world upon Himself and voluntarily bore the punishment due those sins, fully satisfying the justice of God. In raising Jesus from the dead, God declared His satisfaction with the Atonement, His reconciliation to the sinful world, and His promise of pardon, justification, everlasting life to all who believe the Gospel of grace.

The two messages of Scripture, Law and Gospel, are both concisely summarized in one verse by the Apostle Paul: “For the wages of sin is death; but the gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord.” (Rom. 6:23). Or, as Baptist evangelist John R. Rice was fond of paraphrasing it, “if you go to Hell, you pay your own way; but you go to Heaven on a free pass.”

While everyone needs the Good News of the Gospel a great many reject it. They reject the Gospel, because they refuse to accept the verdict of the Law upon themselves, that they are sinners who have earned the just condemnation of God, whose works are unacceptable, and who are therefore in need of the salvation announced and offered in the Gospel. When man refuses to accept God’s diagnosis of his basic problem as sin, he will not accept God’s solution to that problem in the Gospel of grace. He then tries to substitute alternative diagnoses and false gospels.

Everything the Left has ever proposed has been just such a false gospel. At the heart of liberalism, the political philosophy that is the source and foundation of all political leftism, is the rejection of the Law’s diagnosis of the human condition. All of the woes that have afflicted the human race throughout history, liberalism says, come not from sin inside ourselves, but from something external, some defect in our education, our form of government, our system of social organization, our method of producing and distributing wealth, etc. Having substituted these false diagnoses for the true one, liberalism has been devising political solutions to these problems for centuries, wrapping each of them up in the language of salvation. The attempt to put these false gospels into practice has been called the Left since the French Revolution – although it has been around since the Roundhead Puritans of the English Civil Wars. Each one has been a notorious failure.

Republican democratism is the oldest false gospel of the Left. Liberalism falsely diagnosed hereditary, royal, monarchy as the source of the evils of tyranny, despotism, and oppression, and proposed government by elected representatives (republicanism) and/or popular assembly (democratism) as the solution. The Puritan Roundheads, the American and French Revolutionaries, and all Communist revolutionaries have believed this false gospel and it has always failed to deliver in its promise of earthly salvation. The Cromwell Protectorate, the French Reign of Terror, and the Soviet Union and its imitators were all far more tyrannical, despotic and oppressive than the monarchies they replaced. Granted, the Americans did not turn their country into this kind of totalitarian hellhole – at least until the Presidency of Lincoln – nevertheless, the Americans have experienced a far more oppressive burden, both in terms of taxes and intrusive legislation and regulations, under their republican form of government than before their Revolution. Indeed, every Western country in which government authority has been taken out of the hands of royal monarch and placed into the hands of elected politicians has experienced this burden, whether it has officially become a republic or retained its monarch as a figurehead. History has thoroughly discredited this first false Gospel of the left. All false gospels are incompatible with the true Gospel. I am not saying that those who are not royalists are not Christians but it is a blasphemous insult to the King of Kings to attempt to demote Him to President of Presidents.

The next oldest of the Left’s false gospels are capitalism and socialism. Here a qualification is necessary. Capitalism, or economic liberalism as it is more properly called, has often been presented as a false gospel of economic salvation. This is how it appeared in the writings of Frédéric Bastiat and Richard Cobden in the nineteenth century who preached free trade as the path to world peace. It is how it appears in contemporary American neoliberals and neoconservatives who believe the American political and economic systems to be the hope of the world which should be exported to all other countries, by the force of American military might if necessary. The basic elements of economic liberalism, however – the private ownership of property and legal protection of the same, and legally protected freedom to enter into contracts and buy and sell – predate the theories of the economic liberals, indeed, are basic, common-sense facts of human existence, and are upheld by the Law of God (“thou shalt not steal”). They can be held without attaching any salvific significance to them.

Socialism, on the other hand, is ALWAYS a scheme of economic salvation. That is the sine qua non of socialism, its essential nature. Socialism starts by replacing the Law’s diagnosis of sin in the human heart as our basic problem with the idea that the unequal distribution of wealth – and therefore the private ownership of property – is the root of all our ills. It proposes salvation through either the elimination of private property or the government confiscation and redistribution of wealth. Socialism is a complete failure. Those countries unfortunate enough to fall under Communist tyranny, experienced the widespread poverty and misery that socialism, in its purest form, always produces. Western countries have discovered that the partial socialism they have implemented has left them with a choice between spending far beyond their means, crippling their economy, or doing both at once. Socialism is always a false gospel. There is no such thing as “Christian socialism” because the true Gospel cannot be combined with a false gospel. To the extent that a so-called “Christian socialist” is a Christian, he is not a socialist. To the extent that he is a socialist, he is not a Christian.

Feminism is another of the Left’s oldest false Gospels. While many people think of it as a fairly recent phenomenon it goes back to the early nineteenth century. Feminism’s one-word false diagnosis of the human condition is “patriarchy”, a term the roots of which suggest the meaning of “fatherly authority” but which feminism uses to mean a more general male dominance in politics, economics, society, culture and the family. The false gospel that it preaches is “the equality of the sexes”, although feminists often give the impression that “gynocracy” is what they are truly after. While feminism has become far more crazier over the years, to the point that today leading feminists maintain that heterosexuality is an oppressive artificial social construct, that complementing a woman on her looks constitutes “sexual harassment,” that sexual intercourse should be considered “rape” if the woman is dissatisfied and withdraws her consent ex post facto, and that women have the “right” to be believed in whatever accusations they choose to make against men regardless of whether or not there is evidence to substantiate their claims, among other lunatic notions, it has never been in touch with reality but has always been based on sheer fantasy. The implementation of feminism has required bloodshed on a Hitlerian scale (1) and the same adjective might be applied to feminism’s suppression of dissent in academia, government, and most workplaces. While the church has been plagued for decades with “Christian feminists” who oppose the Scriptural doctrine of the headship of the husband/father, who demand the ordination of female clergy against the clear Apostolic teaching, who have mutilated and bowdlerized hymn books, liturgy, and even translations of the Scriptures, with “gender neutral language”, and who in the most extreme cases wish to replace the triune God of Christianity (Father, Son, and Holy Spirit) with some pagan deity they address as Mother/Father God, what was true of “Christian socialism” is also true of “Christian feminism” – to the extent it is the one, it is not the other.

The false gospel of tolerance has been the leading false gospel of the Left since the Second World War. In most Western countries it has assumed the status of an unofficial state religion, and comes with its own redemption story, one which people are not allowed to openly question without severe legal repercussions. Originally, racism was its false diagnosis of the human condition, but it has since been expanded to include other forms of “intolerance” such as “sexism”, “homophobia” and more recently “transphobia.” Needless to say, “tolerance” is the proposed solution. Both “tolerance” and “intolerance” as they are used by the Left, do not correspond very well to their dictionary meanings. “Intolerance” seems to include any negative attitude towards people who differ from you in any discernable way – with the exception of negative attitudes towards white, Christian, heterosexual, males. “Tolerance” has no relationship to its Latin root, which means “to bear or endure” and thus necessarily implies a negative attitude towards its object. At its most benign it seems to mean little more than “be nice to each other, children.” More often, however, it means, “you’re not allowed to think or say that” and resembles the thought control found in Communist countries and the novels of George Orwell and Arthur Koestler.

There is one final false gospel that we will look at. Several decades ago the modern environmentalist movement was born as a synthesis of neo-pagan, pantheistic, nature-worship, feminism and Marxism disguised beneath a thin veneer of ecological science. At its best it promoted things that only a moron would find fault with – such as clean air and water and the preservation of plants, wildlife, and natural beauty. At its worst it called for depopulation through birth control, abortion, state-imposed limits on family size, euthanasia, and suicide. In the late 1970s it began to develop its own apocalyptic, end-of-the-world, doomsday scenario. In this scenario, civilization and life as we know it is on the brink of imminent destruction due to “global warming” or “climate change.” The diagnosis? Mankind’s industrial consumption of fossil fuels over the last two centuries has caused the problem by releasing greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere. The gospel of salvation? The nations of the world need to agree to reduce their carbon-dioxide emissions.

This entire concept of anthropogenic climate change can be summed up in one word: bunk. It does not matter how many ex-American presidents, Hollywood movie stars, or Japanese-Canadian celebrity zoologists promote the idea. It does not require a Ph.D in climatology to understand that if the industrial emissions of greenhouse gasses is responsible for impending disastrous climate change then nothing short of a total return to some sort of pre-industrial society could possibly help. Therefore the climate change treaties, which propose reductions of carbon emissions – not their elimination – accomplish nothing more than allowing the politicians who waste tons of fuel flying around the world to have their picture taken signing these accords to feel good about themselves and to send the message to their voters that they are on top of the “problem.” Of course the entire theory is nonsense. The climate did not start changing in the twentieth century or with the dawn of industrialism but has been changing for all of human history. Other factors have had far greater, more demonstrable, and more immediate effects on global climate than human activity such as the volcanic winters brought about by the nineteenth century eruptions of Mt. Tambora and Krakatoa. Whether the current eruption of Hawaii’s Kilauea will have a similar effect remains to be seen. The effects of Justin Trudeau’s self-righteous climate posturing – of which his arrogant carbon tax, his grants to anti-pipeline protesters are but two examples – are already being felt on our country, however, as the Canadians who can least afford it are being forced to pay the price of the former at the gas pumps, and unemployed Canadians are paying the price of the latter.

Political schemes of salvation are counterfeit gospels, of course, regardless of where they are found, Left or Right. Certain movements on the secular Right have demonstrated the same tendency to look upon their political agenda as a plan of salvation as the Left. It is the fundamental nature of the Left, however, to blame man’s problems on everything except the sin in his heart, and to look to politics as the means of salvation. The true Right, the Right of the old Tories, sees politics differently. The Tory Right accepts the doctrine of Original Sin, and that mankind is incapable of regaining Paradise through his own efforts. It sees civil government as being ordained for the ministry of the Law in its use as a curb to restrain evil. (2) The ministry of the Gospel, in Word and Sacrament, belongs to the Church. Government and the Church, with their respective ministries, are neither to be separate nor confused. In liberalism, with its schemes of secular, political, salvation they are both.

(1) William Brennan, The Abortion Holocaust: Today’s Final Solution, (St. Louis: Landmark Press, 1983). The comparison has only become more valid over the last thirty-five years.
(2) In orthodox Protestant theology the Law has three uses – the curb, mirror, and guide. These are also called the first, second, and third uses of the Law but the order is different in Lutheran and Reformed theology. In Lutheran theology the order is as above, in Reformed theology it goes mirror, curb, guide.

The Free Trade Cult

I started Throne, Altar, Liberty in May of 2010, but I had been writing essays on political, theological, and cultural topics for at least a year before then. I distributed these to friends through e-mail and Facebook. Since starting Throne, Altar, Liberty I have reposted several of these earlier essays here. Last year in April and May, for example, I posted nine of them, with new introductions, as a series entitled “GTN Tory Classics”. My main reason for doing this is that I did not want Throne, Altar, Liberty to sit dormant while I researched a couple of topics that I wished to write new essays on.

Among the essays reposted last year, were several from an eight-part series on economic subjects that I had written in 2009. I had intended to include the final essay in that series, “The Free Trade Cult”, but for some reason or another neglected to so. Since I once again wish to buy myself time to complete some new essays, I will make up for that neglect by posting it now.

My argument against free trade in this essay, is built upon the fact that history has demonstrated that free trade does not work the way it is supposed to. Liberalism – and free trade is the cornerstone of economic liberalism – predicts that the more countries reduce barriers to trade the more they will prosper. History, however, shows the opposite. Countries that are industrialized or are undergoing industrialization, become economically strong under protection and decline under free trade. I pointed to two elements of liberal theory as the explanation for why free trade does not work – liberalism’s placing the individual over the family, community, and nation and placing consumption over production.

Liberalism’s exaltation of consumption over production is derived from liberalism’s desire to be fair. Protectionism is not fair. I don’t think anybody ever claimed that it was. A tariff on milk benefits domestic dairy producers at the expense of foreign dairy producers and all domestic consumers of dairy products. A tariff on grain benefits domestic grain producers at the expense of foreign grain producers and all domestic consumers of grain. The same can be said for any tariff on any product. The unfairness of this is manifest for anyone to see.

Free trade, liberalism claims, is fair. Under free trade domestic and foreign producers compete in the market, with no unfair advantage given to either. The advantage is rather to the consumer, who is able to buy goods at a lower price. Since the consumers of any particular good will always outnumber the producers of that same good, free trade is the fairest system possible.

There is a certain logic to this, and even a certain truth. No false doctrine is ever entirely false – otherwise, nobody would ever be deceived, by it. The problem is that this kind of reasoning leads inevitably to the conclusion that the economy should favour consumption over production. It is true in one sense, that the producer must be the servant of the consumer. If a producer were to decide that he was going to produce whatever he wanted regardless of whether anyone else wanted it, and so begin manufacturing such things as manure-flavoured licorice, pills that do nothing but enhance the pain from which one is already suffering, and record albums such as “Chalkboard Scratching: the Greatest Hits”, he would not remain in business very long. The only exception to this rule that comes immediately to mind is the contemporary artist, who is subsidized at the taxpayer’s expense by an arts council that believes that artists are entitled to public support and that restrictions on the artist’s output, such as that it should be something people want to see or hear, squelch creativity.

If it is true that production should and must be the servant of consumption, it is only true, as Evelyn Waugh’s Mr. Milner said to Lord Copper, “up to a point”. Looked at from a different angle, production must take precedence over consumption. Some forms of consumption, such as that of food and drink, are necessary to sustain our existence, whereas other forms of consumption, such as that of the products of the entertainment industry, are not. Whether necessary or not, however, consumption cannot take place without production. If we encounter a person who consumes without producing anything by living off of what he has previously accumulated or by borrowing from others we know that that person will not be able to do so indefinitely. Eventually, he will run out of accumulated resources, credit, or both. Then he must become productive or die.

That this is true of individual persons is not disputed. It is also true of countries. A country cannot survive long with an economy that consists primarily of moving existing wealth around and consuming goods that are produced elsewhere. Only production can increase wealth – consumption always decreases it. The liberal, who seems only the individual as being real and not the country, does not appear to recognize this. He also, and for the same reason, is blind to the fact that in practice, his doctrine, like that of the protectionist he so despises, does actually work to the benefit of one group of producers against another. Large, multinational or transnational companies, that answer to the laws of no one country in particular, are given an advantage over the smaller domestic producers of any country, by free trade.

At some point in the future I will likely compose an essay exploring the reasons why the classical liberal concept of the free market works better within the context of a national economy than when it is extended internationally. For now, I give you "The Free Trade Cult". - GTN

The Free Trade Cult


By Gerry T. Neal
June 30, 2009

Although there is much that economists disagree on, one thing that unites most if not all mainstream schools of economic thought is a belief in free trade. Free trade is one of the earliest concepts of modern economics. Adam Smith argued in the 18th Century that a country would be foolish to produce at home what it is cheaper to import from abroad. David Ricardo built on this theory in the 19th Century and Richard Cobden made it his life’s goal to see free trade implemented.

Libertarian schools of economics like the Chicago School of the late Milton Friedman and the Austrian School of Mises, Hayek and Rothbard believe devoutly in free trade. But so does Paul Krugman, the most prominent contemporary exponent of Keynesianism. Free trade, we find, gets a lot of support from people who are otherwise not big fans of laissez faire. Liberal columnist for the New York Times, Thomas L. Friedman, is a noted advocate of globalization. American Presidents Franklin D. Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy, and William J. Clinton all devoutly believed in international free trade while supporting massive state intervention in the domestic economy.

Free trade’s wide, cross-spectrum support base, among political and economical theorists may suggest to many that it is a basic concept, obviously true, that only a fool would question.

But is it? What is free trade, how is it supposed to work, and where is the evidence that it does work?

Free trade is the expansion of the concept of the free market across international borders. At the time free trade was first being proposed as a theory the Western nations practiced an economic policy known as mercantilism. Mercantilism was the idea that to become wealthy a nation needed to amass gold and silver, and that the way to do so was to have a trade surplus, i.e., to have more products flowing out of your country than flow in. The powers of Europe sought to accomplish this by subsidizing exports and restricting imports by quotas, tariffs, and other measures that today are known as protectionism.

Adam Smith, in his An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, challenged mercantilist thought. Wealth, he argued, was the result of production and production was enhanced by the division of labor and specialization. These, in turn, were made possible by trade, which allowed the specialist to concentrate on producing one thing and trading his surplus for everything else he needed. Trade, operates best when buyers and sellers are allowed to come to their own agreements as to price rather than having them set by government.

This was the case for the free market and Smith argued that it applied to nations as well as to individuals within a nation. Tariffs, quotas, etc., Smith argued, only prevent a country from obtaining what they need at the lowest price possible, and so rather than enriching a country, impoverished it.

The argument seems impeccable on paper. If it is true then observing the results of free trade versus protection in practice should bear the theory out. After all, all other predictions of laissez faire theory can be demonstrated to be correct. Laissez faire theory says that minimum wage laws do nothing but eliminate jobs that are not worth minimum wage to the employer, usually starter jobs. It says that price controls cause shortages. It says that rent controls lead to housing shortages and neighborhoods decaying into slums. We can point to case after case where these interventionist measures have had exactly these outcomes.

What have been the results of free trade?

The United Kingdom was the first country to put the theory into practice. This began with the repeal of the Corn Laws, which protected British agriculture from imports, in 1846. This was accomplished by the government of Sir Robert Peel after relentless campaigning by Richard Cobden, “The Apostle of Free Trade” and a league of Manchester manufacturers he led. Over the next two decades the UK would lower its tariffs to the point where the average import duty on the vast majority of goods was 0. This would remain UK policy until the first World War.

Did this help or harm Britain?

The UK was the home of the Industrial Revolution, which had started there in the late 18th Century. At the time Britain began her experiment in free trade she dominated the world of manufacturing. Her steel and textile industries were surpassed by none. By the time her long experiment in free trade came to an end she had been eclipsed by another industrial power – the United States of America.

What was America’s trade policy?

The USA had always been protectionist, but during the period when the UK was practicing unilateral free trade it was taking protectionism to an all time high. The 1860’s had seen the rise of the Republican Party, which succeeded in putting into practice the “American system” of Alexander Hamilton and Henry Clay. The main feature of the “American system” was a tariff wall protecting American industry. Following the Republican institution of this system the average tariff on manufactured goods was around 45%.

Did this help or hurt America?

The century from 1870 to 1970 is often called America’s “Golden Age”. As America became the world’s leading industrial power, profits and wages rose simultaneously as did the average American standard of living. When the War came, and the UK was no longer producing enough to meet her own needs, it was to the USA that she looked for help – help the USA was able to provide.

How does the free trader explain that?

“Other factors were involved”. “That is a post hoc ergo propter hoc argument”.

Perhaps. But the USA wasn’t the only country that fared well under protection in that era. In 1879 Otto von Bismark introduced economic nationalism based upon the American system to Germany. The same year the Conservatives brought in protectionism here in Canada. Both countries did very well under high tariffs.

What happened when America abandoned protection?

FDR, the author of American socialism, obtained for the American president the right to lower tariffs in negotiating treaties with other countries. This set the stage for America’s post-WWII retreat from protectionism. During this period of increased free trade America’s GNP and GDP have continued to rise but the average real wage (wages adjusted for inflation) has gone down as America’s manufacturing base has shrunk and her domestic economy has increasingly come to be based on services.

This era has seen the rise of new industrial giants – most notably Japan. Japan practices protection.

What have the free traders missed? What is wrong with their theory? Why are the results so different from what laissez faire would predict here when elsewhere laissez faire theory is so accurate?

The basic problem with free trade is that it is derived from classical liberal ideology. To classical liberalism individuals are all that matters – families, communities, and nations don’t count. Especially nations.

With the exception of Adam Smith (who made numerous exceptions to his theory of free trade) the classical free traders were contemptuous of nations. They believed in an enlightened age to come in which international trade would foster international friendship, war would disappear, there would be world peace, and we would all be one.

In the real world, however, nations matter. And it matters very much, to a nation, who produces the goods that it consumes. Remember that production creates wealth, consumption uses it up. Consuming more than you produce is not the path to prosperity, for individuals or for nations. It is the path to bankruptcy.

Free trade ideology insists that free trade is superior because it favors the consumer with low prices, whereas protection favors the producer with high prices. Everybody is a consumer, the free trader’s argue, but not everybody is a producer, so it is best to do what is in the interests of the consumer. Free traders are nothing if they are not utilitarian.

But how is the consumer going to pay for what he consumes? The answer for the last few decades has been cheap credit. That cannot last forever, however – or much longer, for that matter, if the recent economic crisis is any indication.

A policy that favors consumption over production is a policy that will doom your country to poverty.

A country that wishes to survive, that does not want to bring its people down into poverty, must encourage production, and it must produce more than it consumes. Socialists have attempted to do this by having their government’s seize control of the economy and try to plan it from the top down to be more efficient. All such experiments have been radical failures.

Protection, on the other hand, is historically associated with high productivity.

Today our government’s have got it backwards. They are removing barriers to international trade while doing everything in their power to intervene in their domestic markets with restrictions, and legislation, and red tape. They should be doing the exact opposite – protecting domestic producers while otherwise practicing laissez faire.

But our government’s no longer care about their countries. In lowering tariffs and other protective measures so as to free up international trade, they have surrendered part of their sovereignty to international institutions. The most complete form of this surrender of national sovereignty can be seen in the European Union. But NAFTA provides the basis for a future North American equivalent. On a global basis the long series of GATT talks resulted in the creation of the World Trade Organization. The path down which the free traders are taking us is clear: one market, one currency, one government.

Libertarian free traders will argue that what we are seeing in these developments is not true “free trade” as described in theory, but governments colluding to grant special trade privileges to favored corporations. That is certainly true but it may not be relevant. A one world system – dare I say “New World Order” - is exactly what David Ricardo, Richard Cobden, and the other formulators of classical free trade theory were hoping for.

It will not be the rosy paradise they had in mind however.

Those who do not want to live under the global regime of a global government, who prefer living in their own sovereign countries, and wish to see those countries prosper, should not support a global economy.

Liberalism and the Inevitability of War

For as long as human societies have existed upon this planet they have fought wars against one another.

This is a statement that I believe most people would agree with. The same consensus, however, does not exist with regards to the following statement:

Wars will continue to be fought for as long as human societies continue to exist upon this planet.

This second statement is as true as the first. While specific wars have specific causes, the cause of war in general is to be found in human nature. The only way to eliminate war, therefore, is to eliminate human beings. As long as men live upon this planet they will from time to time go to war against one another.

Consider what the history of the 20th Century has to teach us. Conflicts in the Balkan region in the first decade of that century, broke out into a world-wide conflict between the great powers in the second decade. This conflict was dubbed “the war to end all wars” by those who continued to hold to the progressive optimism of the 19th Century. A little over two decades after it ended, however, it broke out again, this time to be conducted on an even larger, costlier, and more destructive scale. This time, it was brought to end by a technological innovation, the development of which would have, if anything ever could, permanently checked man’s propensity for war. That innovation was the first nuclear weapon, the atomic bomb. The development of nuclear weaponry raised the potential cost of war to what should have been a prohibitive level by making the extinction of the species a real possibility as an outcome of war. This did not, however, prevent the outbreak of future wars. Major, multi-national conflicts were fought in Korea in the 1950’s and Vietnam in the 1960’s and 1970’s and if the large nuclear arsenals of the United States of America and the Soviet Union prevented the superpowers from directly confronting each other in war, it did not prevent them from using smaller allies, all over the globe, like pawns on a giant chessboard. The second half of the century saw conflict after conflict in the Middle East between the Arab nations and Israel and there is no end to those hostilities in sight. In the final decade of the 20th Century, the nations of the Balkans resumed the fighting that had led to the first World War earlier in the century.

That war will be around for as long as human beings inhabit the earth is not universally recognized, however, and liberals in particular are inclined to reject this truth. In fact, liberalism’s primary error concerning war, is the idea that it can be eliminated and a permanently peaceful world order established. This is not the same thing as pacifism. Far too many conservatives make the mistake of associating liberalism with pacifism. Pacifism is the refusal to participate in war on the grounds of a belief that war is always morally wrong. Pacifists are susceptible to the charges of cowardice and free-riding (1) and for this reason accusing one’s opponents of pacifism makes for effective rhetoric. Liberals, however, are not pacifists. Indeed, history would seem to demonstrate that they are more likely than conservatives to involve their country in a war.

Consider the major wars the United States of America was involved in during the 20th Century. It was liberal Democrat Presidents who led the United States into the four largest of these wars. It was a liberal Democrat, Woodrow Wilson, who led the United States into World War I declaring that they needed to “make the world safe for democracy”. It was another liberal Democrat, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who brought the United States into the second World War. (2) Liberal Democrat Harry Truman was the president who got the United States into the Korean War and Liberal Democrats John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson got the United States into the Vietnam War. In contrast, conservative Republican President ordered the bombing of Libya, the invasion of Grenada, countless covert-ops and the support of anti-communist contras in Latin America, but he did not get his country involved in anything on the scale of World Wars I and II, Korea or Vietnam and, in fact, negotiated an end to the arms race and the 40 year Cold War with the Soviet Union.

Similarly, here in Canada, after the Statute of Westminster declared that our own Parliament would decide from then on whether or not we were at war, it was Liberal Prime Ministers who led our country into World War II (William Lyon Mackenzie King), Korea (Louis St. Laurent), and Afghanistan (Jean Chretien).

Clearly liberals are not pacifists. Liberals and conservatives have different ideas about war but those differences are not the same differences which distinguish doves from hawks. Liberalism’s error is to believe that mankind can build a world that is free of war.

This idea lies behind several significant liberal projects of the last couple of centuries. Liberals began calling for free trade – the elimination of tariffs, quotas, and other protectionist measures so as to merge the economies of all countries into one big market – as far back as the eighteenth century, arguing that the economic interdependence that free trade would bring, would merge the nations of the world into one, bringing about universal brotherhood and peace. Richard Cobden, the 19th Century British “Apostle of Free Trade”, proclaimed that free trade:

[A]rms its votaries by its own pacific nature, in that eternal truth—the more any nation trafficks abroad upon free and honest principles, the less it will be in danger of wars.(3)

In a speech given on January 15, 1846 he declared:

I see in the Free-trade principle that which shall act on the moral world as the principle of gravitation in the universe,—drawing men together, thrusting aside the antagonism of race, and creed, and language, and uniting us in the bonds of eternal peace.(4)

Similar utopian sentiments can be found in the speeches and writings of many other 18th and 19th century free traders.

When Woodrow Wilson asked the American Congress to declare the United States’ entry into World War I, he told Congress that “The world must be made safe for democracy”. This goal was connected in his mind with that of world peace. He immediately went on to say “Its peace must be planted upon the tested foundations of political liberty”. (5)

Wilson’s idea of world peace is very similar to that of free traders such as Richard Cobden. The difference is that Wilson saw elected government as being the means to world peace rather than international commerce.

The idea that democratic governments are more likely to be peaceful government is not borne out by history. The roots of democracy go back to ancient Athens and Athenian democracy is widely regarded as having reached its peak during the years of Pericles, which are often spoken of as Athens’ Golden Age. This was not, however, an era in which Athens lived in peace and harmony with its neighbors, but the era of the Peloponnesian War fought by Athens and her allies against Sparta and her allies. This war, the history of which we know from an account written by Athenian general Thucydides, was not a conflict in which a democratic state, desiring peace, was forced to defend herself against the aggression of her non-democratic neighbors. Athens was as belligerent and ambitious as Sparta. From that day to this, democracies have been no less likely to go to war than any other kind of country. Nor is it true that democracies do not go to war with each other. Historians often refer to the War of Southern Independence (6) as the “first modern war.” Both sides in that conflict, however, the United States of America and the Confederate States of America, were democratic republics. Furthermore, this was a particularly bloody war in which more Americans died than in any other war they have ever participated, including both World Wars and Vietnam combined.

At the end of World War I, Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany and Emperor Karl von Hapsburg I of Austria were both forced off of their thrones and Germany and Austria became democratic republics. By Wilson’s logic, this should have made these countries less likely to want to resume the conflict at a later date. In fact it had the exact opposite effect. In the 1930’s Germany and Austria came under the control of Adolf Hitler who launched a second war that was far worse from the first. Now the point might be made that under Hitler, Germany and Austria ceased to be democratic. However true that might be it is very much the case that had the German Kaiser and the Austrian Emperor kept their thrones, Hitler would never have had the opportunity to rise to power. Hitler was a demagogue and democracy is the ladder a demagogue climbs to achieve power.

The spread of democracy was not the only part of Wilson’s plan for world peace. The last of his famous Fourteen Points was that:

A general association of nations must be formed under specific covenants for the purpose of affording mutual guarantees of political independence and territorial integrity to great and small nations alike. (7)

This association took the form of the League of Nations. Although it was proposed by the American President, the United States never joined it. The countries that did join need not have bothered because it failed completely in its appointed task.

The failure of the League of Nations did not prevent a second liberal American President from repeating the experiment at the end of the second World War. FDR’s United Nations was conceived of as a forum in which the nations of the world could voice their grievances with each other and resolve those grievances without resorting to war. If the League of Nations was useless, the United Nations was worse than useless. The General Assembly simply became a platform upon which the representatives of every Soviet vassal state, Third World dictatorship, and Islamic theocracy in the world, were invited to stand and espouse their poisonous drivel to the world. The Security Council is powerless to oppose wrongdoing on the part of any of its permanent members, each of which has a veto. Since the Soviet Union was one of those permanent members the Security Council was powerless against Communist aggression in the Cold War, just as it is powerless to stop the sole remaining superpower, the United States of America, from doing whatever she wants. The only thing the United Nations has proven effective at doing has been wasting the money it receives from its member states as it tries, thankfully less effectively, to tell them how to manage their own affairs, usually in the name of some inane left-wing agenda. It has not made the world a more peaceful place.

These examples, I believe, are sufficient to establish the truth of my contention that there is a strong tendency in liberalism to believe that it is possible to construct a peaceful world order in which war is eliminated and that this belief lies behind several of liberalism’s most important projects. They also demonstrate that whatever the scheme the liberal comes up with his goal of world peace continues to elude him. (8) Today the economies of the world have been integrated into a global market, democracy is widespread, and the United Nations has been established for almost seven decades, yet perpetual universal peace is nowhere in sight.


(1) A free rider is someone who benefits from participation in a group without paying his fair share of the dues. A pacifist is susceptible to the charge of free-riding because he enjoys the benefits of living in his country, including the security provided by his country’s military, although he is not willing to serve his country militarily if called upon to do so.

(2) Granted, the Japanese empire attacked the United States first. However, FDR was in favour of the United States entering the second World War long before Pearl Harbor. He and his advisors in the year leading up to Pearl Harbor talked about war with Japan as a “backdoor” into the war with Germany. At the time, public opinion in the United States was strongly against American involvement in the war with Germany. See Thomas Fleming, The New Dealers’ War: FDR and the War Within World War II (New York: Basic Books, 2001) and Robert Stinnett Day of Deceit: The Truth About FDR and Pearl Harbor (New York: The Free Press, 1999).

(3) Richard Cobden, The Political Writings of Richard Cobden, (London: William Ridgway, 1878) p. 126.

(4) http://www.econlib.org/library/YPDBooks/Cobden/cbdSPP20.html

(5) http://historymatters.gmu.edu/d/4943/

(6) This is usually called the “American Civil War”. Ordinarily, the phrase “civil war” refers to an internal struggle for control of a state. In the English Civil War, the Roundheads fought to turn England into a Puritan republic against the Cavaliers who fought to keep it an Anglican monarchy. In the Spanish Civil War, the Republicans and the Nationalists fought each other for the control of Spain. In American history, however, the North and South did not struggle for control of the United States, but over whether the secession of the Southern states and their independence from Washington D. C. would be allowed.

(7) http://www.ourdocuments.gov/doc.php?doc=62

(8) If permanent world peace is an unattainable goal and it is inevitable that men will from time to time go to war with each other it does not follow from this that any particular conflict is inevitable and that attempts to prevent particular wars are always foolish and doomed to fail.